Companies can help. But companies can not be net-zero, according to Carbone 4, a French consultancy that works with companies measuring their emissions and deciding what to do about them.
More than 5,200 businesses have pledged to cut their greenhouse gas pollution to zero by 2050, or reach “net zero” by canceling out emissions with forestry or other projects that remove CO₂ from the air. They include some of the world’s biggest companies across all sectors: Apple, Zurich Insurance, P&G, General Motors, and so on.
They’re not alone. The French government last year issued guidance that echoed Carbone 4's diagnosis of corporate net-zero goals. Nobody should claim to be “carbon neutral,” wrote the Agency for Ecological Transition . A net-zero watchdog this month introduced a trial “code of practice” to help evaluate corporate net-zero claims, and the UN Secretary general has launched a group of experts to look at non-national net-zero pledges.
So companies can still brag about how much they spend on carbon removal — they just can't count it against their own emissions. The semantic point Carbone 4 makes is an important one: Only on a global or regional level can drawing down CO₂ physically neutralize past emissions, leading to “net zero,” and companies that deliberately ignore that in their own strategy or marketing are being disingenuous at best.
As of now, corporations spend vast sums on lobbying against science-based climate policy, on political contributions to elected officials who block climate legislation, and on a whole category of professional services that has yet to measure its own emissions, let alone set targets for reduction.