The Great Carbon Con is Coming to an End

Are There Solutions to the Climate Problem? Naomi Oreskes explains why there’s plenty of work to do to mitigate the effects of climate change

Businesses are feeling the heat as a result of growing skepticism overambitious, opaque and even fraudulent climate pledges. Already, we’re seeing customers voting with their wallets, employees choosing employers based primarily on net zero credentials, and investors making choices about what to fund based on tangible climate action. To put that in numbers, as many as 60 percent of millennials are willing to pay more for truly sustainable products; two-thirds of people are more likely to work for a company with strong and meaningful environmental policies; and research by Amazon has found that as many as 83 percent of investors want to invest in more sustainable startups.

For too long, businesses have been investing in traditional emissions-avoidance offsets to compensate for their own emissions. Clean cookstove projects, investment in renewable energy, and forest protection are emissions-avoidance offsets.

Scientists say there’s a lot we can still do to slow the speed of climate change. Naomi Oreskes, historian of science at Harvard University, says that there are some “climate solutions” that aren’t real. “This space has become really muddied,” she says.

It may sound basic, but one big way to address climate change is to reduce the main human activity that caused it in the first place: burning fossil fuels.

Scientists say that means transitioning to a more energy efficient way of life. We already have a lot of the technology we need to make this transition, like solar, wind, and batteries, Oreskes says.

It’s important to think about both the climate solution that they’re trying to sell and the problem that they’re trying to solve.

When you see a plan to combat Climate Change that includes increasing the use of fossil fuels, pay attention. She says an example is natural gas, which has been sold as a “bridge fuel” from coal to renewable energy. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel and its production, transport and use of methane, a greenhouse gas, is much more potent than carbon dioxide.

“I think we need to start by looking at what happens when the fossil fuel industry comes up with solutions, because here is the greatest potential for conflict of interest,” Aronczyk says.

Sometimes you’ll hear about new promising technology like carbon capture, which vacuums carbon dioxide out of the air and stores it underground, says David Ho, a professor of oceanography at University of Hawaii at Manoa.

I think a lot of people think that we have the ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere if we don’t work in this space. And we’re not there,” Ho says.

The problems with regulation of offsets and the case of deforestation in Brazil: a U.N. professor’s analysis of the 2011 Brazilian election

There are often problems with regulation of offsets according to a professor of energy economics. He says that it’s very dangerous.

It’s difficult to tell if trees are really being protected if they are cut down and burned in a wildfire using offsets from forests.

“You cannot guarantee, ‘Okay, you’re gonna offset your dress by planting a tree.’ He says that there is no guarantee that the tree will be there in three years.

There is a lot of work to be done in the future to get off fossil fuels and onto clean energy sources. “So people have to realize there is a price to pay here. No free lunch.”

The key thing, Aronczyk says, is that climate solutions will involve governments, businesses, and individuals. She says that it’s an “all hands on deck” situation.

And governments will also have to play a big role in regulating emissions, says Schaeffer, who has been working with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for 25 years.

Schaeffer points to the recent election in Brazil, where climate change was a big campaign issue for candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula won, and has promised to address deforestation, a big source of Brazil’s emissions.