Despite a heated debate at COP28 over whether the world should be phasing-out fossil fuels altogether, Net Zero remains the collectively agreed target. But as Mike Hulme argues, Net Zero is both a misguided and dangerous goal. It reduces the complex problem of climate change to an over-simplistic metric, and ignores the unintended consequences of the policy, many of which would exacerbate the problems that climate change poses in the first place.

At various times in human history, the world’s community of nations has been urged by campaigners to come together around a universal moral goal.  Examples might include ‘the rights of man’, the abolition of slavery, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or ‘making poverty history’.  Within the last 10 years a new goal has gained global recognition and ascendancy: securing ‘net-zero emissions’.  I believe collapsing global policymaking for the future around this singular goal is both misguided and dangerous: misguided because ‘net-zero’ obscures many important welfare and ecological goals; and dangerous because such a narrow policy focus creates unwelcome secondary consequences.

Towards the end of the 2000s, a change occurred in the way in which future emissions of greenhouse gases were imagined by scientists.  Rather than focusing on different emissions pathways into the future – for example, ‘high’ or ‘low’ emissions paths – the argument gained traction that it was the total cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide that would largely determine future global temperature.  It was thence only a short step from cumulative emissions to the notion of an ‘allowable carbon emissions budget’ for a given temperature target.  In other words, the question could now be asked, ‘How much of this emissions budget is there left to “spend” if 2°C, or 1.5°C, of warming is the desired global temperature?’

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The net zero imaginary leads to an unyielding determination to pursue a single goal without considering – or certainly without carefully considering – the broader context of why climate change is a matter of concern in the first place.

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The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report in 2013/14 reified this concept of a cumulative carbon budget and promoted the translation of abstract global temperature goals into net zero emissions targets.  This idea of an allowable carbon emissions budget has had important consequences for policy framing and for the wider cultural imagination around climate change.  By being linked to a global temperature threshold, the budget metaphor stimulated the imaginary of ‘exhausting’ or ‘exceeding’ the allowable emissions.  As a consequence, in order to ‘expand’ the allowable carbon budget to prevent its exhaustion, technologies for carbon dioxide removal became much more attractive.  Thus, according to the OED, ‘net-zero’ emissions is defined as achieving “an overall balance between the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases [emitted] and the amount removed from the atmosphere”.

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The new policy imaginary of net zero became institutionalised during the period 2015–2018.  But collapsing the sole object of climate policy to delivering net zero creates what author James C. Scott refers to in his classic book Seeing Like A State as ‘a narrowing of vision’.  The net zero imaginary leads to an unyielding determination to pursue a single goal without considering – or certainly without carefully considering – the broader context of why climate change is a matter of concern in the first place.  NZ thus becomes a double-proxy for human and ecological welfare.  Global temperature is itself a dangerously reductionist proxy for planetary welfare and net zero became a derivative proxy for global temperature.

Such a narrow, selective, one-eyed view of reality brings many advantages, not least making a complex and messy world appear legible and manageable.  It is what Scott refers to as ‘seeing like a state’.  It is attractive to state authorities and to single issue campaigners.  Such reductionism and quantification give the appearance of a world that can be manipulated and controlled through rationally designed policies. 

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But fixating on net zero as the predominant goal of policy is not just misguided. It is also dangerous. It risks losing sight of diverse welfare goals and ethical imperatives.

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It is what hospitalization rates did for Covid-19 policy and, now, what global temperature and net zero have done for climate policy.  It is also what GDP has done for economic policy.  In his 2015 book, The Little Big Number, the economic historian Dirk Philipsen points out that “GDP has ballooned from a narrow economic tool into a global article of faith … GDP only measures output.  It ignores central facts such as quality, costs, or purpose.  Sustainability and quality of life are overlooked.  Losses don’t count.  The world can no longer afford GDP rule – GDP ignores real development”.

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Such reductionist policy goals are always misguided.  What hospitalisation rates, GDP and global temperature -- and its derivative NZ -- reveal, respectively, about Covid, the economy and climate change may not be the things that matter most.  Using a term from anthropology, GDP and net zero become ‘fetishes’ – that is, things to which the human imagination grants causal powers in the material world even though they are inventions of the human mind.

But fixating on net zero as the predominant goal of policy is not just misguided.  It is also dangerous.  It risks losing sight of diverse welfare goals and ethical imperatives.  Take the case of replacing polluting and dangerous open wood burning stoves in India with liquid petroleum gas (LPG) cooking stoves.  Despite the huge health and welfare benefits of such a transition, for the sake of NZ, European nations such as Germany and Norway seek to ban investments in such clean technologies in low- and middle-income countries.  Development economist Vijaya Ramachandran denounces the effects of this proposed ban: “This puritanical, one-size fits-all approach is bad for the climate and overwhelmingly leaves women breathing in dangerous smoke from dirty cooking fuels.”

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The antidote to net zero is to design, promote and mobilize around diverse policy goals that have a direct bearing on locally contextualized and specific social-ecological welfare outcomes.

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Or take the example of forests.  In 2021, driven by the rush at COP26 in Glasgow to demonstrate commitments to NZ ambitions, a wide coalition of nations pledged $12 billion halt deforestation, with a focus on the tropics and sub-tropics.  But forests are not only sinks for carbon dioxide.  And ‘halting deforestation’ not only protects a carbon sink.  It has other effects as well.  For many communities in the Global South, the harvesting of wood from forests provides both income and energy.  There are many different types of low-intensity wood harvesting practices that are essential for the world’s poor, and yet which maintain a functioning forest ecosystem.  In the name of delivering net zero, poorly designed, institutionally ineffective and scientifically uninformed bans on such harvesting practices simply drive them ‘underground’.  The ambition of net zero ends up making the livelihoods of many vulnerable people illegal.

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The antidote to net zero is to design, promote and mobilize around diverse policy goals that have a direct bearing on locally contextualized and specific social-ecological welfare outcomes.  Recognising that targets are needed for policy development, such targets should be designated with specific welfare goals in mind, rather than forcing all policies to serve the singular goal of net zero.  In the case of climate change, examples of these would be local air quality standards, rates of clean energy innovation and investment, and the Sustainable Development Goals.

This article is adapted from ‘Climate Change Isn’t Everything: Liberating Climate Politics from Alarmism’; Polity, 2023