Almost every day, Motherboard reporters receive press releases from companies and governments large and small boasting of some new effort to reduce emissions. While it is obviously a good thing these entities—or, at least, their PR departments—are thinking about their environmental impacts, we've also noticed an unfortunate trend. These releases routinely misuse and abuse basic climate change concepts. In some cases, they even introduce new and misleading terms by slapping "green" or "eco" in front of some pollutant.
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You've probably heard many of these terms before: carbon neutral, net zero, zero emissions. These terms sound simple, even self-explanatory. But the basic concepts they express are laden with complexities. And by getting repeated in the media without being fully defined, these terms have adopted slippery meanings, a slipperiness very much intended to imply companies and governments are doing more to reduce emissions than they actually are. Not all of these cases fit the traditional definition of "greenwashing"—in which companies express concerns about the environment while doing little to address those concerns—but many of them do. To try and—ahem—clear the air, Motherboard has created this glossary of key terms relating to how corporations and governments talk about reducing emissions. We have assembled this guide in the hopes that it will help all of us more critically evaluate the claims corporations make about their attempts to be environmentally responsible. To be clear, this is not a comprehensive guide to all important climate change-related terms. For that, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s glossary is a good place to start. Nor do we cover all aspects of greenwashing, which cover far more than emissions, including waste/recycling, water pollution, etc. But we have chosen to focus specifically on emissions-related terms here because they are among the most abused.
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There is a very clear, achievable, and direct path to significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions soon: Curb consumption, electrify everything, and clean up the grid with proven, cheap, renewable, zero-emission energy sources like wind and solar. The explanations of the terms below relate to how corporations delay, obscure, or otherwise obstruct that path, extending a decades-long trend of behavior that prioritizes profits ahead of the continued sustainability and habitation of this planet. This term refers to the overall emissions an individual is responsible for in their day-to-day activities: Driving, shopping, flying, and other rudimentary actions all come with a certain environmental impact, and the concept aims to sum that up while holding individuals accountable for their own role in the climate crisis. While aiming to limit ones’ own consumption and contribution to a system that’s polluting our planet is noble, the idea of a carbon footprint is highly individualistic and places onus on the person to solve a global crisis, allowing large polluting sectors to skirt responsibility in turn. In fact, the term was popularized by oil giant British Petroleum (BP) in the early aughts as part of a marketing campaign crafted to redirect attention for solving climate change away from fossil fuel corporations; in 2004, the company worked with a public relations firm to launch a carbon footprint calculator to help the individual assess their own role in global warming. But as Rebecca Solnit writes for The Guardian, “The revolution won’t happen by people staying home and being good.” 77 percent of all emissions in the U.S. come directly from transportation (29 percent), electricity (25 percent), and fossil fuels and industries that rely on them to manufacture goods (23 percent), according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Slashing emissions at the scale required to slow the climate crisis will require systemic policy changes. Carbon Neutral, or carbon neutrality, is the goal often targeted by businesses, corporations, and governments in climate pledges. The basic concept is to measure an entity's carbon footprint, reduce that amount as much as possible, and purchase offsets for the emissions that can't be avoided. According to this logic, at that point, a corporation is theoretically not adding more carbon into the atmosphere. While auditing an entity's carbon footprint can be a helpful step towards reducing emissions simply because it forces the entity to realize where and when it is harming the planet, at this time the concept of carbon neutrality is only as viable as the offsets purchased.
What is a carbon footprint?
What does carbon neutral, or carbon neutrality, mean?
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What are offsets?
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On balance, experts increasingly believe offset programs actually increase emissions. And some corporations are acknowledging this. Walmart declared a goal of zero emissions by 2040 "without relying on carbon offsets." One expert advised the Financial Times that, for the time being, offsets should be deemed "guilty until proven innocent."Carbon Negative is the same as carbon neutral but offsets or other mitigation efforts to remove CO2 exceeds the emissions generated. Any claim today that an entity is carbon negative should be treated with utmost skepticism because carbon removal efforts like offsets are either experimental or speculative while the emissions they are designed to offset are definite and locked in.You might see this term used interchangeably with “carbon neutrality,” though it’s slightly broader, in that it encompasses emissions of all greenhouse gasses, like methane and nitrous oxide, not just carbon dioxide. Broadly, being “net zero” means that the emissions of a given entity have been matched by reductions over a slated period of time. Like carbon neutrality, the term is often used in government and corporate pledges, like the one the Biden Administration made to shrink national emissions by 2050.But the term has also come under fire for being imprecise and a vehicle to excuse continued emission with what many environmental justice groups perceive to be false promises. Crucially, if a company has achieved net zero emissions, that does not mean that it is not emitting at all—hence, the common slogan, “net zero is not zero.” Rather, it is likely purchasing offsets that equal its emissions in volume, which, as we've learned, are not a sure thing.
What is carbon negative, and how is it different from carbon neutral?
What is net zero?
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What are “green” and “blue” hydrogen?
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But progressive environmental groups call bullshit, noting that most processes for producing hydrogen at scale require fossil fuels. Green hydrogen, specifically, is made with renewable energy sources, which would truly be emissions-free—but the industry for this is extremely small. Today, oil and gas companies produce nearly all of the country’s annual supply of hydrogen, according to non-profit environmental advocacy group EarthJustice. Hydrogen produced from fossil fuels is more commonly referred to as “blue hydrogen,” which is not a clean energy source, despite how much oil and gas companies want us to think it is. Transitioning from fossil fuels requires eliminating them from our energy palate entirely, environmentalists argue; investing in technologies that require them is antithetical to the goal of transitioning to an emission-free economy. Carbon Capture, also called Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS), Carbon Capture and Storage, Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS), and a number of similar terms and acronyms, broadly refer to any effort to take CO2 from the air, atmosphere, or polluting source and either put it back in Earth or re-use it. It is frequently touted as a promising and even necessary intervention to keep the planet from catastrophic warming. As humanity continues to fail at reducing global CO2 emissions at a level that will prevent catastrophic climate change, that failure makes technologies like carbon capture all the more necessary. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now considers such technology necessary to achieve net-zero or net-negative emissions. But the fact that the stakes for technology like carbon capture panning out are now so high doesn't guarantee they’ll work. To date, CCS facilities have several high-profile failures and few success stories. And the CO2 pulled from such facilities are often not returned to Earth at all but are used to extract more fossil fuels. Hundreds of environmental groups in the U.S. and Canada are opposed to the technology because it prolongs dependence on fossil fuels and the necessary infrastructure poses serious risks to nearby communities.
What is carbon capture?
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