Climatologist Jolle Gergis On Why Planting Trees And "Net Zero" Accounting Tricks Are Insidious, Feel-Good Bullshit [View all]

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Instead of focusing on economic incentives to encourage the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, climate policies are heavily reliant on feelgood “nature positive” solutions that aim to neutralise carbon emissions by essentially planting trees instead of reducing industrial emissions. While the protection, expansion and rehabilitation of natural carbon sinks like forests and wetlands is an inherently good thing to do, researchers have shown that there is not enough land to meet the global goal of net zero emissions using nature-based solutions alone.

Approximately 1bn hectares – an area larger than the United States of America – is needed to achieve net zero pledges. More than 40% of this land would need to be converted from existing uses like food production to carbon sequestration projects by 2060 at an unprecedented rate. And even if this regenerative utopia could be realised, we know that forests take time to mature and can burn down so cannot be thought of as a quick or permanent carbon storage solution, especially in a rapidly shifting climate. As extreme heat and aridity engulfs more of the planet, these well-intentioned efforts could literally go up in smoke.

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Achieving net zero by 2050 requires carbon dioxide removal (CDR), which currently relies almost exclusively on land-based measures to soak up excess carbon from the atmosphere. Polluters can simply buy carbon credits to offset their emissions and continue on with business as usual. Meanwhile, the energy imbalance caused by the burning of fossil fuels continues to further destabilise the Earth’s climate. Essentially we are adding more carbon debt to our planetary credit card, leaving future generations with an unpayable liability.

To limit the magnitude and the duration of overshoot of the Paris Agreement temperature goals, ultimately the world needs to go well beyond the neutralising effect of net zero and begin to drawdown cumulative historical emissions to achieve “net negative emissions”. According to the Global Carbon Project’s latest numbers, vegetation-based CDR is currently absorbing the equivalent of about 5% of annual fossil carbon dioxide emissions, while technology-based CDR accounts for only about one-millionth of the CO2 emitted from fossil fuels. More generous industry estimates sit around 0.1% of total global emissions. At the risk of sounding like a heretic, the political distortion of net zero is an insidious loophole that distracts from the scientific imperative to eliminate the primary cause of our overheating planet – fossil fuels.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/07/net-zero-distracts-from-scientific-imperative-to-eliminate-fossil-fuels-cop30