People’s inability to see past net zero shows it is no longer fit for purpose
“Be flexible, find common ground, come forward with solutions and achieve consensus and never lose sight of our north star of 1.5°C, that’s what I’m going to stay laser-focused on.”President of COP28, Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber
Four years ago I, along with Robert Watson and Wolfgang Knorr, wrote the article ‘Climate scientists: the concept of net zero is a dangerous trap’. For a while this seemed to make me something of a bête noire in what I am going to call the climate centrist circle. This is a poorly defined group of political, industrial, and academic voices who are pro-climate policies, but in a incrementally prescribed way. While the language may sometimes use include rapid, and radical, there was never any meaningful attempt to engage with some of the deeper pathologies of capitalism, or even the much more superficial issues with net zero that we were trying to surface. If avoiding dangerous climate change demanded a major reset of the Overton window, then the climate centrist circle were only ever comfortable twitching the net curtains.