Last year, we saw an explosion of net-zero announcements that relied too heavily on technologies that either do not exist yet or are at early stage development. But it looks like companies and governments will not get away with vague net-zero plans anymore. 

The UK government is being sued over its net-zero climate strategy, which lawyers argue relies too heavily on speculative technology instead of making real commitments to curbing emissions, the Guardian reports. The court papers were filed on January 12 by Friends of the Earth (FoE) and separately by ClientEarth (CE), who claim the UK’s net-zero plan fails to meet legal carbon budgets and, therefore, infringes on young people’s right to life and family life. 

This month, the EU is also making moves to ensure that claims of carbon removal are checked accurately. The bloc’s climate chief Frans Timmermans said the bloc must rapidly develop a way to certify the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere if it wants to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, according to Bloomberg Green.  

Over in California, a bill that would require corporations with more than USD 1 billion in annual revenue to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions to California Secretary of State’s office passed in the state Senate. The bill is the first-of-its-kind in the US and, if it passes in the Assembly, would hold corporations accountable for their emissions, becoming the broadest and most comprehensive set of emissions reporting requirements.

Shell’s carbon capture plant emits more than it captures, according to a new Global Witness report released this month. Although the Canadian plant has captured 5 million tonnes of carbon over a five-year period, it has also emitted an additional 7.5 million tonnes of “climate polluting gases” during the same time - emissions Shell did not disclose. This means that each year, Shell’s plant - the world’s first commercial-scale carbon capture plant - has the same carbon footprint as 1.2 million petrol cars, says the report. However, these doubts are not putting off investors - this month, both BP and Elon Musk said they were going into the carbon capture business.

Over in Iceland, where the world’s first commercial direct air capture (DAC) plant lives, there are similar doubts about the technologies’ viability. As an article by the ABC points out, DAC remains prohibitively expensive and would need to be  scaled up enormously to be useful. As we’ve noted in this newsletter before, the plant removes 10 million times less carbon than the world emits annually, which means the plant removes three seconds’ worth of global emissions in a year. This is always the way with new technologies - costs fall rapidly as scale increases. To this end, the Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Catalyst fund announced it will invest USD 15 billion into clean tech, including DAC. Though Gates admitted many of the start-ups are likely to fail, he said we only need a few to succeed. Doubts over the ability of these technologies to scale up in time raise serious questions for companies and countries, notably Australia, that plan to rely heavily on carbon removal technologies to achieve their climate goals.

The underwater volcanic eruption that covered the nation of Tonga in ash on January 14 did not release enough sulfur dioxide to cool global temperatures, as some eruptions have historically. But the volcanic eruption reignited the ongoing debate about whether solar radiation management (SRM) - which aims to put sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to slow the rate of global heating - should be explored. 

To be clear, SRM is not a carbon removal technology. But it does feature in debates within the climate community about what technologies should be used to slow global heating and whether they are reliable options that don’t cause other societal problems.

When it comes to SRM, many scientists are deeply sceptical. Although the idea has received a lot of funding, namely from Bill Gates, who has backed the Harvard-based solar radiation experiment, a consortium of scientists continue to speak out against it. This month, over 60 scientists called for a non-use agreement on solar geoengineering, which they believe poses catastrophic risks to the global climate. While some scientists argue that we can no longer afford to take SRM off the table, others have pointed out that previous volcanic eruptions have led to massive crop failures across the world and disturbed monsoon rains, with the temperature always bouncing back within a few years. SRM would do nothing to curb ongoing ocean acidification, which would be devastating to ocean ecosystems and polar regions. There are also fears that SRM projects - which are often conducted in regions like the Arctic, home to approximately four million people, many of whom are indigenous - turn communities into geoengineering test beds. This raises major questions about how this technology - the impacts of which cannot be contained within countries’ borders - should be governed. This has many, including New York Magazine, asking: Will solar geoengineering bring nations together? Or will it drive them apart? These developments fuel the debate about what research ‘normalises geoengineering’ and whether research areas like governance and modelling of impacts should continue to be explored in order to determine whether this technology is indeed just too dangerous to consider.

Carbon removal is often discussed amongst scientists, policymakers and billionaires. But this month, we saw more unusual advocates enter the stage - the faith community. In a Newsweek op-ed, Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp and Eric Dodds argue that high-polluting countries have a moral obligation to remove “legacy carbon” - the carbon that has accumulated since the Industrial Revolution. Such interventions, they argue, would not be “playing God” as some faith groups have suggested. So long as we veer away from invasive geoengineering projects, there are ethical ways to amplify natural processes that capture and sequester carbon, “processes that humans disrupted in the first place,” they write. “Not only should we not dismiss such ‘biomimicry’ interventions to enhance carbon sequestration as hubristic, we should also ask ourselves whether we aren't morally and spiritually obligated to undertake them.”