In his new article “The ‘Net Zero’ Greenwash” in Wall Street International, Ashish Kothari highlights the underlying flaws of the rhetoric and promises around “net zero”:
Firstly, a mindset that equates pollution emitted or forest cut in one place to pollution absorbed or afforestation done elsewhere, is ecologically and socially ignorant (or willfully negligent). This comes from a flawed view that the climate crisis is only about carbon and that a forest is only a collection of trees, a grassland a collection of grass, a wetland a body of water with fish in it. The emissions of a thermal power station are not only carbon dioxide, but other gases and liquid effluents, with their own hazards to human and environment health. How can capturing an equivalent amount of carbon somewhere else, possibly compensate for the other emissions (or for the impacts of associated activities such as coal mining, fracking, pipelines, transmission lines)? Similarly, in the case of biodiversity, a rainforest is a complex of thousands of species and varieties (many of which we may not even have yet identified or described), and there is no human mechanism that can it possibly be replicated elsewhere, certainly not in any short time-span. The same for complex grasslands, wetlands, coastal and marine areas, and other natural ecosystems.
