As dreams of 1.5°C melt away, net zero’s reckoning is overdue

“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.

I mention this now because one of the things I said at that time appeared to particularly upset people: ‘No one believes we are going to limit warming to no more than 1.5°C’. My argument then was that net zero was being used to stop an examination of why the Paris Agreement had failed. Net zero was a very useful idiot in that regard because by invoking the possibility of future carbon dioxide removal, you are proposing a sort of time machine in which humanity will be able to turn the climate clock back. If we were serious about 1.5°C, then we would be witnessing the rapid phase out of fossil fuels in the richest and most industrialised nations. This would help stabilise emissions, and then we begin the process of accelerating decarbonisation. That clearly had not happened. Back in 2021 the available budget for 1.5°C was rapidly disappearing as a result of increasing fossil fuel use. Dreams of 1.5°C were already over.

I was publicly told, and sometimes scolded, that I should not say that because: you have no idea just how rapid net zero action in various industries is; this isn’t about science but policy and you can’t know what future political decisions will be made; it’s not for you to say 1.5°C is over, this is an issue about those most vulnerable to climate change; you are providing ammunition to fossil fuel interests to slow down climate action. For a while I was invited to a number of climate events in which I was clearly the dissenting voice. In 2022 I even gave a talk at TED about the dangerous fantasy of net zero. Unsurprisingly that went down like a lead balloon with some of the attendees (you won’t find my profile on ted.com because that talk was never released - I’ve got some info about it here).

At the time it felt like being in the back seat of car that was hurtling towards a cliff edge. Rather than react to this danger, the driver was pushing down harder on the accelerator while angrily telling you to calm down because you are affecting their concentration.

Conversations in private were another matter: ‘Of course we aren’t going to limit warming to 1.5, but we can’t say that yet’. I was told that countless times. A common argument was that 1.5°C was a mechanism to increase ambition, to up the pace of climate action. It was always framed as a stretch goal - possibly unlikely - but even it it isn’t achieved, it will drag us closer towards safety.

I do not argue that there has been no effective climate progress. We are indeed seeing an exponential deployment of solar power that has the potential to usher in a revolution in how we generate energy. In some places, electric vehicles are already reducing transport-related emissions. It’s also worth remembering just how astonishing the Paris Agreement was. For the very first time, the international community agreed to do what it takes to avoid dangerous climate change, and to define the danger level at 1.5°C in response to an effective campaign by those most exposed to warming beyond that level. Euphoric would be a fair description of many people’s reaction to this.

My simple point is that if that the net zero approach that emerged from the Paris Agreement was intended to keep humanity safe, then it hasn’t worked. We are in the process of not just exceeding but crashing past 1.5°C. The twelve months of 2024 were 1.6°C above pre-industrial levels. There is still much active research (and argument) about what was responsible for some of the astonishing increases in temperatures. I’m sympathetic to arguments that ultimately boil down to decreasing albedo (and I’m agnostic about causes of that). What I take from this, is that not only is global warming accelerating, but it may be doing so in ways we do not fully understand. The climate’s response to our forcing could be higher than central estimates.

We may have also dangerously underestimated the possibility of tipping points in the climate system. At the end of June, we will be hosting the next Global Tipping Points conference. I remember the silence at the end of Stefan Ramstorf’s presentation about AMOC at the previous conference. Back then he was reporting on new science that seemed to indicate that the AMOC ocean current system that transports vast amounts of heat from the hot tropics to the cold norther hemisphere, may be much more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought. More recently Stefan has gone so far to say that the rapid slow down and potential collapse of AMOC may be the more likely outcome within this century. This is extraordinary. AMOC collapse has the potential to usher in catastrophic climate change. In many respects it is the outcome that must be avoided at all costs. And now it may be odds on.

I think a perfectly normal response to this is a rising sense of dread, even panic. This is another issue for which I have received unsolicited advice from climate centrists. I need to calm down because being alarmist makes people switch off. Yes, we need to be very careful in how we interpret and communicate climate science, and yes sometimes people say things that are not supported by the science. But this tone policing sometimes feels utterly unhinged from what is actually happening.

This is where net zero comes into its own. It’s the soothing balm that can be applied to any temperature anomaly, any devastating storm or withering drought. It promises both salvation from climate breakdown and a continuation of business as usual. It was only ever the latter that was the priority. The moment net zero actually threatened concentrated economic and political power, it would be ditched. This is what we are now witnessing. It would be easy to blame Trump for the roll back of climate action as part of his onslaught against DEI and anything deemed progressive, but see how quickly other organisations have used this moment to unwind their net zero pledges. Across the Atlantic, serial grifter Nigel Farage is extending his spiteful attacks on immigrants and Europe to net zero, and in doing so turbo charging reactionary right wing push back against climate action.

This is where the climate centrists appear at the brown of the hill. Proudly holding aloft their net zero pennants, they charge down into the political battlefield and set about with promises of green industrial policy. How many defeats do they need to experience before they learn this is not working? Time and time again they fail to link climate action with things that matter to people: food poverty, fuel poverty, air pollution, inequality, job insecurity, lack of housing, unfordable or non-existent healthcare. But then what serious responses can they offer when they are constrained by only being able to offer pragmatic, ‘politically feasible’ centrism? They drag around arsenals stuffed with complex economic formulas, but really the only weapon they wield is the promise that growth with solve all of these issues.

Net zero allowed policy makers to argue we can have our fossil fuelled economic growth and avoid dangerous climate change. COP28 President Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber is a particularly instructive example. As he was exhorting nations to work together to limit warming to below 1.5°C he was also managing a large increase in oil and gas extraction in his role as CEO of fossil fuel corporation ADNOC. In the end COP28 made headlines as being the first COP that concluded with the agreement that humanity has to move away from fossil fuels. That it took nearly three decades of international climate conferences to identify coal, oil, and gas as the problem resulted in a slow-clap from activists around the world.

It’s real legacy should be the moment when we realised what net zero was all along. A mirage. A refraction of a possible future appearing on a horizon that is already shimmering with boiling heat.

Continuing down that path will lead us further into disaster.