SCOTT is celebrating, he’s ditched the fossil fuels at home, and it’s left him dreaming of what comes after global net zero, could it be…
THE big news here at Reconnect Heights is that the gas has been capped off and the meter removed, and we have stepped away from fossil fuels. My transition to net zero has taken a significant step. I said during the pandemic, when we had those blue skies and clean air that I wanted to make net zero at home by 2025 a priority. I recently saw a quote from American, Danny Kennedy, former Greenpeace activist & founder of Sungevity, which I think whether you believe in Climate Change or no, resonates: “Think about it this way: We’re killing people in foreign lands in order to extract 200 million-year-old sunlight. We frack our own backyards and pollute our rivers, or we blow up our mountaintops. All for an hour of electricity, when we could just take what’s falling free from the sky.” Of course there’s still the Embodied emissions, sometimes called embedded emissions those are the emissions from manufacturing the things we have purchased. I’m anticipating all our work will have paid for itself in 4 years. We sold our much loved diesel camper van and bought an EV that we converted saving around £2.8k a year on diesel. The solar panel system we fitted still has a carbon footprint taking into consideration the materials and structures, inverters, cables, control electronic devices, transportation, installation, and recycled materials we used. A lot of calculations later I estimate our total saving –8,862.91kg of CO2e per year and our embodied emissions (the carbon created in the manufacturing of the goods we have purchased to get to net zero) are within our carbon budget for the next 3 years. Back when I’d scribbled all the maths down on a scrap bit of paper I estimated that our home would reach a true net zero footprint by 2030, it now looks like Reconnect Heights could be net zero before 2028. Now, I have started to think what comes after net zero? We still have to go further – cleaning up historic emissions. Most countries are signed up to the UNFCCC’s Climate Ambition Coalition and committed to net zero by mid-century. Climate scientists know these pledges are significant, but still insufficient, the long-lived impact of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere means that global temperatures will continue to rise thanks to the cumulative amount of carbon dioxide – the total amount since the industrial revolution. Amazingly, industries are now pledging to not only eliminate their current emissions, but also to remove sufficient carbon dioxide from the air to counter all of their own historic emissions too. All you need to know about futuristic carbon capture tech is this: In 2007 Richard Branson announced a $25million prize for a ‘commercially viable’ idea to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere – it’s never been awarded. Those currently offsetting their historic emissions are providing finance for nature restoration projects. Globally countries that industrialised early need to take a similar direction. It is only fair that they do – the benefits of early industrialisation flowed to those countries and the clean up costs should be borne by them too. In 2019, the UK emitted about 350 million tonnes of CO2, accounting for slightly less than 1% of the global total. Our early industrialisation was actually responsible for cumulative emissions of about 78 billion tonnes of CO2 – about 5% of the global total of 1.5 trillion tonnes. It’s that accumulated ‘carbon hangover’ we have to start remedying. We can then make a persuasive case to countries such as India and China about their need to rapidly cut emissions, by showing them that us earlyindustrialisers are pulling CO2 from the atmosphere through natural restoration. If we pledge to address our historic emissions as well, suddenly we have the potential to heal the planet. If we want that debt paid off by the end of the century we’d have to be removing 1.6 billion tonnes a year (that’s a helluva lot of carbon sinks – whales, peatland, woodland, water systems and seas). The thought of it is galvanising though, the great nature restoration will be an enormous undertaking. Humanity working together on a multi-generational endeavour to undo the damage that we have wrought on the world. We live at a time unique in our history, when we will strive to restore the atmosphere, draw down CO2 back to a level that is compatible with a stable climate and healthy oceans, and restore the planet’s complex natural systems. The great nature restoration will be an enormous undertaking. I’ve heard it described as a cathedral project. Those involved at the outset may draft the plans and dig the foundations, but they will not raise the spire to its full height. That privilege, will belong to our descendants. None of us will see that day, but we can make a start in the belief that future generations will finish the job.