…a report delivered to the secretary general in Egypt this week pointed squarely at the problem of climate hypocrisy — and the delusion that promises and good intentions could substitute for good math.
The greenwashing report, focused on private sector pledges, outlines 10 gold standards, including that companies should not be able to describe themselves as "net-zero-aligned" while continuing to invest in fossil fuels of any kind, buy cheap carbon credits that don't stand up to independent scrutiny, only reduce the intensity of their work and not the absolute emissions produced by it, and lobby against climate action or participate only in voluntary disclosure protocols rather than more transparent regulatory frameworks.
"You walk down the street, and we have oil and gas companies saying, 'Guess what. We're net zero. We're carbon neutral,' whatever," said Catherine McKenna, a former environment minister of Canada and the current chair of the group that wrote the report. "The problem is everyone's making announcements, there's billboards, there's all these things out there. And if you're a regular person, you're like, 'I don't know. Is that true or not?'"
Whether the United Nations builds a true oversight program for net-zero pledges, as is called for in the report, is an open question, but, McKenna said, "we do need to move to a more rigorous structure for sure."
"And that goes for governments too," she went on. "They need to actually not just have targets. They need to actually be having policies that are going to help them reach those targets. And then they're going to have to be more ambitious," she said. "You have to be more ambitious."
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