Net zero ≠ game over
What does net zero even mean? And why is net zero the prerequisite to win Daybreak?
Daybreak is a cooperative board game about stopping climate change. If you haven’t already, check out this quick overview of how the game works.
How many times have you heard the phrase net zero (emissions by 2050) lately? Maybe you wondered why people who spent decades denying the climate crisis seem to have suddenly fallen in love with the idea.
I’m co-designing Daybreak, a cooperative game about stopping climate change, in which we actually set net zero as a win prerequisite. So I have a few things to say about recent governmental and corporate net zero pledges.
What is net zero?
The sweeping scientific terms used to describe the climate crisis — of epochs and degrees and parts per million — obscure the sheer amount of human suffering that has fuelled it. The largest single cause of climate change is particular humans moving about this earth and doing particular things to it and to one another, including pouring prodigious amounts of greenhouse gases into the sky. Some humans deem some lives more valuable than others in the hunt for profit. An imperfect shorthand for these processes is capitalism.
The climate crisis is a crisis of capitalism.
For centuries, the ruling classes have fuelled economic growth by extracting and burning coal, oil and gas, as well as turning forests into plantations or farms. These activities produce gases like carbon dioxide and methane, which have piled up in our atmosphere and, acting like the walls of a greenhouse, trapped heat/energy from the sun. Trapped heat warms places all around the world, causing ice sheets to melt, sea levels to rise, and heatwaves to become more intense and frequent (among other effects). Trapped energy leads to more extreme weather events, from hurricanes to (perhaps counterintuitively, given the common “global warming” name) snow storms. All this is bad for people, animals and plants.
Certain human activities have been generating more greenhouse gas emissions than our planet can absorb.
You can think of cumulative emissions as a bathtub. The tap has been turned wide open by the drive for profit: more cars, more planes, more beef, more stuff. The drain on the other end is getting clogged, as natural carbon sinks like seas and forests are being polluted or burned down by the same system that pump more emissions into the atmosphere. This means that net emissions (those flowing through the tap minus those going down the drain) have been growing, and the bathtub is filling up quickly.
In this context, net zero means adding no more emissions than those being removed by carbon sinks.
How does one achieve net zero emissions?
Well, how would you tackle the bathtub problem? Turn off the tap? Unclog the drain? Drill another hole in the tub? All of the above?
Let’s say your company doesn’t want to turn off the tap, because its business model depends on it. You can still proclaim to be carbon neutral by offsetting your emissions. That is, paying someone else to turn off their tap, and then counting their “avoided emissions” as yours.
Add your carbon here, reduce some carbon somewhere. A zero-sum game. In practice, at best you’ve done nothing.
But in many cases, carbon offsets are causing harm on the other end of the net zero formula. For example,
Italian oil giant ENI is involved in a gas extraction project in Mozambique and has been implicated in kicking 550 families off their land and blocking fisherfolk from the sea. At the same time ENI has committed to planting 20 million hectares of forest in Africa to achieve net zero by 2030. For the communities living on the land and forest this is essentially a double land grab – once for gas extraction and again to offset it.
Kirtana Chandrasekaran, Can Land as a Carbon sink save us all?
Another trick is promising to drill a hole in the tub with a clever yet not-quite-ready technology. You can claim your company will be net zero by 2050, while you avoid cutting emissions today. Assuming you’d be able to build carbon removal technologies at a scale matching your emissions, what actual incentive would you have to pay for them? There is no profitable market for captured carbon dioxide.
A promise without a credible roadmap and without accountability is as good as empty.
One more trick. Net zero pledges often don’t consider all the emissions a company or country is responsible for. For example, fossil fuel companies tend to proclaim they’ll reach net zero emissions from their operations. Using the bathtub analogy again, it’s like saying “I will patch the leak in my water pipe, and then offset the water that still leaks from the pipe by funding a drainage project in Africa. Net zero leaks!” But are they even considering turning off the tap? No way.
This is the crux of the issue. Some companies have no intention to do the real work of cutting their emissions, so they use vague net zero pledges stuffed with future carbon offsets to (1) pretend they are climate leaders and (2) avoid being regulated.
A very limited amount of offsetting could be justified as a last resort, after every practical attempt of cutting emissions has been tried. But carbon offsets cannot be the main ingredient of a credible net zero strategy.
So why is net zero the prerequisite to win Daybreak?
At this point net zero might sound meaningless or even suspicious, but it was originally used by climate scientists to model a global bathtub that is no longer filling up. Not a single country or company. Net zero emissions across the entire world.
In Daybreak, net zero is a global goal.
Each round, the emissions from all players are pooled together. Some get sequestered by carbon sinks. Then the remaining, net emissions drive up global heating, which causes a crescendo of crises (from extreme weather events, to global crop failures and political shocks).
Natural carbon sinks are depleted during the game, as a result of the crises and shifts in planetary conditions caused by the emissions players are challenged to reduce. This makes players actually care about those forests and ocean sinks.
There are no carbon offsetting cards in Daybreak. When you take a global perspective, it just doesn’t make sense to shift carbon from one player to another. What players try to do, and what the global community should be pressing on in the real world, is removing that carbon at its source.
If players reach net zero, they still have to survive a last set of crises in order to win the game. Net zero is therefore the moment when players have stopped the problem from getting worse, but it’s not game over yet.
Back to the real world
We need to call out company executives and politicians when they tell stories of net zero to shirk responsibility and delay real, radical climate action.
Tackling climate breakdown is a bigger challenge than balancing the emissions equation. Drawing emissions down to net zero, globally, is necessary but not sufficient.
While we decarbonise the global economy, we must support the communities bearing the brunt of the crisis, and those least responsible for the damage. And to enable all this, at the scale required and within a narrow time frame, we need to build political coalitions that have the power to transform our societies.
The purpose is not just to make today’s economy environmentally sustainable but to build the democratic economy of tomorrow: dismantling the injustices of the present, replacing them with a reparative economy founded on the nurture of life, common care, and solidarity, enabled by institutions that share the wealth we create in common, and where meaningful freedom is a universal inheritance.
A systems crisis must be met with a politics of systemic ambition.
If you want to explore what a just transition to a sustainable and democratic future can look like, I thoroughly recommend Planet on Fire.
