Why net zero is just the beginning of decarbonising the planet
Governments are largely focused on adding no further pollutants to the atmosphere. But we need to think about removing the carbon that’s already up there.
Celebrated economist Max Corden once told me while I was studying for a PhD at the Australian National University that he had been pondering a problem for several days only to conclude that the answer was intuitively obvious. That’s what I concluded, too, when I pondered the world achieving net zero emissions by 2050: that this doesn’t make a bad situation better; it only stops making it worse.
Atmospheric pollution in the Chinese city of Dalian. We need to reduce emissions and extract carbon from the atmosphere. Bloomberg
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Craig Emerson is managing director of Emerson Economics. He is a distinguished fellow at the ANU, director of the Australian APEC Study Centre at RMIT and adjunct professor at Victoria University’s College of Business.
