Business is now the dominant force pushing the speed of decarbonisation

Most of us assume that governments and international organisations will take the crucial roles in the fight against climate change. But over the past year more and more commercial companies have chosen to become the leaders in the battle to reduce emissions. While countries have prevaricated and blustered about their response to the environmental emergency, businesses have quietly taken action to align their activities to the ‘net zero’ objective.[1] These steps may not pay off immediately. In fact, it is likely that many decisions by corporations will end up by costing them money. Nevertheless, the number, complexity and size of projects announced by major businesses in the last few months have shown a striking commitment to taking important steps to develop low-carbon technologies, even without an obvious monetary incentive. The route to ‘net zero’ is well defined when it comes to energy supply. But this only covers about two thirds of all emissions. Agriculture The next most important source of greenhouse gases is agriculture. As is becoming increasingly well understood, cattle farming is a particularly important source of methane which, like CO2, helps heat the global atmosphere. Perhaps 10% of all greenhouse gases arise from cows and other ruminants. Other animals are less bad but are still significant contributors to the climate change problem. It is very uncomfortable to say this but climate stability is impossible to reconcile with today’s levels of meat-eating. The world’s diet needs to shift towards plant-based foods. Grains, pulses, seeds and vegetables use far less land than meat animals, allowing us to reforest a substantial fraction of the world’s surface. As an aside, global food production is currently about 6,000 calories per person per day. So there’s no shortage of food; it’s just that most of it is fed to animals. And, of course, a varied diet that avoids farmed meat is likely to improve human health in rich countries. Artificial meats and new forms of indoor agriculture will help us reduce the area of land we require. We will also need to create an agricultural system that helps rebuild the depleted levels of carbon in our soils. This means moving away from our destructive emphasis on intensive monocultures and recreating an agriculture that improves local ecologies. This change will be highly disruptive and farmers will need to be properly protected. Steelmaking, cement and fertiliser production What else do we need to do? The next most important sources of emissions are steelmaking, cement and fertiliser production. Steelmaking represents about 7% of world emissions, largely because coal is consumed to reduce iron ore to molten metal. Speciality Swedish steel producer SSAB was the first to take substantial action to move away from this fuel. It is constructing a new steel works that will use hydrogen instead of coal. This will be a new process which several other major steelmakers are also beginning to experiment with. SSAB’s initiative is costly, with a total bill of around 200 million Euros to the end of the pilot phase, and the steel produced will be perhaps 25-30% more expensive than metal made using coal. Nevertheless, the company and its partners are confident that the switch away from coal is necessary and its new process will, in time, be the most economical way of producing steel. Cement is somewhat more difficult but fertiliser production can shift very easily to renewable hydrogen. Transport Other steps we will all need to take include a move away from flying, better public transport and the creation of large car-free areas across towns and cities to encourage cycling and walking, while reducing the need to own a car. We’ll want to reduce our purchase of clothes, a major current of emissions and environmental degradation, as well as making sure that we create a fully ‘circular’ economy that recycles and reuses everything we need. Best practices There are many examples of very recent path-breaking steps by businesses in advance of any obligation to take action to decarbonise. Some of these projects have been financially assisted by governments or the EU but all have been partly funded by private companies taking a risk on their investment of money and management time. Large companies across the globe realise that the gravity of the climate crisis obliges them to act. But moving from today’s reliance on fossil fuels to a business with a negligible carbon footprint is hugely demanding, particularly for companies facing shareholder demands for quick investment returns. The Torres winery, headquartered not far from Barcelona, is the largest producer in Spain. Still family-owned after five generations, its vineyards produce a wide variety of wines, including some of the very highest quality. The company’s planning for a transition to a low carbon world, and its actions to address the impact of climate change on both the amount and quality of its production, seem to me to be exemplary.About 80% of the impact of wine making on greenhouse gas emissions arises away from the vineyard itself. Torres often has an important place in the sales of its suppliers and so it is able to exert productive pressure on the CO2 emitted by the chain of the businesses that it works with. Lastly, I wanted to note a very different sort of project. The US payments processing company Stripe recently asked for bids for a pot of 1 million dollars that it had set aside to pay other companies to collect and permanently store CO2. Winners included a Swiss company that captures CO2 from the air and then injects it into basalt rock. The rock is chemically altered by this action, permanently sequestering the gas. Stripe is doing what we all need to do, thinking about ways in which it can counterbalance remaining emissions once it has taken all the actions it feasibly can to reduce its carbon footprint. These examples illustrate the second phase of the long journey towards decarbonisation. The first was the rapidly growth in investments in wind and solar across the world, increasing the production of green electricity. ENEL Green Power was one of the most important actors in this global movement, accompanied on the journey by the many companies that decided that their electricity purchases came from exclusively zero-carbon sources. The business world now needs to ensure that the momentum is maintained, showing governments and the rest of civil society that decarbonisation is both technically and financially feasible. [1] We use the expression ‘net zero’ when describing a company or a country that has reduced its responsibility for overall emissions down to zero, possibly by employing techniques that capture CO2 to counteract any remaining greenhouse gases which it creates.

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Business is now the dominant force pushing the speed of decarbonisation

Business is now the dominant force pushing the speed of decarbonisation

Chris Goodall

How near are we to a green future for companies?

Founding member of the board of Foundation for Sustainable Development

Chemist and founder of EPEA (Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency)