Net Zero: How Do You Measure Success?

Okay I have a couple of questions about Net Zero. 

The First is: How Do You Measure Success? Because if we are spending Billions of pounds on trying to attain Net Zero, there should be some tangible benefit, some monitoring, some measurement that proves the success of the plan. 

Otherwise we are just throwing money away.

Without the ability to monitor the effects of our privations, there's no point. If we go net zero and global CO2 keeps climbing then there's no point.

Virtue or salving the conscience of a minority is not a good enough. We need tangible results. 

Just saying but doing X we save Y amount of carbon is not good enough. I want to see monitoring, I want to see live data showing an actual benefit. Because by doing X and reducing carbon output in one area may actually increase carbon in another area.

For instance shutting down steel production here may reduce local carbon, but overall may increase it.

For instance steel production, which has now virtually ceased in the UK. It reduces carbon output locally, but now you are relying on third-world countries producing steel using inefficient technology, creating more CO2 to produce the steel. The steel then needs to be shipped to the UK, so unless you're using sailing ships, that actually adds to the carbon footprint of that steel.

It's like electric cars. They are only zero-emissions vehicles locally. The energy used to create the electricity still creates CO2 at the power station. It's just that the CO2 isn't produced by the vehicle.

That's a con. It's not reducing CO2, it's just moving production elsewhere.

If we were measuring the actual production of CO2 regarding the things we have done to reduce local CO2, the overall CO2 output would have risen. Because we are not making goods locally, we are making them half way round the world and shipping them to the UK. 

We are not burning the fuel directly in an internal combustion engine, we are instead burning fossil fuel in a power station to heat water to create steam which turns a turbine which turns a generator which produced electricity which is fed down wires at ultra high voltages and then stepped down through several transformers to mains voltage and then through a charger into the battery of the electric vehicle. At each step there are losses because no transfer or conversion of one type of energy to another is 100% efficient.  It's therefore not the most efficient use of the fossil fuel compared to burning it directly.

The people falling for all of this are really falling for marketing. Maybe extreme marketing, but marketing all the same. It's not science, otherwise we would be doing net zero a lot differently.

And we would be monitoring the results. Scientifically.