The climate emergency has become impossible for the private sector to ignore. As of 2021, at least one fifth of the world’s 2,000 largest public companies have made a net-zero commitment, and these kind of corporate pledges have tripled in one year.
By 2022, every tech unicorn CEO will have a net-zero plan – but it will become apparent that reducing emissions won’t be enough. Next year we will understand that the way to reach net zero is through carbon removal.
The tech sector already has a carbon footprint larger than the entire aviation industry, and it will soon be non-negotiable for tech CEOs to have a net-zero mandate – employees, customers, board, investors and communities will demand it. And so will the planet, which is already warming more quickly than UN scientists previously feared.
In 2022, tech CEOs will recognise that, if we want to stay alive as a species, they can’t just reduce their companies’ emissions and then plug the gaps with conventional offsetting schemes. To get to net zero, companies’ own carbon emissions must be removed from the atmosphere.
In 2022, carbon removal – once the preserve of wonks and early adopters – will become mainstream, while ineffective carbon-offsetting projects lose their place as the bedrock of corporate climate programmes. The most ambitious tech CEOs will follow in the footsteps of Microsoft and commit to erasing their historical lifetime emissions with carbon removal.
Many of these technologies are still in their infancy, but we have no choice other than to scale them if we want to stay below 1.5°C of warming and meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Even conservatively, getting there means removing eight billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere every year by 2050 – that’s about 20 per cent of what the world emits annually.
We’ve only removed a few thousand tonnes via these early technologies. But from 2022, direct air capture, enhanced weathering, biochar and kelp sequestration will be the topic of dinner-table conversations around the world. As awareness builds, every child will soon be asking the adults around them what they’re doing to help these technologies scale.
Instead of being daunted by such scaling requirements and the staggering associated cost curves, tech CEOs will be the first to mobilise. These entrepreneurs and visionaries understand what it means to be an early adopter of a product, they understand Wright’s law – that the cost of an innovation falls as it scales – and they know that their early spend will catalyse an industry that humanity won’t be alive without. Their adoption of carbon-removal technologies will be essential.
Get more expert predictions for the year ahead. The WIRED World in 2022 features intelligence and need-to-know insights sourced from the smartest minds in the WIRED network. Available now on newsstands, as a digital download, or you can order your copy online.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
