What are the science nerds going to come up with next?

On the indispensable Popular Information substack, Judd Legum and friends report that an awful lot of corporate pledges to work toward "net zero" deserve Zero Credibility.

Corporations want the public to know that they take the climate crisis seriously. Most major corporations have taken a public "climate pledge," promising to reach "net zero" carbon emissions by a future date. ... As a concept, climate pledges are appealing. ... there is no "sustainable" rate of CO2 emissions. By pledging to reach "net zero" emissions by 2040 or earlier, corporations are aligning their companies with science. ...

The NewClimate Institute recently released a report that evaluates the climate pledges of 25 multinational corporations. The results are not encouraging. Specifically, while all 25 companies have pledged to reach "net zero," they've collectively made specific commitments to reduce just 20% of their current carbon footprint by 2040. 12 of the 25 companies have made no specific carbon emissions reductions whatsoever.

Maybe all this corporate feel-good posturing will do some good. In the struggle toward a sustainable climate, every little reduction in fossil fuel pollution helps -- a little. It's probable that these pledges can give climate hawks additional angles from which to goose the corporate behemoths to do better.

But it also seems possible that techno innovators are making strides which might change the sustainability arena. We've come to understand that to keep warming caused by CO2 under limits, we need to Electrify Everything. If we're to switch from coal and gas to renewable power from sun and wind, we need sustainable technology to electrify. We need new, bigger, and different batteries.

Here's a battery innovation story that's more than feel-good posturing.

 

No more mining rare earths in the Congo with slave labor for these guys. There's innovation here that just might work out.