In 2020, BP unveiled a plan to cut oil and gas production 40 percent by 2030 as part of the company’s goal to reach “net-zero” emissions by 2050 or sooner. This February, the company announced it’d instead seek a 25 percent reduction by the end of the decade. Then, on Monday, Reuters reported that BP intends to abandon that pledge altogether and instead expand production in the Middle East and the Gulf of Mexico.

BP wasn’t alone in making such a pledge in 2020, although its version was considered more ambitious than the plans put forward by its peers. Four years on, it’s joined the pack of oil and gas producers who’ve dramatically scaled back their more concrete “net-zero” plans. Shell, for instance, ditched its pledge to reduce oil and gas production by 2030 last year. The company then dropped its 2035 emissions reduction pledge entirely this past March. Leading up to the UN climate talks in Glasgow in 2020, COP26—held just as the world started to emerge from Covid-19 lockdowns—governments and corporations alike fell over themselves to announce shiny new plans for reaching “net-zero.” Those promises have mostly fallen out of fashion among the politicians and executives who once championed them. So whatever happened to net-zero? What’s replaced it, and is the world any closer to getting there?

“Net-zero” was always a pretty vague slogan. In general, it implies reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses. But there are some complications: The planet-heating effects of greenhouse gasses are cumulative, meaning that we’ll be feeling the impact of carbon dioxide (CO2) spewed decades ago for decades to come. Every additional ton of CO2 emitted now means more warming down the line. Limiting warming along the lines laid out in the Paris Climate Agreement, to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, is generally understood to mean stopping those emissions by 2050. But in most scenarios........

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