Google, Walmart, and Other Big Companies Are Half-Assing Their Climate Plans A new report finds that many corporate net-zero plans are full of holes. The world’s leading companies are seriously overstating their plans to act on climate change, according to a report released Monday. In findings that should surprise no one, 25 firms, including Google, Unilever, and Walmart, are only on track to reduce emissions by an average of 40%—a far cry from what’s suggested by popular terms like “net zero” and “carbon neutral.” The analysis comes from the New Climate Institute, an organization based in Germany, which partnered with CarbonWatch to comb through the carbon-neutral or net-zero plans of some of the world’s leading organizations, giving each of them an “integrity” rating. None of the companies surveyed hit the highest integrity grade possible in the report, and only one, Danish shipping giant Maersk, got the second-highest “reasonable integrity” rating. Apple, Sony, and Vodaphone followed with “moderate integrity” ratings. Companies including Amazon, Google, IKEA, Volkswagen, and Walmart got “low integrity” scores, while 10 companies, including CVS Health, Nestlé, and Unilever, bottomed out with the lowest ranking. “We set out to uncover as many replicable good practices as possible, but we were frankly surprised and disappointed at the overall integrity of the companies’ claims,” Thomas Day of NewClimate Institute, lead author of the report, said in a release. “As pressure on companies to act on climate change rises, their ambitious-sounding headline claims all too often lack real substance, which can mislead both consumers and the regulators that are core to guiding their strategic direction. Even companies that are doing relatively well exaggerate their actions.” Nearly all of the companies surveyed—24 out of 25—are relying heavily on offsetting credits to reach their net-zero targets, a process that has problems of its own. Two-thirds of those 24 companies currently lean heavily on offsets based on reforestation, planting trees, and other land-based activities—which, as the report points out, can be impacted or reversed by something as simple as a forest fire—to reach their net-zero targets. And policies around offsets don’t necessarily hold steady through an entire company. Nestlé and Unilever, both enormous multinational brands, “explicitly distance themselves” from offsetting at the top level, the report found—but do encourage brands they own to pursue investing in offsets, in many cases in order to sell products that can be labeled “carbon neutral” while the company pursues relatively minor emissions cuts. https://newclimate.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CorporateClimateResponsibilityMonitor2022.pdf