Overshoot: Navigating a world beyond 1.5°C
Jun 9, 2026 · 13 min · 6 segments
We sit down with investigative climate journalist Amy Westervelt to dissect how the framework of "Net Zero" has been weaponised by the fossil fuel industry to justify continued extraction and…
Amy WesterveltGuest
Laurie LaybournHost
Amy, you're a journalist and you've been investigating fossil fuel companies for years.
So when was it that you first realized that the concept of net zero was being exploited by the fossil fuel industry?
Because really, like, the concept of net zero comes out of the Paris Climate Agreement, right? Like, right after that, you're hearing this thrown around a bunch, and the fossil fuel companies jump on it almost immediately.
You know, okay, we can... reduce emissions here and it balances out over there and all that stuff.
But very quickly they start to use this framing to kind of bake in the idea that we, we will over emit and it's okay because we've figured out through, through the magic of accounting and technology how to like deal with this issue.
But the, so the first time that I started kind of thinking, wait a minute, the math isn't mathing on this.
I started looking into carbon capture around 2020 because a bunch of really smart people whose opinions I generally respected were talking about it as something that was a foregone conclusion, we're going to have to do it, and also it makes sense and people should... you know, dig into the science more and understand it before they criticize it, right? So I thought, okay, maybe I'm just missing something here.
I must just not be understanding it because I'm not a scientist, right? So I started talking to both, you know, kind of pro-CCS and critics of CCS and people that were sort of middle of the road and just trying to understand the mechanics of it myself and Like it fairly quickly became clear that even at its best, most optimized version, which we've never seen, and they have been trying to do this since at least the 80s, it would at most reduce CO2 emissions by two to three percent.
which is like not nothing, but it seemed quite small for something that there was so much money and policy and attention around.
Amy, you're a journalist and you've been investigating fossil fuel companies for years.
So when was it that you first realized that the concept of net zero was being exploited by the fossil fuel industry?
Because really, like, the concept of net zero comes out of the Paris Climate Agreement, right? Like, right after that, you're hearing this thrown around a bunch, and the fossil fuel companies jump on it almost immediately.
You know, okay, we can... reduce emissions here and it balances out over there and all that stuff.
But very quickly they start to use this framing to kind of bake in the idea that we, we will over emit and it's okay because we've figured out through, through the magic of accounting and technology how to like deal with this issue.
But the, so the first time that I started kind of thinking, wait a minute, the math isn't mathing on this.
I started looking into carbon capture around 2020 because a bunch of really smart people whose opinions I generally respected were talking about it as something that was a foregone conclusion, we're going to have to do it, and also it makes sense and people should... you know, dig into the science more and understand it before they criticize it, right? So I thought, okay, maybe I'm just missing something here.
I must just not be understanding it because I'm not a scientist, right? So I started talking to both, you know, kind of pro-CCS and critics of CCS and people that were sort of middle of the road and just trying to understand the mechanics of it myself and Like it fairly quickly became clear that even at its best, most optimized version, which we've never seen, and they have been trying to do this since at least the 80s, it would at most reduce CO2 emissions by two to three percent.
which is like not nothing, but it seemed quite small for something that there was so much money and policy and attention around.
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