Race to zero!

Hello, I'm Paul Dickinson and welcome to this special episode of Outrage and

Optimism, where we are very excited to present the second installment of our What the Hale

and mini-series by welcoming back Thomas Hale, Associate Professor in Global Public Policy at Oxford University.

Thomas joined us back in March of this year to discuss the launch of a report

taking stock, a global assessment of net zero targets. That report, Sean Aspotlight,

on the credibility of a wave of government and business net zero commitments,

and he's now back with a significant update, the launch of a publicly available net zero tracker.

But rather than explain the net zero tracker myself, let's get right to it. Here is my

conversation with Tom about this exciting new launch.

Welcome back to the podcast, Tom. Now, the net zero tracker officially launched today.

We are, it's coming out on Wednesday, excitedly. Congratulations, and what were the

main aims behind the launch of this tracker? The net zero tracker is aiming to record

not just the quantity, but also the quality of net zero targets from cities, from businesses,

from regions, and from countries, and putting it all together, and it's easy to access and

publicly available source. Tell me, why is it important that you're launching this publicly

facing net zero tracker now, especially the time when the number of net zero commitments

from businesses and governments seem to have exploded in the public arena?

So net zero has really gone from sort of this obscure scientific concept to a central

organizing principle for addressing climate change in a remarkably short period of time.

But the question we now really have is how do we make it robust? Because if we come so popular,

so quickly that it's kind of outpaced the systems and the processes we have for making sure

...