I spent Tuesday morning at Ovation with two tabs open. One was the Glasgow coverage. The other was a client deck titled Sustainability Narrative, Draft 6, and the headline slide read Net Zero by 2050.
So I did math on a napkin, which is what I do when I am avoiding the actual work. The chief executive who will sign that slide is fifty-eight. In 2050 he is eighty-seven. The marketing lead who commissioned it is forty-four, and by then she has been retired for over a decade. The agency that built the deck will have rebranded twice and probably been acquired once.
Nobody in the room where that promise gets made will be in any room in 2050.
A commitment that outlives every person who made it is not a commitment, it is a press release with a very long fuse.
Here is the part that gets lost in the coverage this week. The problem is not that 2050 is far away. Long horizons are how power grids and rail lines and forests get built. The problem is that almost none of these pledges carry anything due before the person announcing it collects a pension.
Watch what happens in Glasgow when a reporter asks for the 2025 number. There is a pause. There is a reframe about ambition. There is a line about scope three emissions being complicated, which is genuinely true, and which is also the single most convenient sentence in corporate climate communication.
So I have started handing clients three questions instead of a target. One, what changes this fiscal year. Two, whose bonus shrinks if it does not. Three, where does a customer see the number without having to go looking for it.
Most decks die on question one. The good ones do not.
Patagonia has spent years publishing awkward figures, including the ones that make the company look bad, which is the entire reason anyone believes the flattering ones. Oatly put a carbon number on the side of the carton, where a shopper can read it in the two seconds she actually spends deciding between two milks. Neither of those is a promise about 2050. Both are checkable on a Tuesday.
The 2050 pledge has one advantage over both. It cannot be graded.
Nobody in the room where that promise gets made will be in any room in 2050.
I sent the client a note suggesting we cut the headline and lead with what happens by 2024. I expect to lose. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms enough times to know that the far date always tests better.
Truffles slept on the printed deck all evening, which was the most useful edit it received. Barnaby was indifferent. They operate on a planning horizon of roughly four hours and they hit every target they set.