Carbon neutrality in Switzerland: disorders of magnitude

According to Confederation figures, Switzerland directly emits more than 40 million tonnes of CO₂ per year. It still has more than one million poorly insulated homes. Thanks to the Buildings Programme, between 2011 and 2024 emissions were able to be reduced by 27 million tonnes. It is therefore at least incongruous that the Federal Chambers are cutting this programme, even though it is the most cost-effective tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Switzerland.

This policy is all the more paradoxical since the climate and innovation law, approved by the people in June 2023, provides that “the effect of greenhouse gas emissions of human origin generated in Switzerland must be brought to zero by 2050.” It is hard to see how carbon neutrality can be achieved by reducing the most effective means of getting there.

Moreover, there will remain so-called “hard-to-avoid” emissions. They are estimated by the Federal Council at around a dozen million tonnes per year in 2050 — about half from industry, the other half from agriculture. To offset them, Switzerland will have to resort to compensation certificates (the “indulgences of the 21st century”) as well as the well-known “carbon sinks” that forests, for example, represent. 

Companies that capture CO₂ from the air today emit more carbon than they remove.

We will also have to rely on numerous technologies for capture, storage, reuse and negative emissions. Their variety is impressive and, to describe them, acronyms proliferate. But to date, the real potential of these technologies remains limited. In Europe, the ambition is to achieve, thanks to them, a reduction of between 40 and 75 million tonnes of CO₂ per year, even though the European Union emitted 3.31 billion tonnes in 2021…

An irresponsible immobilism

In Switzerland, these technologies would, according to the Federal Council’s projections, reduce emissions by only a few million tonnes in total by 2050, whereas by then hundreds of millions of tonnes will have been emitted. Not to mention that, as the daily “Le Monde” recalled in May 2025, companies that capture CO₂ from the air today emit more carbon than they remove.

To top it all off, a publication by ETH Zurich published in March 2024 indicated that the costs of these techniques will remain high and will be three times higher than initial estimates. The study predicts that in 2050, extracting one tonne of CO₂ from the atmosphere will cost between 230 and 540 dollars.

The famous Climeworks project, which has been much discussed in the media, removes CO₂ from the Earth’s atmosphere at a cost close to 1,000 francs per tonne. Yet, between 2005 and 2024, the price of CO₂ emission certificates fluctuated between 0.01 and 106 euros per tonne (it is currently between 70 and 80 francs). Such a disproportion makes a rapid generalization of such costly processes unlikely.

Needless to say, these techniques fall under the same syndrome as the desire to revive nuclear power — which would be of no use in facing the energy dilemmas to be resolved over the next twenty-five years. Cutting useful subsidies while displaying blind confidence in immature technologies are the two sides of the same immobilism, literally irresponsible.

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