CNN Business  — 

Last month, Polestar, an electric vehicle maker that was spun off from Volvo, announced it will create a completely carbon neutral car, the Polestar 0, by 2030.

The brand, which is based in Sweden, said it will not rely at all on carbon offsets — something virtually every other automaker has said they will use to reach their own carbon-neutral goals — but rather it will actually work to reduce the carbon emissions created by the production of its car to zero.

“Scientists tell us it’s not sustainable to rely on carbon offsetting in order to reach carbon neutrality,” said Fredrika Klarén, head of sustainability at Polestar. “So, we will focus on eliminating emissions.”

That’s a tough goal to reach, however. Most passenger vehicles today contribute a lot to global warming just by being driven. The solution for that is relatively straightforward. First, make all vehicles electric and then make sure you charge them up on electricity that’s created by using renewable energy, such as wind, solar or hydroelectric power.

Those steps alone would eliminate up to 80% of the carbon dioxide created by today’s internal combustion-powered vehicles, said Eric Hannon, an industry consultant with McKinsey & Co.

But that still leaves the smaller — but still significant — amount of CO2 produced while vehicles are being made, which is what Polestar hopes to solve. A number of other major automakers, including Volkswagen (VLKAF) and General Motors (GM), have vowed to become “carbon neutral” in how they manufacture cars, too.

Major automakers have been relying on carbon offsets to help gain some ground on their carbon neutrality goals. Carbon offsets usually involve paying for carbon-consuming trees to be planted in numbers that will make up for the carbon a company emits into the atmosphere. It’s helpful, but the idea has some flaws.

For one thing, trees generally consume carbon dioxide at a much slower rate than smokestacks emit it, said Aning Chen, an environmental researcher at Colorado State University who has studied the carbon consumption of trees and forests. Also, long established ecosystems, including the soil, are much more efficient at breaking down CO2 than newly planted tree farms, he said, so emphasis should be placed on preserving existing forests.

Instead, every effort must be made to simply not emit more carbon, said Chen.

Katia Prassoloff, a spokesperson for ReforestAction, a group that provides carbon offsets, agrees. As she noted, offsets pay for preserving existing forests and creating new ones — which are important steps — but it should always be seen as a last line of defense against global warming.

The challenge

But getting down to, literally, zero carbon emissions will be very difficult. Even Polestar’s Klarén admits she doesn’t know all the details of how it will be done yet.

All of the materials and parts that make up the car will need to be produced in a carbon-neutral way. It will require the cooperation of complex networks of suppliers and suppliers to suppliers and so on.

To start, Polestar has partnered with a company called Circulor to track the carbon emissions of various parts that go into the car rather than relying on general industry estimates, the company said. Circulor will measure carbon emissions produced by parts manufacturers and by the power suppliers to those manufacturers.

Circulor will then calculate how much carbon each individual part accounts for, by itself, and use those figures to work out the total emissions impact of an individual car. The final figure will include the carbon emissions caused by the assembly of the car and by the manufacturing of all the parts that go into the car.

One of the most important next steps will be to start relying on renewable sources for the electricity that powers many manufacturing processes, said McKinsey’s Hannon. That alone would make a huge difference.

“There’s a very large deviation in emissions performance from different suppliers based on the type of extraction in the mine, based on the local grid that they use for electricity generation, based on the type of fuel for heating in the plants,” Hannon said.

Having a clean electricity source will become a major competitive advantage for automotive suppliers that can meet these goals as automakers work to trim carbon emissions, he said. That could be an economic boost for countries, like Norway, that have cleaner energy grids because they would be more attractive partners for the auto suppliers.

There are a number of other steps automakers can take that don’t cost any money and, in some cases, can even save money, said Hannon. For example, recycled aluminum, which costs less than new, freshly extracted aluminum, requires less energy to produce. That’s one easy and cheap way automakers can reduce their energy usage and carbon emissions. The same can be true for plastics, he said.

In these ways, along with switching to renewable energy sources, automakers could reduce carbon emissions by two-thirds by 2030 without increasing costs, according to a McKinsey report Hannon co-authored.

This does presume some reasonably foreseeable technological advancements, though, Hannon said. For instance, it presumes more use of hydrogen as a fuel for heat-intensive processes. That requires greater availability of hydrogen than exists today.

Taking carbon out

Additionally, carbon capture, literally removing carbon dioxide from industrial emissions and storing or using it, is another technology that could help, but it’s still in the relatively early stages, said Ed Crooks, an industry analyst with Wood Mackenzie. In fact, carbon capture will almost certainly be necessary, on a global scale, to have any real hope of meeting overall Paris Climate Accord goals, he said. That’s in addition to taking other serious steps, like shifting more vehicles to electric, he said.

That means carbon capture must be viable, not just technologically but economically, he said. If valuable uses can be found for the carbon trapped from industrial emissions, then carbon capture could really take off.

“If you’re going to address climate change it has to be made to work,” Crooks said.

Polestar’s Klaren agrees. She hopes carbon taken from the air and from emissions can be used to make parts for Polestar cars in the future. Instead of being emitted into the atmosphere, then, the carbon will become part of the cars themselves.