Carbon Accounting and Computing
- Author: Michelle Thorne
- Full Title: Carbon Accounting and Computing
- Category: articles
- URL: https://branch.climateaction.tech/issues/issue-5/carbon-accounting-and-computing/
Highlights
New highlights added August 7, 2023 at 9:20 AM
- Corporate climate action generally borrows its frameworks from the field of accounting, calculating inventories of carbon in, and carbon out, to get to carbon neutral or ‘Net Zero.’ This usefully quantifies a business’ responsibility and provides metrics to assess the credibility of corporate progress on carbon goals. Yet, accounting also presumes that carbon is a fungible commodity, with offsets anywhere around the world are taken as equivalent and tradable. While the location of emissions doesn’t matter to the greenhouse gas effect, this approach has opened the door to a range of trading and offsetting schemes with high potential for fraud. Carbon numbers can be double counted, inflated, or otherwise cooked. (View Highlight)
- Offsetting can further perpetuate colonial patterns of resource control, and a single-minded focus on carbon can undermine issues like energy equity, biodiversity, water access, and local self-determination. What’s more, dubious offsets can distract from more credible strategies for addressing climate change, such as verified removals or operational reductions against industry-specific baselines. As a result, even those who work to become carbon neutral or net zero can end up causing lasting harms. (View Highlight)
- Because of increasing regulations and new state and corporate climate commitments, carbon data is increasingly lucrative. This can incentivize investment in research and new monitoring tools, but it can also incentivize unregulated markets for datasets and environmental dashboards which may or may not actually lead to reduced emissions. (View Highlight)
- Carbon accounting relies out of necessity on a hodgepodge of sources, raising concerns about methodology and certainty. Trust, accountability, and iterative development are necessary to overcome these limitations, but they can be hard to secure in the context of proprietary software, cloud platforms, and opaque machine learning models. Public standards and nonprofit or open-source development can provide useful alternatives. Accounting systems can and should also be designed with long term maintenance, accessibility, sovereignty, and surveillance concerns in mind, and with an eye to the climate impacts of the digital accounting systems themselves. (View Highlight)