Carbon emission reporting is still stuck in mediaeval thinking – we urgently need to start using the same yardstick.
This article explains why our current system of competing standards needs ditching, and what should replace it.
A Tale of Two Rulers: Kings and Yards
We all need to measure things.
If I sell you a yard of cloth, you want to get a yard of cloth. We expect to haggle over the price, not the length.
In mediaeval times, a ‘yard’ could be the circumference of the King’s chest or waist, or the stretch of his arm. Measurement by monarch.
‘Ruler rulers’ worked as a rule of thumb (the width of the King’s thumb being an inch). But a child could spot their flaws when deployed over greater time and space.
- Barrel-chested king citizens trading with svelte-king citizens
- Portly king citizen builders using materials from snake-hipped king citizen suppliers
- Selling short-arm king inventories when long-armed Princes ascend the throne
- Engineers from different regimes collaborating on a structure
Give unscrupulous traders an inch, and they can claim their king has mile-wide thumbs.
If the problem was obvious, so was the solution.
To stop bickering over how long, heavy, or capacious things were, use standard metrics. Reliable, replicable, consistent standards allow us to flourish.
We can build, trade – and measure increases and reductions – without a monarch on standby.
Metre Made
A brief history of the official definition of the metre:
- 1799: a metal bar in a Paris vault
- 1960: a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86
- 1983: the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second
In this virtuous cycle, better science means better standards, which lead to greater innovation. A shared understanding of how to measure things benefits us all.
Nobody pays to use the definition of a metre, litre or kilogram. They are widely adopted because they are ‘AFOT’:
- Accurate: as precise as contemporary science permits
- Free: cost nothing to use
- Open: accessible to all
- Transparent: anyone can examine and critique how they’re calculated
We don’t pay to use AFOT standards, we pay experts to use them to advance our wellbeing.
Carbon Footprint Shoe Sizes
We’re currently using Kings to measure carbon.
Not as a base unit – the standard way of measuring atmospheric carbon is derived from an SI unit – ‘metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent reduced or sequestered’. ‘CO2e’ is not (yet) as familiar a unit as a ‘metre’, ‘litre’ or ‘gramme’, but it too has a precise, objective definition.
The problem is that there are hundreds of competing carbon accounting standards. They all use tonnes of CO2e as their nominal output, but all have different ways of producing that number.
In this sense, we’re back to mediaeval times, except the disparity is far greater than between fat and thin kings.
Qatar built 10 air-conditioned concrete stadia to stage the 2022 World Cup. Three million fans flew in, who’d otherwise have stayed at home. Qatar claimed it was the ‘first carbon neutral World Cup’. The carbon accountants awarding this green badge were owned by Qatar’s ruling family.
Until, that is, a Swiss court ruled otherwise, playing the child in this Big Oil version of the Sheik’s New Clothes.
Yet businesses everywhere are still playing the same greenwashing game. Pay someone to make you look good, and they’ll contrive some ludicrous measures to come up with the ‘right’ answer.
This is PR, not science. It’s time to move carbon reporting standards from greenwash into black-and-white.
Carbon reduction is the most urgent task of our species’ 300,000-year history. We must stop allowing hundreds of competing standards to measure it.
Greenwashing businesses favour the status quo because choosing special rulers is cheaper than reducing carbon.
Pay for the right ruler, and the obese can claim to be twig-like. Your PR team can claim you stand 10 feet tall and weigh nothing. ‘Carbon neutral’ badges are their Emperor’s New Clothes.
But now, Swiss courts – and others – are starting to point and laugh at the most shamelessly naked claims. Our mockery will soon turn towards businesses using greenwashed fig leaves to hide their carbon shame.
Few of us are blameless. We’ve grown up taking carbon for granted. We’d rather not acknowledge fossil fuels are not an infinite resource. We’d prefer to keep imagining that burning them incurs no environmental cost.
Our reluctance to quantify that cost is understandable, if irrational.
But a more sceptical crowd is no longer celebrating the Emperor’s New Clothes. Tailors still expect payment for the imaginary rulers they use to cut their cloth. Businesses that don’t insist on something better risk public mockery, exposed as fools.
Smart businesses are scrambling to ditch the greenwash merchants using Ruler rulers.
What they want is carbon consultants who use a universal carbon reporting standard.
A Bolt from Brussels – the CSRD
In January 2023, a particularly loud and authoritative voice came from the crowd. From Brussels.
The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) became law, like many similar initiatives elsewhere. The CSRD yanked carbon reporting from mediaeval Unruliness into the modern standard unit era.
The EU’s market power – and because the CSRD applies to any business trading with it – makes it landmark legislation.
It’s a first effort, a work in progress that acknowledges its imperfections. Still, it clearly signals an irreversible direction of travel. Alert businesses rapidly adapt to such signals, rather than resist them.
This EU directive is not so much game-changing, as game-ending, as it:
- closes greenwashing’s most egregious loopholes
- lays out a road map and broad timeline for compliance
- sets a tariff of punishments for non-compliance
The CSRD tolls the death knell for carbon reporting’s Age of Voluntary. It rings in the long-overdue Age of Compliance.
The Boss’s Dilemma
How will business leaders respond when they see the executive summary of the CSRD? It will be some version of :
Action Required: businesses can no longer treat carbon reporting as a greenwashing opportunity
- Many bosses will keep lobbying to retard or dilute carbon legislation. They may even believe climate problem will ‘fix itself’ and can be ignored until it goes away.
- Timid bosses will keep their heads down in the peloton, waiting for leaders to make their move.
- Active leaders will focus on future-proofing their businesses.
This last category will snatch the carbon reporting portfolio from their PR team. And then carefully place it in the hands of their Compliance team.
Their Compliance team will give them the bad news. The CSRD specifies many things, but not approved consultants or compliant reporting standards.
The CSRD lays out the carbon reporting outcomes it wants, but doesn’t specify the means.
It describes the Emperor’s new dress code, but doesn’t tell businesses which ruler they should use to produce them.
One Ruler To Rule Them All
There’s a race on to define carbon reporting’s new standard.
All have their eyes on the same prize. For the same reason we abandoned using kings’ bodies, only one standard can prevail.
It’s a crowded field. Like many races, many entrants are non-starters, no-hopers, or hobbled.
New entrants are joining current players. Many are venture capital-funded AI plays, ready to disrupt the carbon reporting industry. Already worth a trillion dollars, the industry can only grow bigger as climate change catches up with us.
The established standards honk their legacy brand appeal, though their track record is in unrelated sectors.
The new guard hope to tech their way to dominance. They package carbon reporting compliance with other services, honking the latest hot tech. Unfortunately, AI is great for fundraising, but not much use for Scope 3 reporting.
What their business models have in common is they still expect to charge to use their standards. They still want to sell the rulers, as well as cut the clothes. They’re stuck in mediaeval thinking.
Logic, history, common sense and any sense of hope for humanity’s future suggest the same thing – any attempt to monetise a universal carbon reporting standard must fail. No one pays to use metres, litres, kilograms or Centigrade.
The new non-Ruler ruler must be ‘AFOT’:
- Accurate: measure an enterprise’s emissions as precisely as science and practicality permit
- Free: businesses’ money should go to expert consultants who use the rulers to reduce emissions, not on rulers that give them a flattering number.
- Open: available and useful for all scales and scopes of enterprises. It must work for SMEs like farmers and plumbers, and multinationals.
- Transparent: verifiable enough to be useful, but flexible enough to be refined as technology advances. Carbon measuring is an imperfect, but rapidly-improving science. Transparency is the only way to keep abreast.
To manage something, we must first agree how to measure it.
To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we need to start treating carbon like we treat money.
Reporting carbon footprints needs to be as routine, and regulated, as submitting financial statements. It must use agreed standards, be audited, and available for public scrutiny.
Necessary but not sufficient
Rulers only measure. They are a means, not an end. Accurate, consistent, universal reporting is only useful as a tool to reduce emissions.
After all, if all the world’s businesses, individuals, organisations and nations accurately measured their entire carbon footprints down to the last gramme, no carbon would be reduced. We’d merely be documenting our civilisational collapse more accurately. Hi-precision instruments can fly a modern airplane into a mountain.
But significant carbon reduction is vanishingly unlikely without a common ruler.
This standard must be as easy to use as a metal bar lying in a Paris vault. It must be as open to improvement as the redefinition of a ‘second’ using breakthrough technology to measure a caesium atom’s vibrations.
Once a new standard is established and universally adopted, we can stop bickering about rulers, and start building a sustainable future.
The technicalities of carbon accounting are already complex. They’ll become more complicated as we better understand our impact on our planet.
But this doesn’t mean the standard that governs them must be complex. The UN’s Sustainability Development Goals can be summarized in 17 icons.
See Through Carbon has narrowed its standard down to 10 principles.
- Auditable
- Protect Commercial Sensitivities
- Carbon Reduction Plan
- Open Database
- Scope 3
- Transparent Methodology
- Public by default
- Insetting Only
- Advice
- Free to Use
These principles contain detailed nuance and precise definitions, which will be refined and improved as events, reality, and science shifts. New principles may be added in response to new possibilities, or successful attempts to game the system.
Being open and transparent permits such flexibility, agility and responsiveness. It also guarantees future as well as current accuracy. Without being free to use, no standard can expect to be universal.
Accurate, Free, Open and Transparent carbon reporting standards are the urgently necessary next step to rapid decarbonisation of our economy.
It’s time to drag ourselves from mediaeval practices, and enter an Age of Carbon Enlightenment.
For details on See Through Carbon’s Accurate, Free, Open and Transparent standard, and its series of Pilots, visit www.seethroughcarbon.org