Christian Aid Report on Carbon Footprints Includes Indirect Business Impacts...discuss.

Christian Aid's recently released report has recieved some slack because it is seen as condoning--or leading to--double counting. I believe that these acusations are due to a misunderstanding of the report and unfortunately lead people to miss some interesting opportunities...

(Carbonara--And My Response)

As mentioned below by Jon yesterday, British charity, Christian Aid, has published a report saying that many British companies have not measured all their carbon emissions.

It's comments on consistancy where to my mind more important, talk of messy data and comparion between companies being impossible was most worrying. A standard carbon auditing procedure seems to be a good idea.

Christian Aid believe companies should measure, in addition to their direct emissions, also their indirect emissions, for example, those which arise from activities by companies upstream in their supply chain, or downstream, for example, by customer activities.

I think that there is some merrit to this. I find it disengenuos for the likes of Merril Lynch, to be talking about carbon neutrality in it's own running and then funding more than a dozen coal plants in Texas. I think that this information is vital, it could perhaps be seperate from there own corporate emissions when it is presented but reference to it should be made.

While this method would give a picture of the wide emissions impact of a single activity, such as operating a supermarket, this approach is not sensible from an economy-wide perspective.

I don't for a second think that they would disagree with you on this, certainly keeping data on direct and indirect emissions seperate for different purposes would make sense.

Counting indirect emissions would mean double- or multiple- counting lots of emissions, since the emissions of each company in a supply chain would be counted by every other company in that same chain. This makes no sense from public policy perspective.

Perhaps futher to my statement above; double counting occurs when you are calculating a national inventory by addition so in that case it makes no sense, but for a customer to have access to the total for a given company makes absoloute sense. Perhaps they would rather invest with a bank that isn't funding coal, they could be a powerful force if they had this information.

In addition, an organization can only reduce its own emissions, not those of their business partners. In particular, it makes no sense to blame a supermarket such as Tesco for the emissions generated by their customers driving to buy groceries, since Tesco has no control over their customers.

The first point here is plain wrong, suppliers react to...well demand, if there is demand from customers for a low contribution to supply chain carbon intensity then they will work to provide this sort of product! This is how wallmart plans to make it's greatest impact, through its many thousands of suppliers. The second part is also not true although working on customer carbon emissions is more radical it can be achieved by making stores closer to where people live or improving public transport...if they had a financial nmotive they might even put on transport to reduce emissions from cars!

Surely our common goal should be to reduce carbon emissions through a well-designed and well-operating cap-and-trade system.

Absoloutely, no one disagrees on this.

Accusing companies of not measuring emissions outside their own direct control may create a lot of publicity, but it does nothing to promote this goal.

I have tried to argue this is not the case, but if you still disagree i would be interested in hearing your argument.

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