While there's a lot of nuance to this: in carbon accounting it is standard practice to account for the same emission more than once. Carbon inventories are broken out into three different scopes, the first two scopes concern fuel and electricity generation emissions, and the third scope includes everything in your value chain (both upstream and downstream). Therefore the country producing the EV battery would report on the emission in their Scope 1 and Scope 2 inventory, and the country utilising that EV battery would report it within their Scope 3 inventory.
It may seem odd to double account, but the goal of carbon accounting is not to ascribe blame to an emission (since ascribing blame is a never-ending game of finger pointing), it is to make every business/consumer responsible. The country creating the emission needs to be incentivised to decarbonise, and the country consuming that emission needs to be incentivised to decarbonise their full - including international - supply chains.
They do the same double accounting for green credits. If a country produce green energy it get accounted there. If they then sell that energy it get accounted a second time by the country who buys it. The exporter (possible a separate company from the producer) can even account it a second time, as can the consumer in the end.
Basically every time green energy has changed hand there are two new credits being created, and with a international energy market there is a lot of opportunities for energy to change ownership.
Ah - that's really interesting, didn't know this. But that means that UK should already be counting CO2 emissions of products sold there(where known), right?
Yes, this is where the *nuance* mentioned at the start of my reply comes in.
It *should* include all scopes, including upstream emissions from purchased goods and services from abroad. But in many countries their country-level carbon inventories still have huge gaps.
UK Legislation implements the GHG Protocol scope system in the UK's carbon accounting regulations that businesses must follow for reporting their emissions (e.g. SECR), and government guidance for calculating emissions all follow the scope system too (e.g. BEIS Conversion Factors guidance). So it is very disappointing if the UK's carbon accounts has got gaps (but I wouldn't be surprised).
> It may seem odd to double account, but the goal of carbon accounting is not to ascribe blame to an emission
It's definitely how it is used by activists / NGO etc tho [1].
Another strange practice is to scale the CO2 production with the price of goods. Eg: it is assumed that you produce 10x more CO2 when you buy a $100 bottle of wine than if you buy a $10 bottle of wine. This makes no sense at all from an environmental perspective, but the conclusion you can draw from this are aligned with the political views of the people producing those reports.
Sure, for example I had accounting done as part of a study which also fitted meters (which I wanted anyway) and read the data (which I would likely have freely agreed to but obviously does need formal permission) and their baseline basically go well, about 60% of your income isn't accounted for in these days so we assume you turned that money into carbon emissions at our default rate. Actually the money was just sat in a bank account, which AFAIK doesn't cause net carbon emissions.
For individuals I don't think this approach works very well, but over a population I can believe it comes out in the wash.
> Actually the money was just sat in a bank account, which AFAIK doesn't cause net carbon emissions.
That depends on your definitions. I'm not sure about U.K. reserve ratios, but in the U.S., about 90% of your bank deposit goes back out as loans that hopefully increase economic activity. The majority of that activity probably isn't carbon-neutral.
How did I miss the reserve requirement in the US going to zero in 2020? I was living overseas at the time, and I know I had more pressing things to consider, but still...
> In addition, banks in modern times have never had to wait for deposits to extend loans.
Are you referring to the discount window, the repo market, and interbank lending, or the fact that reserve requirements are typically averaged over a couple of weeks? In these cases, (as long as there's a reserve requirement), a person adding to a bank does still enable more lending, no? Or, are you saying that in modern times, even with non-zero reserve requirements, commercial banks usually operate with excess reserves, so reserves are not the limiting factor on lending?
Specifically, in my case, that bank is (mostly) NS&I, one of several banks owned by the British government.
NS&I doesn't write loans, nor does it have a big vault full of cash somewhere, instead my money is "invested" in running the country I live in. Rather than borrowing money from international money markets by writing gilts (bonds payable by the government) they borrow my money and pay me interest.
As a result, nothing changes, all the same things were going to happen anyway, just they'd have borrowed from the Chinese, or the Americans or whoever was buying gilts.
On the 1x vs. 10x point, I believe the unit quantity is derived by finding the manufacturing costs (in CO2) for a given process and then extrapolating. No one is counting the grams of CO2 of your cheeseburger. They're counting the CO2 of the whole farm.
Yeah we can do better on pricing. We're considering models based on usage (e.g. total MAUs or Flows) or on seats (total devs, PM, PMM, etc). Which would you prefer?
If you go seats. Please have an seat management+billing and view only role not count towards seats. Team members need to manage the tool’s access but don’t use the features.
MAUs make sense. Enterprise want a linear spend with volume based discounts and rollover credits.
Neither investment in EVs and repairing transmission issues live in isolation and both can be invested in at the same time. Solving one issue might also help solve the other (e.g. charging EVs can occur at non-peak times which balances energy demands, and in future EVs could be used as batteries to discharge into the grid during peak times).
but event "emissions" isn't a simple calculation
No one is claiming that it is, but there are standardised reporting practices to ensure proper coverage of emissions when published. These are the Scopes 1, 2, and 3 (which includes 12 sub-scopes), listed in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. They are the GAAP of the sustainability industry and is required by every major reporting mechanism (e.g. CDP, etc).
All the items you listed are covered within the scopes, include power generation, fuel processing (typically called well-to-tank), transmission loss, emissions embodied in purchased assets (e.g. construction emissions of a vehicle), employee commuting, waste, etc.
Depending on how you look at something, getting an electric car is a horrible thing to do. Even then, is that better or worse than charging it at night from a coal power plant?
A common claim by climate-deniers that has been widely debunked for almost every power network in the rich world (where electric cars are most common). If I remember correctly, only two countries in all of Europe were found to have lower emissions with a petrol engine than plugging into a dirty grid.
I think a lot of the woke efforts in and of themselves are short sighted, and not very well thought out at all though.
Woke? Not thought through? You wrote a long comment about carbon reporting when you clearly don't know the first thing about how carbon is reported or calculated...
That study doesn't say what you're trying to imply it does, and it's just not very good regardless:
> In this case, by keeping more cars in the hands of their original owners longer, the number of used cars on the road decreases. Accordingly, emissions from the driving of new, relatively fuel-efficient cars increase while those of used, relatively fuel-inefficient cars decrease.
That, makes no sense. They seem to believe that a years old car moving from one owner to another suddenly increases the emissions. It does not, the relative emmisions change with age, because new, more efficent cars are produced, like EVs.
But yes, making cars last longer is good. You know the best way to do that? Make them EVs.
I realise I’m just replying to a troll’s cherry picked list at this point, but come on you’re not even trying.
All of those chips and fabs all rely on ASML? Those manufacturers you list literally couldn’t make the chips they make without an EU company being the backbone of their work.
You can’t think of global scale European applications. SAP, the worlds third largest software company by revenue? Representative of the EU’s tech sector, probably not, but it goes to show your either ignorant of the wider industry in the EU or being deceiving.
> Open banking and SEPA. Are these technologies? I think they were just regulations.
Turns out regulations can be a good thing? Our banking infrastructure ‘just works’, instantly, EU wide, with low fees and technology first.
> Wake up.
People get real holiday, great purchasing power (sure, not as high as a US tech worker, but pretty darn good), healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt them, proper mental health treatment so walking down a street isn’t a gamble, great affordable education, and the pleasure of not having a mass shooting multiple times a week. But yeah, the US has some big companies. Good for you bud.
Speaking of cherry-picking. Which European fab is ASML selling to? Being able to manufacture one machine for one stage of the process doesn't make an industry. Europe has some great niche companies, but has a real problem fostering an actual ecosystem.
Europe has sleep-walked into technological irrelevance since at least the early 2000s. In 10 years or so, all there's left in European tech that's competitive is going to be aviation, and agriculture and fashion if you count them as tech.
> People get real holiday, great purchasing power (sure, not as high as a US tech worker, but pretty darn good), healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt them, proper mental health treatment so walking down a street isn’t a gamble, great affordable education, and the pleasure of not having a mass shooting multiple times a week. But yeah, the US has some big companies. Good for you bud.
US tech workers have PTO, and Europe has mass shootings as well, and war and migrant crisis on the border. FANNG's profit is not just big, they are so massive, they dwarf many European countries' GDP.
The truth is hard to swallow, but if Europe doesn't recognize just how far behind you are, you are never going to catch up, or even better, produce some industrial leaders once in a while.
Our business has an API that can be used for displaying dynamic information at point of sale (i.e. dynamic in that it cannot be cached and will need a DB call).
While we encourage our customers to try and use us asynchronously, we have a number of enterprises that don't and therefore demand incredibly fast response times with low latency. They pay us accordingly, so as a result we have geolocated databases (in our case though, we are using AWS Aurora replication).
Agreed. I work in the sustainability industry, and forestry carbon accounts for a small minority of offsets available. It also has plenty of well documented flaws so we often steer out customers clear of it.
Yet the media and every blog writer loves to talk about offsets as though the only projects available are plopping trees in the ground.
The vast majority of offsets fall into filling the funding gap for renewable energy, methane capture and burning (a fun one to explain, but results in a net reduction), biomass use, and on and on. The simple fact is offsets are one of the greatest funders of decarbonisation in low income nations.
It’s also worrying how high this post was voted considering the authors apparent lack of understanding for how the carbon certification or economics work. Examples seemingly missed out include the fact that most certification schemes require buffers for forestry carbon to cover the unknowns in this type of project, or the economics idea that if every offset was purchased it would force offsets to go up in price until they encourage carbon reduction.
I agree, it makes no sense to have them stored in the same password manager.
One of the things I like about 1Password is that we were able to switch off the built in TOTP for our whole organisation, and force all TOTP codes to go via Duo Security. Thereby forcing a separate 2FA app.
But both apps are on the same user devices, presumably? If so I can see that splitting them protects against the 1password DB being compromised but not against someone getting access to a user’s phone (which seems more likely to me).
It may seem odd to double account, but the goal of carbon accounting is not to ascribe blame to an emission (since ascribing blame is a never-ending game of finger pointing), it is to make every business/consumer responsible. The country creating the emission needs to be incentivised to decarbonise, and the country consuming that emission needs to be incentivised to decarbonise their full - including international - supply chains.