GHG’s of mp3’s and the Carbon Content of Coca-Cola
While very few people actually know their carbon footprint, most could take to reduce emissions from products they buy if they knew the impact of their choices. In the same way millions of Americans choose diet soda instead of regular because it has 0 calories, many might choose a can of diet coke over a bottle of Coke Zero, because it has a lower carbon footprint. Or, those still living in the 90’s might finally decide to switch to music downloads because the carbon footprint is lower than buying CDs.
Carbon footprint-based decisions are impossible without carbon accounting, and such transparency is not an easy feat. Carbon footprints are hard to measure. Also companies measuring their emissions often overlook large parts of their supply chain. A recent study from Carnegie Mellon University, profiled in this blog post from sustainablelifemedia.com, found that “two-thirds of U.S. industries overlook 75% of their total greenhouse gas emissions using current calculation methods.”
What if you want to know your own carbon footprint? You would probably count the gas you pump in your car because you own the car and you burn the gas inside it. You would also probably count the electricity you purchase because you use it to light your house and cook your food. I have 2 different carbon calculators on my iPhone, and they both only measure transportation and electricity, because after that the math gets tricky. The sandwich you eat, the spam in your inbox, and even your toilet paper all have hefty carbon footprints, but so far there has not been an easy way to count those impacts, so we don’t. Thus, the size of a carbon footprint effectively depends on what data we count, at what point we start counting, or if we bother to count at all.
How counting carbon is like counting calories
Why does carbon accounting matter so much?
As this article from Wired explains, having reliable data about the environmental impact of our choices so allows us make better ones, in the same way that the nutrition information on food labels helps us to make better decisions about what we eat. Think of it like a diet: if you want to lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you eat. This means eating fewer calories by dieting, and burning more by exercising. Just like cutting calories to lose weight, to mitigate the worst effects of climate change we will need to cut back on our emissions, as well as sequester the ones that are already in the atmosphere. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, imagine if you were dieting but had no way of knowing how many calories you’d eaten on any given day. If there was no labeling on our food, unless you knew a lot about nutrition, you would never really know if you were eating too many calories until you gained weight. In this same way, if we’re not calculating our emissions, we do not know how much carbon is being emitted into the atmosphere until it is already affecting our climate. Unlike your diet–which may have profound effects on your health–our ability to stop climate change will have profound effects on every living thing in the world.
Greenhouse Gas Accounting and Managment: Challenges and Opportunities
Why is carbon accounting so complicated?
To effectively manage greenhouse gas emissions, we have to do more than just count some of our emissions. We have to create accurate, comprehensive and transparent inventories that account for all the carbon in our economy. Then we have to make this information available and as easily accessible as nutrition information is on food. That means we need lots of people counting lots of emissions, and the big accounting firms are starting to catch on. Financial accounting and carbon accounting are similar in the sense that like financial accounting, the protocols and standards used to count emissions matter a lot. That’s because of we live in a global economy, and companies that operate internationally need to be held to a single standard. A ton of carbon in china has to mean the same thing as a ton in the U.S., or we can never enforce any worldwide climate agreement, should we ever manage to make one.
The carbon accounting industry has come a long way in the past few years. We still have a long way to go, but there are signs of hope. Outside of New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where some 510,000 people see it daily, Deutsche Bank has installed a 67-by-32-foot electronic billboard monitoring the real-time, cumulative pollution humans are emitting into atmosphere. In addition, more than 600 universities have signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, which requires members to report their emissions (Not to brag, but the University of Florida–my alma mater, was one of the first to sign). Outside of academia, investors are starting to demandthat public companies they disclose their footprints, and the Carbon Disclosure Project has obtained such information from more than 3,700 corporations across the globe. And, although most of the news you hear about U.S. regulation of emissions is about our likely doomed cap-and-trade legislation, the EPA has been regulating emissions on their own with relatively little political interference. The new Mandatory GHG Reporting Rule will require any entity that emits more than 100,000 tons to report their emissions to the government. This regulation alone will cover around 85% of our nation’s economy, meaning that companies from all sectors of the economy will be legally required to count their emissions. These initiatives and countless others will ensure that carbon accounting will continue to be a bigger part of our lives, but there is no reason you can’t help speed things along. Go ahead and count–really count–your household’s carbon footprint. Think about what’s missing, and help the cause by joining others in demanding full disclosure from companies. And, if you need a career, try becoming a carbon accountant. If you’re not convinced, check out the post: Top 5 reasons to learn to count carbon: Reason #2 Someone’s Everyone’s gotta do it, but few know how.
Why you should learn to count carbon: Reason #2
Why you should learn to count carbon (Reason #2): Someone’s Everyone’s gotta do it, but no one can
This is the third in a sporadic series of posts on carbon accounting. The last two posts (Intro, and Reason #1: Someone’s gotta do it) were a buzz-kill, and according to this article from June’s Seed Magazine: “extensive polling and focus-group sessions conducted over the last several years…indicate that words like ‘global warming,’ ‘cap and trade,’ and ‘carbon dioxide’ turn people off.” So, following a the advice of people with PhD’s, if I ever talk about GHG’s or any other topic that Al Gore made a movie about I say things like “our deteriorating atmosphere” and “pollution reduction refund,” and “moving away from the dirty fuels of the past.”
Since the above is going to be hard to do with a straight face, I’ll try instead to focus on the opportunities that exist in the emerging carbon accounting errr pollution reduction opportunity assessment industry.
Before I adopt my newfound positive attitude, here’s a few more disturbing interesting statistic from the 2009 GHG and Climate Change Workforce Needs Assessment Survey [PDF], publised by the GHG Management Institute and Sequence Staffing. [REMEMBER: In my last post, I mentioned that of the 800 GHG and Climate Change experts that responded to this survey, 98.4% believe measuring and accounting of greenhouse gas emissions is critical or very critical to the successful management of global climate change.] These experts were also surveyed on the state of the GHG/Climate workforce, and the results are both kind of scary or kind of exciting, depending on how you look at it. Below are some excerpts from the survey
“Left unchecked this shortage will only become exacerbated as efforts are more defined and international programs emerge and expand. Essentially, we are only at the very first steps of the vast staircase of GHG programs and initiatives that will need trained and professionalized staff throughout the world.
:
“This shortage of qualified greenhouse gas staff and professional experts could have a profound effect on accounting and measuring practices well into the next two decades. This shortage could occur at a critical moment for the emerging industry and seriously impede efforts to successfully address climate change. Failure to meet this challenge will threaten the quality and legitimacy of GHG accounting, the greater welfare of the international community through potentially devastating impacts of climate change, and the future of the professionals who practice within this field.”
In plain English: the experts don’t think there are enough experts. This might translate into high pay for those who can do this stuff, but it doesn’t bode well for our chances of establishing a healthy low-carbon economy unless we address this shortage.
How is this good news? If you’re one of the millions of my unemployed college classmates, 
this shortage means that you can hold off on suing your alma-mater and get a job in the GHG/Climate change market instead. Who better to fill all of these vacant jobs than the youngest eligible workers? We will feel the negative effects of climate change more than all of those middle-aged white men that are currently filling most GHG jobs. Since my generation has the most to lose, and it seems the most to gain, we are the perfect candidates for these unfilled jobs. Added bonus: maybe people will stop talking smack about us Gen-Yers not “walking the walk”, and rather than all that carbon money going to tax-evading baby-boomers, it can go to the banks that gave us our student loans.
Five reasons to learn to count carbon: Reason #1: Someone’s gotta do it
Below is the first in a series of five posts on why it’s a good move to learn carbon accounting, which I introduced in this post.
Reason #1: Someone’s gotta do it.
There is a new industry developing around counting carbon, with no end to the growth in sight. Continued growth is expected to reach $3.5 billion by 2010, up from $250 million last year, according to some analysts. Why the excitement? More than 700 key professionals, scientists,and organizational leaders that work in this emerging industry responded to the 2009 GHG and Climate Change Workforce Needs Assessment Survey [PDF]. Though they came from public, private and non-profit sectors from every continent and nearly every major nation on the globe, 98.4% of them believe measuring and accounting of greenhouse gas emissions is critical or very critical to the successful management of global climate change. If nearly 100% of nearly 800 people from so many different sectors and countries actually agree on something, you better believe they’re right.
Why you should learn to count carbon: Musings from a soon to be college grad.
- Why you should learn to count carbon: Musings from a soon to be college grad.
I am graduating from the University of Florida with a degree in economics next week, and lately I’ve been reflecting on how my college experience has prepared me for the “real world”. While I took some pretty interesting classes, I learned most of the important things outside of class (Note to impressionable students and concerned parents: This does not mean you shouldn’t go to college, and I recommend going to class most of the time. College is great, but the actual classes are just one part of the experience. It’s hard to get life-skills in a classroom). All of my internship and job experiences, the parties I attended, the friends that I made and leadership roles I had are experiences that will stay with me for the rest of my life; they gave me the people skills and career skills that will help way more than if I only had a degree.
Learning carbon accounting was a major factor in setting me on my current career path, and getting into it was more or less an fortunate accident. I say “fortunate” because I am one of the only students at the University of Florida (out of 50,000 or so) who knows how to complete a greenhouse gas inventory, which shows how rare a skill it is for a college student to have. This does not mean carbon accounting is hard. The main reason for this is the fact that very few schools actually teach carbon accounting, and those that do have not done so for long. More about that below.
I got to learn carbon accounting thanks to a few great programs and organizations at UF and around the world. These include: NWF’s Campus Ecology Program, the Global Change Education Program, UF’s Office of Sustainability Internships, UF’s University Scholars Program, oikos Winterschool and the EIA’s Internship Program. This may seem like a lot, but keep in mind that most of these opportunities were awarded to me because of those I had previously. So, getting your first internship or extracurricular experience will make getting the 2nd much easier, and it only improves from there. Please feel free to contact me for any advice on getting an internship in the climate change industry.
co2U: Empowering the next generation of greenhouse gas experts and climate change leaders
You should learn to count carbon. This is because I believe that climate change is one of the biggest challenges our generation will face, and I want to do everything I can to ensure that we can to stop its worst effects. I cannot do that alone (luckily, I wont have to). While there are a lot of people out there who are working very hard to stop this crisis, there’s nowhere near enough. I see this especially in my own peers, many of whom are having trouble finding work. This is a problem that I am working to solve by starting a training program to teach greenhouse gas accounting and management to students and professionals alike.
I don’t think you should learn carbon accounting because I started a business that trains others on the topic (although I hope you decide to go with my company for your training). I think you should learn it because carbon accounting is an emerging industry that is already a “big business”. Learning this much sought-after skill can help save the world and your own career as we work together to battle climate change.
Coming as soon as I finish packing my apartment: The top 5 reasons you should learn to count carbon. Stay tuned!
Campus Climate Solutions is now on WordPress!
We have switched from a blogger account to a wordpress blog, hoping to eventually make this our main site (as soon as I can figure out technology). We will have integrated info from all of our social media and announcements from CCS up soon, so stay tuned!
-Alison
Campus Climate Solutions wins UF Bright Idea Award
The UF Office of Sustainability celebrated the inaugural Sustainable Solutions Awards. These awards, announced Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at our Earth Day Celebration, recognized those individuals, departments and organizations that have made significant contributions toward advancing sustainability at the University of Florida.
Campus Climate Solutions received the “Bright Idea” Student Award, given for the best new idea for advancing sustainability on UF’s campus.
Congratulations to all of the other award winners, and thanks to the UF Office of Sustainability for the award, and for their continued support without which this idea would not have been possible. Go Gators!
Campus Climate Solutions Begins Training a New Generation of Climate Change Leaders
CCS’s first course: An Introduction to Greenhouse Gas Accounting and Management began March 31st. The class will meet every Tuesday from 12-2PM at SFC’s Center for Innovation and Economic Development in downtown Gainesville.
Campus Climate Solutions looks forward to teaching its first class of soon-to-be GHG Accountants and Managers!
Click here to see the course syllabus and schedule.
If you are interested in attending one or more classes, but were unable to sign up for the course in it’s entirety, please call Alison: (321)298-0059
