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 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.

To effectively manage greenhouse gas emissions, we have to do more than just count some of our emissions, which is more or less what we do now. 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.

While very few people actually know their carbon footprint, most would choose to reduce their carbon footprints 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. They’re even harder to measure accurately. 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.”
Why is carbon accounting so complicated?

Say you want to know your 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 the size of the footprint effectively depends on where we start counting, or if we bother to count at all.

While the picture above may seem bleak, carbon accounting 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, stay tuned for the next post in this series: Top 5 reasons to learn to count carbon: Reason #2 Someone’s Everyone’s gotta do it, but few know how.