Why avoided or imaginary emissions are the future of carbon accounting
Why avoided or imaginary emissions are the future of carbon accounting
Scope 4 emissions help me justify my flight to New Zealand and compensate for its carbon footprint.
I apologize for my posts not showing up at the usual times; I got back from Australia and New Zealand with a crushing jet lag that I still haven’t recovered from, with a cold thrown in as well. I hope to be back to my usual programming shortly.
Everyone is talking about “Scope 4” and “avoided emissions” these days. Joel Mackower of Trellis (formery GreenBiz, it is sad that everyone is running from “green”) defines them:
In simple terms, Scope 4 refers to greenhouse gases never emitted due to a product’s cleaner production or attributes. Or, more precisely, “the difference in total lifecycle GHG emissions between a company’s product and some alternative product that provides an equivalent function,” according to the World Resources Institute. “Product,” in this case, includes both goods and services.
Arbor consultants describes how you count them:
“The calculation of avoided emissions involves comparing the emissions that would have been produced under a 'business as usual' scenario with the emissions that are actually produced after implementing sustainable practices or technologies. This difference represents the amount of emissions that have been avoided.”
I have called them imaginary emissions, and wrote earlier, “this is like me going on a diet to lose weight and eating a tofu dinner instead of a hamburger, and then crediting myself with the calories saved by not eating a hamburger. Who does that?”
It turns out that a lot of people are doing this. Mackower thinks this could be a big problem.
“Scope 4 is rife with potential for companies to misstate the benefits they engender. In the absence of credible frameworks or guidelines, it is likely that many companies will report information that’s inaccurate, misleading or simply debatable.”
But where I was a total skeptic about imaginary/ avoided/ Scope 4 emissions, I am seriously reconsidering and warming up to them, especially after my recent trip to New Zealand and Australia. I emitted 5.8 tonnes of CO2 in the process, when my carbon budget for living a 1.5 degree lifestyle is only 2.5 tonnes per year. But through the magic of avoided emissions, I can make that all disappear, with imaginary hamburgers!
Lets do the math.
An average hamburger has a carbon fooprint of 3.3 kg of CO2 equivalent emissions.
Divided into 5.8 tonnes, the round trip represents 1757 hamburgers.
The average American eats 154 hamburgers a year (over three per week!)
So dividing 1757 burgers by 154, it means that if I promise to avoid eating hamburgers for the next 11.4 years, I will have avoided all the emissions from my trip to New Zealand.
Does this make any sense? Mackower worries that Scope 4 and avoided emissions risk becomign “yet another sustainability term that is ill-defined — and, ultimately, misused, overused and abused.” But me not eating a hamburger definitely reduces my carbon emissions, what’s wrong with this picture? If I had known about this when I wrote my book, Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle, it would have been so much easier had I got to count every avoided car trip where I biked instead, and all the imaginary red meat I didn’t eat.
Avoided emissions have been used by some architects to classify their buildings “carbon positive” after they redesign the imaginary concrete structure and make it mass timber. Others, like the Populus Hotel in Denver are using the undefined term “carbon positive” after planting trees as offsets, which a University of Colorado Environmental Studies professor tells the Guardian is “like eating KFC every day, then paying someone in Florida to eat vegetables.”
But planting trees is hard and expensive, and somebody has to make sure they don’t burn. Calculating avoided or imaginary emissions is so much easier! Now I don’t have to feel guilty about my flight to Portugal to speak at the Passivhaus conference next month; 1800 kg of carbon divided by 3.3 is only 43 hamburgers, or an additional few months, taking me to 11.8 years without a burger. Easy!
Scope 4 and imaginary emissions are absolutely the future of carbon accounting, it works for everything!
I didn't fly to NZ or Australia, so I can eat 1757 hamburgers. But I don't eat meat, or fly. So please send me a pony. And a cookie.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but the hamburger example seems to be a carbon offset, not scope 4 emissions unless you went there to attend a beef reduction conference… Seemingly a better example would be if your New Zealand trip inspired others to reduce their carbon emissions that would not have happened without the trip.
I’ve been struggling with this in a project of mine, a car-free infill multifamily development focused on sustainable & attainable workforce/student housing. It's located in a beach/college town with an extreme housing shortage that is pushing people to live in cheaper towns inland that require a 1-2 hours driving commute due to no viable transit options and being beyond what most people would consider bikeable.
Even with using a pretty radical approach to upfront and operational emissions it will still have significant scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. What would be the “business as usual” version for determining scope 4 emissions? Likely one of two things:
1. A traditional developer takes on the project and optimizes everything around maximizing profit. They build fewer, larger units, dozens of parking spots, and have no regard for upfront or operational emissions. It would house ~⅓ as many people, most of whom would use cars as their primary transportation.
2. The site remains vacant for the foreseeable future, there are no upfront or operational emissions.
If we throw out scope 4 emissions, option 2 is the clear winner, but even using very conservative math, both alternatives result in dramatically higher emissions over the long term.
Calculating scope 4 emissions amounts to trying to predict the future, best case they’ll be a rough estimate, and worst case are an opportunity for rampant greenwashing. However, dismissing them entirely seems like a case of letting perfection be the enemy of good.