Why Scope 3 emissions should be like an apple pie

We make everything so complicated so that nobody can understand it or do anything about it.

My wife Kelly (not shown above) tells me that she often skips my posts that are too technical or inside baseball, and I suspect just writing “Scope 3 Emissions” is enough to drive her and other readers away. So I will start instead with one of my favourite quotes from Carl Sagan:

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe."

Apples and flour are natural plant-based materials made of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen, using tools made from metals and other materials that can all eventually be traced back to the Big Bang. It is just a question of boundaries; does your pie start at the supermarket shelf or does it start at the creation of the universe? Does our baker resemble Betty Crocker or Stephen Hawking? How complicated do you want to make it?

“Scope 3 emissions” are part of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, developed by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) in 1998 as a way for companies to measure and categories their emissions. They are complicated. There are currently three “scopes,” and they are all about boundaries, or lack thereof.

Scope 1 emissions are direct emissions from making stuff, such as burning coal for cement or steel, or using natural gas for making fertilizer. It’s relatively easy to measure because it is all in-house, the boundary is the fence around the factory.

Scope 2 emissions are indirect, from the energy consumed; if you make your product with electricity and it comes from a coal-fired power plant, then those emissions are in this scope. There is a boundary around that power plant so these are relatively easy to figure out. They are also not that big.

Scope 3 emissions are indirect emissions without boundaries. They are huge and they are a mess. Some are upstream from suppliers, and their suppliers, and their suppliers; it could go ad infinitem like our apple pie. Scope 3 emissions could be midstream, coming from the cars employees drive to work. But the biggest ingredient in the Scope 3 pie is downstream, the emissions that come from using the product.

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the problem of Scope 3 got on my radar a few years ago when the Guardian titled a story, "Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions." I thought, wait a second, 90% of those emissions are Scope 3, us burning fossil fuels in our cars and planes and houses. It’s us, buying what they are selling. (I covered this concept more recently here in Stop blaming 57 companies for greenhouse gas emissions and look in the mirror which got 114 comments mostly calling me an idiot.)

But I have had to change my thinking because 64% of global greenhouse gas emissions are Scope 3 emissions from burning fossil fuels, and everyone is pretending that Scope 3 is someone else’s problem. In Canada, according to the Canadian Climate Institute, “The combustion emissions associated with exported Canadian oil and gas (i.e., Scope 3 emissions in the jargon) don’t affect Canada’s climate targets, because these emissions accrue to other countries where the fuels are burned.” So we talk about boiling our rocks in the tar sands more efficiently, reducing Scope 1 and Scope 2, while ignoring what happens after we sell our oil. As Steve Hanley cleverly put it in Cleantechnica,

They really don’t want to talk about what happens when their customers use those fuels to power industrial processes or transportation. It reminds me of Tom Lehrer’s satirical song about Werner Von Braun, who went from the architect of the V2 rocket program during World War II to a senior NASA adviser once the war was over. “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department!, says Werner Von Braun.”

This is why everyone runs from Scope 3 reporting. The producers can say it’s not their problem, and the consumers can blame the producers instead of looking in the mirror and maybe not filling that pickup truck, and it is all so complicated that nobody can figure it out. And it gets worse.

According to the Protocol, there 15 categories of Scope 3 emissions, and in their drawing here, “use of sold products” is just one of 7 downstream activities. But the vast majority of all carbon emissions are in that category, coming from the burning of fossil fuels. Category 11, use of sold products, could be 70% of all emissions. For fossil fuel companies, it is upwards of 90%.

The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) shows this graphically in a recent report on Scope 3 emissions; good old Category 11 dominates the picture. That’s us, buying fossil fuels and putting them in our cars or houses.

Most companies don’t measure Scope 3 emissions, even though they are dominant; they claim that once a product is out the door, they have no control over how it is used. Some claim that “Calculating and measuring scope 3 emissions is challenging, unaffordable, and no one knows how to do it.”

It is challenging. The Cake electric motorcycle company in Sweden wanted to calculate their upstream emissions to reduce their carbon footprint and build the Cleanest Dirt Bike Ever, and found they couldn’t get the information they needed;

"As the Cleanest Dirt Bike Ever project involves global suppliers and partners, it is difficult and sometimes nearly impossible to get primary data, due to the complex global supply chain and some assumptions that need to be made."

But it is not impossible. As noted in the post Scope 3 Emissions: 10 Myths Debunked on upstream emissions, “The Scope 3 emissions for one organization are the Scope 1 and 2 emissions of another organization” And on downstream emissions:

“Not measuring scope 3 emissions also leads to challenges when comparing the sustainability impact of different manufacturers within the same industry without looking at their supply chains. For example, it is infeasible to distinguish an electric vehicle manufacturer from a traditional car manufacturer.”

This is why Scope 3 is so ridiculous and confusing; the upstream and the downstream activities are controlled by different parties. It is the burning stuff for the use of the product that is the single biggest category, and it is mixed in with all these other variables.

Everybody makes everything so complicated; As Steve Hanley notes,

Scope 3 emissions. Hoo boy, what a can of worms. The concept is simple, but the specifics are hard to define. That makes it easy for corporations to bob and weave around any proposed standards, which means a lot of greenwashing happens, but very little progress toward addressing our global climate emergency takes place.

This is why in the building world, I push “upfront carbon” instead of embodied carbon, because everyone can understand it- there are before and after, now and later emissions. It’s a plea for simplicity and using language that everyone can understand.

Scope 3 emissions seem almost designed to confuse and obfuscate. I often think it is me, I am just not smart enough, I haven’t read enough or thought about it enough. I was wondering whether to even publish this, thinking it might just expose my ignorance or naiveté. I just can’t scope cope.

And then I think about apple pie. I don’t have to be a cosmologist or physicist to bake one; the boundaries and fences can be set much closer. Every ingredient has a standard label on it thanks to government regulation, so I can add up the calories or vitamins to figure out the nutritional footprint of the completed pie.

This is what we need- a label for every material and every product made by every company, right up the value chain. Make it simple so that anyone who can follow a recipe can understand what goes into and what is emitted from everything they buy. It should be as easy as pie.