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Comment by Snoozus | Hacker News Reader

So what's the carbon impact of paying employees? Is there a Co2 kg/$ ratio?

We treat payroll as zero emissions. The responsibility boundary of a company doesn't include the personal consumption decisions of employees. The spend-based approach makes this pretty straightforward — if the company is buying, those are company emissions. If an individual is buying, those are individual emissions.

Not trying to put you in a 'gotcha' situation, but GHGP Scope 3 Category 7 (Employee Commuting) is entirely related to employee actions outside the bounds of the company. Commutes and also home-office energy choices (heating, cooling, use of renewable energy credits, ...) are typically chosen (and paid for) by individuals outside of work but are components of an organization's value chain.

ya, that's right, good point. For complete GHGP inventory reporting, customers need to estimate employee commuting separately (and we're happy to help with that; it's usually a pretty straightforward calculation, though gathering the employee info takes some doing).

Setting the GHGP aside, my own personal opinion about how we interpret GHGP data is that it's important to make a clear distinction between upstream emissions and downstream emissions. For example, 'use of sold products' (Category 11) is also not something you can determine from spend data. But I'd argue that 'use of sold products' is a very different thing than upstream emissions (even though they're all lumped under Scope 3).

Commuting is a less clear-cut case, but I think of commuting (that is paid for by employees) as more of a downstream emissions category.

We wrote up some notes on this here: https://bend.green/faq/downstream-emissions

Good question! We don't currently consider payroll a carbon emitting activity. Generally we think of salary as paying exclusively for human-hours.

In contrast, if your company paid for your metro card or reimbursed for mileage or gas on your commute, we would estimate the carbon intensity for those expenses.

So replacing a 100k employee by a 10k cloud service would increase a companys co2 balance? Seems counterintuitive, no?

I don't understand what you're saying. Replacing a 10k cloud service with 100k of private server equipment would probably reduce a company's co2 balance.

I meant this turned the other direction lol

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