Comment by kitbrennan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kitbrennan | Hacker News Reader

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While there's a lot of nuance to this: in carbon accounting it is standard practice to account for the same emission more than once. Carbon inventories are broken out into three different scopes, the first two scopes concern fuel and electricity generation emissions, and the third scope includes everything in your value chain (both upstream and downstream). Therefore the country producing the EV battery would report on the emission in their Scope 1 and Scope 2 inventory, and the country utilising that EV battery would report it within their Scope 3 inventory.

It may seem odd to double account, but the goal of carbon accounting is not to ascribe blame to an emission (since ascribing blame is a never-ending game of finger pointing), it is to make every business/consumer responsible. The country creating the emission needs to be incentivised to decarbonise, and the country consuming that emission needs to be incentivised to decarbonise their full - including international - supply chains.

They do the same double accounting for green credits. If a country produce green energy it get accounted there. If they then sell that energy it get accounted a second time by the country who buys it. The exporter (possible a separate company from the producer) can even account it a second time, as can the consumer in the end.

Basically every time green energy has changed hand there are two new credits being created, and with a international energy market there is a lot of opportunities for energy to change ownership.

Ah - that's really interesting, didn't know this. But that means that UK should already be counting CO2 emissions of products sold there(where known), right?

Yes, this is where the *nuance* mentioned at the start of my reply comes in.

It *should* include all scopes, including upstream emissions from purchased goods and services from abroad. But in many countries their country-level carbon inventories still have huge gaps.

UK Legislation implements the GHG Protocol scope system in the UK's carbon accounting regulations that businesses must follow for reporting their emissions (e.g. SECR), and government guidance for calculating emissions all follow the scope system too (e.g. BEIS Conversion Factors guidance). So it is very disappointing if the UK's carbon accounts has got gaps (but I wouldn't be surprised).

> It may seem odd to double account, but the goal of carbon accounting is not to ascribe blame to an emission

It's definitely how it is used by activists / NGO etc tho [1].

Another strange practice is to scale the CO2 production with the price of goods. Eg: it is assumed that you produce 10x more CO2 when you buy a $100 bottle of wine than if you buy a $10 bottle of wine. This makes no sense at all from an environmental perspective, but the conclusion you can draw from this are aligned with the political views of the people producing those reports.

1: https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/top-5-ways-bill...

Sure, for example I had accounting done as part of a study which also fitted meters (which I wanted anyway) and read the data (which I would likely have freely agreed to but obviously does need formal permission) and their baseline basically go well, about 60% of your income isn't accounted for in these days so we assume you turned that money into carbon emissions at our default rate. Actually the money was just sat in a bank account, which AFAIK doesn't cause net carbon emissions.

For individuals I don't think this approach works very well, but over a population I can believe it comes out in the wash.

> Actually the money was just sat in a bank account, which AFAIK doesn't cause net carbon emissions.

That depends on your definitions. I'm not sure about U.K. reserve ratios, but in the U.S., about 90% of your bank deposit goes back out as loans that hopefully increase economic activity. The majority of that activity probably isn't carbon-neutral.

Neither the UK nor the US have a reserve requirement.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_requirement

In addition, banks in modern times have never had to wait for deposits to extend loans.

How did I miss the reserve requirement in the US going to zero in 2020? I was living overseas at the time, and I know I had more pressing things to consider, but still...

> In addition, banks in modern times have never had to wait for deposits to extend loans.

Are you referring to the discount window, the repo market, and interbank lending, or the fact that reserve requirements are typically averaged over a couple of weeks? In these cases, (as long as there's a reserve requirement), a person adding to a bank does still enable more lending, no? Or, are you saying that in modern times, even with non-zero reserve requirements, commercial banks usually operate with excess reserves, so reserves are not the limiting factor on lending?

This is what I read from the Bank of England:

> The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks

> Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...

Specifically, in my case, that bank is (mostly) NS&I, one of several banks owned by the British government.

NS&I doesn't write loans, nor does it have a big vault full of cash somewhere, instead my money is "invested" in running the country I live in. Rather than borrowing money from international money markets by writing gilts (bonds payable by the government) they borrow my money and pay me interest.

As a result, nothing changes, all the same things were going to happen anyway, just they'd have borrowed from the Chinese, or the Americans or whoever was buying gilts.

On the 1x vs. 10x point, I believe the unit quantity is derived by finding the manufacturing costs (in CO2) for a given process and then extrapolating. No one is counting the grams of CO2 of your cheeseburger. They're counting the CO2 of the whole farm.

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