We are obsessed with carbon accounting.
Like anyone who has spent nearly a decade in the startup space, you see trends come, inflate to comical proportions, see companies— products and people— quickly move to adopt, the trend proceeds to self-combust, people are fired, mistakes are forgiven in the court of public opinion, op-Ed’s are written, we laugh at our naïveté until the next one comes along.
Carbon accounting is no different. Like other trends, it’s a vehicle to increase profits by advertising that a brand is self-aware, without them needing to change anything about their operating model. A form of glorified green-washing that brands, startups in the climate space, and investors are quickly getting behind.
The goal is well-intentioned: to account for how much carbon dioxide equivalents an organization emits in order to produce a product or provide a service. This information has started to appear on banners atop company websites, in the form of certifications, and even on the products themselves; Adidas and Allbirds include a breakdown of their carbon footprint on the tongues of their sneakers.
If anything, carbon accounting tells us how little we know about our footprint and how little we know what to do about it. Like any form of measurement that aims to put a single value on a complicated process, the power lies with the entity that creates the metric. In this case, the term ‘carbon footprint’ was coined and popularized through a $250 million marketing campaign by BP, the oil company. The accounting and advertising of emissions data have become akin to climate action. One-size-fits-all emissions calculators have become the bible, and the industry and societal standard by which we measure our progress towards a ‘greener’ future.
With the arc of climate sensitivity moving ever so slightly towards accountability, brands are scrambling to figure out how to show consumers that they care, while trying to maintain their bottom line and not drastically alter the ways in which they’ve been doing business, through which they’ve found low costs of production, success, and recognition. Advertising carbon emissions in the name of transparency is the perfect loophole to shift the onus of action onto the consumer.
To put it simply, carbon accounting doesn’t change anything about the production process or consumption. We are still pumping the same amount of emissions into the environment and, on top of that, the action piece is missing. This is largely because we are aware of the amount of money, logistical capabilities, and buy-in that it would take to actually offset emissions. It might just require a total overhaul of production processes or, even more challenging, figuring out how to increase a product’s lifespan through recirculation after its first use.
There is a minuscule amount of attention paid to what happens once a product is already out in the ether. The same products will eventually populate one of over 3,000 active landfills in the United States, or be bundled into a cube of usable nothingness to be shipped abroad, the breakdown of which ultimately contributes to increasing and unprecedented climate disasters that affect countries that bear the brunt of the failure of carbon accounting in action. We are seeing this happen in Pakistan right now, one of the lowest producers of greenhouse gasses globally yet one of the worst affected by the climate policies of the Global North.
We can read a series of emissions numbers on the inside of a sneaker tongue, but knowledge is not action, it’s just being purposefully and strategically set as the benchmark for tackling these issues.
Running a startup in the climate space, it is evident that we’re dancing around a very costly and complicated problem that, if tackled head-on, requires more than just technology. Yet the majority of dollars in the climate tech space are unsurprisingly biased towards what will bring the highest returns in the shortest amount of time and not necessarily towards what solves the problem. Startups looking to get funding in this space are taking note and producing accordingly.
Low production quality would make it virtually impossible to recirculate items that are produced to have a limited lifespan, but what is surprising is our voluntary hesitancy towards pursuing actual physical solutions. We rely heavily on charitable organizations and non-profits to handle the recirculation of usable products to their second use, while lauding brands for green-washing, investors as beacons of climate knowledge for the emergence of ESG investing, and startups for building technology that only continues to break down the problem into pieces that are more and more bite-sized, scattered, and that piecemeal technology can be built around.
We are moving into a world where, for corporations, carbon credits will be akin to currency, but the number of carbon emissions generated will only be redistributed, not eliminated; offset, in theory, by one company or country and taken on by another. We cannot move towards a greener future if these products are still meeting the same end: being thrown to a Goodwill, left out of the curb for a trash hauler, tossed into an incinerator, or shipped abroad.
When it comes to carbon accounting, some of it is science. Much of it is simply distilling complicated science down to a metric that can be advertised. At the end of the day, the production of goods and the amount of stuff that we are buying and sending to landfill is accounting for a huge amount of the carbon emissions that we’re pumping into the environment.
We need to invest in technology, but also that which is incredibly lacking in sex appeal: infrastructure; the physical transportation of the things that we buy, and inevitably will no longer use, away from landfill towards people and places that can make use of them. We need only to step out of our front doors to see the problem staring us right in the face, waiting for us to deal with it.