Neal Dikeman

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle has been the classic environmental triage message for years. And of course we have the “triple bottom line” of People, Planet, Profit, so it seems fitting that we should have a new Triple E for carbon planning: Evaluate, Efficiency, Environmental Offset. OK, so it’s not quite as catchy as Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, but I’m just a blogger, so cut me some slack.

Evaluate
My church was looking to do its part for the environment awhile back and trying to figure out where to start. Like many industries, a church’s carbon emissions aren’t regulated, and there aren’t generally accepted standards for how a church should go about reducing them. I gave them the same advice I’m giving here: First, figure out what you’ve got, figure out what you want to count, and figure out how to make a difference. Then get your people involved and just do it.

The real issue has always been “boundary conditions,” or what you are going to include in determining your carbon baseline. The standards for a voluntary low carbon plan are still emerging, and there is a wide range of accepted practices.

For many businesses, ISO or API standards and the standards being developed under initiatives like the California Climate Action Registry are framing up the issues well; others can look to the cap-and-trade schemes in Europe under the Kyoto Protocol.

So, back to what you could count. We can basically divide it into four main buckets:

• Your own direct emissions (e.g., power plants or transport fleets). This is generally the easiest to measure and analyze, but often the hardest to reduce for many businesses.
• Your indirect emissions (e.g., grid power usage). Someone else owns the power plant or trucks doing the emitting, but you get the benefit.
• Your life-cycle emissions (e.g., the paper in your supply chain). Always a real devil in the details. There’s the old joke about economists: Put three in a room and ask one question; you get 10 answers. As far as I can tell, with lifecycle analysis you may get 457 answers instead of 10. It’s not a simple exercise.
• Your employee’s or stakeholders’ direct and indirect emissions (e.g., commuting). Basically, this involves counting life-cycle emissions on your people instead of your supplies.

As with most things, the KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) principle works pretty well.