The Limits of Carbon Accounting: Questioning Corporate Climate Metrics
The article explores the growing obsession with carbon accounting in corporate sustainability efforts. It follows Jane Flegal's experience at Frontier Climate, a $1 billion carbon removal initiative, and examines how companies are increasingly focused on measuring, tracking, and offsetting carbon emissions. The piece questions whether this intense focus on carbon accounting metrics is productive or if it distracts from more meaningful climate action, highlighting tensions between expensive technological carbon removal solutions and cheaper offset programs.
Key quotes
When Jane Flegal was working in market development for Frontier Climate, a $1 billion initiative to catalyze advances in carbon removal, she had what she called a 'radicalizing experience.'
These were more expensive than the carbon offsets companies could buy to support forest conservation or clean cookstoves in Africa, but the investment would support innovation important
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