[IMTDb]

> 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...

[tialaramex]

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.

[KMag]

> 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.

[okeuro49]

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.

[KMag]

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?

[okeuro49]

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-...

[tialaramex]

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.

[LargeTomato]

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.