I have a new journal article out with Prof Leonard Seaboorke of Copenhagen Business School this morning. It is in the Danish journal Samfundsøkonomen (Society's Economist). To make it easier for blog readers here it is open access and in English. Entitled 'The case for building climate reporting into financial accounting' this is about sustainable cost accounting. As the abstract says:
For mitigation efforts against climate breakdown to be effective they need to bring in the private sector in a meaningful way. Current standards for financial reporting for commercial organizations focus on the interests of capital suppliers to the exclusion of other stakeholders and civil society. These stakeholders include the suppliers of capital, trading partners, employees, regulators, tax authorities, and civil society. So far initiatives to include environmental and social costs have been additive rather than substantive. In this think piece we offer a radical proposal in the form of sustainable cost accounting (SCA). As a standard SCA would build on existing accounting principles to require commercial organizations to report on how they will manage the costs of becoming net carbon zero compliant. SCA does not include carbon pricing or the cost of offsets. It would require the commercial organization to establish the costs of the transition to carbon neutrality. Regulatory requirements, enmeshment in transnational standards, and adequate auditing would implement SCA. If SCA was mandatory and comprehensively applied it would take a significant step in bringing business onside in addressing climate breakdown.
This is part of a fairly rapid exercise I am now engaged in to build the case for financial reporting of the consequences of climate change. This will dominate my workload early in the new year. Comments are welcome.
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I’m becoming a bit concerned about the extent to which the environmental movement is focussing on CO2 emissions whilst ignoring all the other factors adding to the looming environmental catastrophe and the possibility of civilisational collapse,
it isn’t helped when the subject ceases to be science and becomes politicised, the increasing use of forecasts based on the IPCC’s worst case scenario models which rely on assumptions that currently aren’t reflected by the present reality on the ground have fuelled a lot of extreme media stories that can be described as ‘climate disaster’ porn, in reality storm intensity shows no statistical increase, precipitation shows only slight increase, wild fires, floods and storm damage only seem to be effecting humanity more because humanity has expanded and spread into the areas where this stuff has always happened,
sea levels are rising but currently only at the thickness of a coin per annum,
I myself admit to have been caught up on the wave of climate disaster porn last year because deep down I wanted incontrovertable evidence of what a mess we are making of our planet to get people to wake up and start dealing with these issues,
exaggerating a problem only makes it easier for detractors to brush off your concerns, there are 3 sides to every story, one side, the other side and the truth which is somewhere in between, in the increasingly polarised battle between ‘changers’ & ‘deniers’ both sides are now exaggerating whilst also retaining nuggets of truth, neither side represents reality, only parts of it,
in itself CO2 is neither good or bad, it’s probably the most benign byproduct of industrial civilisation and it’s increasing concentration in the atmosphere is really an observable symptom of the problem as opposed to the central cause of the problem,
I stand by the forecast of the Club of Rome sponsored MIT study of 1971 ‘The Limits of Growth’
it has been revisited recently and been found to have been an uncanny prediction of how events would play out,
the converging crisies that the report highlighted were expanding global population, environmental degredation, resource depletion and pollution generated by industrial society,
much of sustainability aims to stem the expansion of the global population, reduce and reverse environmental degredation, throttle back the rate resources are being depleted and attempt to recycle as many of the resources already extracted back through the industrial system instead of discarding them and extracting further reserves and make prudent efforts to reduce the quantity, toxicity and longevity of the pollution that industrial society emits,
fossil fuels as a resource are a major concern, not so much because of the carbon emitted during their combustion but more because of: A; industrial civilisation has become entirely dependent upon them, B; fossil fuels are a finite resource, C; half of all fossil fuels ever burnt have been extracted and used since 1990, a growth of consumption which seems impossible to sustain in the future and quite possibly even the present,
I’m in favour of a transition to non fossil fuel energy sources not so much as to replace fossil fuels but more that fossil fuels are rapidly being exhausted,
the problem with burning coal wasn’t so much the CO2 emissions but the sulphur emissions that were causing acid rain and killing the forests that could have been merrily absorbing CO2,
also the mining of coal was releasing heavy metals and toxins into the water courses causing a very challenging and long term problem,
the problem with oil again isn’t so much the CO2 emissions but the diesel particulates and other combustion byproducts emitted by vehicles polluting the atmosphere of our cities and towns, the sheer volume of plastics being manufactured and then rapidly dumped, willy nilly, into all areas of the environment and the utter dependence of all large scale agriculture since the ‘green revolution’ on products manufactured from an oil or gas feedstock, feedstocks which will not be available in such copious quantities in the near future,
if we were to cease recklessly tearing through whatever oil and gas we can access and conserve and use wisely the remainder of this one off natural endowment of concentrated energy then the ecosystem would have a chance to draw down and capture the CO2 we have already emitted,
to ignore the wider picture and focus entirely on CO2 and set a target of zero carbon emissions by a certain date without having established alternative sources of power generation or replaced the fossil fuel inputs that global agriculture is currently so dependent upon would imperil modern industrial society just as much as the course of lunacy that we are currently stuck upon,
I’m not entirely sure a Green New Deal is the right answer, maybe more a Green Transition,
there is ample evidence of a direct link between the size of an economy and the energy it consumes,
globally economic growth has stalled, also the growth of the energy supply that economies are reliant upon has stalled,
in the last few decades, as economic growth has struggled and slowed, central banks and govt.s have tried to paper over the shortfall with monetary adventurism, creating far more new money than the existing economy of real things can support or the availability of energy to a future economy, that it would need access to, to be able to grow and pay off the debts,
currently it’s pretty obvious that the financial economy has decoupled from the reality of the economy of real things, stuff and people and is on course for a nasty bruising,
I rather suspect the financial economy won’t accept a resolution in the form of hard default where they take a big hit to their asset valuations and will try to manipulate us into accepting a soft default in the form of inflation which could be severe and of a protracted duration,
the inflation can only be long and nasty because it has so much unaffordable debt to negate,
I don’t think we really have access to the surplus energy to power a Green New Deal, I don’t think the environment would really appreciate the growth spurt in human activity this would generate and I don’t think the economy of the future will have an energy base of sufficient magnitude to support an enlarged economy that would be required to pay off any further debts we might choose to incur today,
that’s why I think the only realistic way forward is a Green Transition, a re-allocation of current economic and physical resources not a demand for more money, stuff and growth which would only intensify our current predicament,
we need to accept the end of growth, we need to concede that we are horribly reliant on fossil fuels that won’t last much longer and we have no plan B for a post fossil fuel world,
we need to deny the financial economy the opportunity of sidestepping the consequences of their follies and imposing a horrific period of prolonged inflation upon us and insist they take a hard default on their grossly inflated asset valuations,
we can’t go forward and grow our way out of this situation, we shouldn’t collapse and go back to the stone age or a dystopian Mad Max world, we need to move sideways and transiton to a sustainable future where we live within the means our planet has to offer us for support and sustainance,
this isn’t meant as a criticism of Richards GND or taxation proposals as nearly all of them are compatible with a Green Transition,
it’s really about dropping some of the ‘hope-ium’ and injecting some realism with which to bridge the current chasm between ‘changers’ & ‘deniers’
Matt
I entirely accept your concern
I know, for example, what I am seeking to do on sustainable cost accounting is not tackling biodiversity – my focus is on what I can do – and I cannot see way to do biodiversity in the same way as yet
But you are right to do say the issue is broader
Best
Richard
I am loathed to get into the never ending “climate emergency” debate as I have been classed as one of those loathsome deniers who will be guilty of the “manslaughter of future generations” but it should be pointed out there is no breakdown of climate to mitigate. Climate is doing what it has for millennia. It changes, often a lot faster and much more dramatically than anything we have seen in the last 400 years.
The theory of radiative global warming due to CO2 emissions is simply that it is a theory unproven by experiment or empirical observation. It flies in the face of basic physics, what heat is, how it works, the laws of thermodynamics, Planck’s law etc. Basically a bodies radiation cannot warm itself, in other words, there is no perpetual motion. Further CO2 makes up 0.04% of the earth’s atmosphere and is only able to absorb 16% of the infrared heat at two narrow spectrums and quickly becomes saturated, so it flies in the face of reason to assume or postulate that 0.0064% of the radiative heat could make any appreciable difference to global temperature even if worked as climate alarmists claim which it cannot. Angstrom circa 1900 conducted experiments which show that increasing Co2 had minimal effect on temperature and Dr. P.L.Ward experiments recently increased Co2 concentrations by 23 times with no appreciable rise in temperature.
My point is how to account for the unaccountable. Co2 is not a pollutant it is the staff of all life. Below 200 parts per million life starts to extinguish, below 150 ppm plants die leading to the total extinction of all life as we know it. In fact, the ideal Co2 concentration for plant growth is between 750 – 1800 ppm depending on the type of plant, so we are living in Co2 famine as far as plants are concerned. Science is never settled as claimed by global warmists and certainly not their claims regarding Co2 as the main driving factor of climate change never mind the paltry addition of the 4% of human Co2 emissions to the total in the atmosphere.
What this whole charade is doing is distracting us from what we can and should be concentrating on which is conservation, waste management/pollution, recycling and land management which is wholely within our remit and fully accountable and would lead to a vast improvement in the living conditions of everyone .
I’m sorry…but this is nonsense
I accept the science on this
The science says on all reasonable balances of probability that you are wrong
It looks as though you are not publishing my reply. Never mind it’s hardly worth falling out over. Have a good and prosperous new year.
I am afraid I don’t give a platform to climate change denial
It’s not credible
And not worth debating as a result
I have never denied climate change in my life in over 50 years of following the subject nor has any scientist of any note including the 500 signatories in a letter to the UN, a copy of which I sent to you. Indeed my first statements in my original reply clearly state ” Climate is doing what it has for millennia. It changes, …” What is at issue is that anthropogenic Co2 emissions are the main driver in radiative global warming. There is no experimental, empirical or theoretical evidence which supports such an assumption other than models which are notorious for their inaccuracy and are totally inadequate as a basis on which to make up any policy. Climate models predict that you will get warmer standing in the moonlight than standing in sunlight.?????
“Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.” Nicolas Tesla
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” To date there is no experiment carried out by IPCC which shows that atmospheric Co2 causes temperature increase.
To shut down debate in science is to shut down science. It then becomes a religion with no objectivity, closed and absolute acceptance of a particular knowledge no longer open to scrutiny. A sorry state indeed but one climate alarmists have been engineering for decades.
I have to say that I do not believe that your claim stacks
And I am not willing to debate it
I may be wrong
But the balance of probabilities is that that the issue is worth addressing as if the claimed science is right, which I am willing to believe it is
And if the “science” is wrong it will be the most costly mistake ever foisted upon mankind
No it won’t….
I’m sorry Jim – but please go and play your silly fantasies elsewhere
I am bored by people like you