It promises to add an onerous new layer of accounting overhead to your operations, every bit as detailed and strict as your financial accounting is now.
That same layer of cumbersome bureaucracy will be imposed on your suppliers, making their goods more expensive, and on your customers, siphoning off cash they could be spending with you.
This is the nascent business of carbon accounting. The intent is to discover exactly how much of the poison plants breathe your company emits, so that you can meet a raft of new standards and regulations and participate in the artificial "market" for carbon credits.
Peter Klein, a popular speaker on the green circuit, says that companies should embark on "a five-step process for implementing an enterprise-wide carbon management strategy" for reasons of legislative compliance, corporate reputation, stakeholder satisfaction, and cost reduction.
If the latter were true, however, one wonders why companies have to be told to do so by someone who freely admits a vested interest in the business of global warming, because he is a senior executive at Supply Chain, a consulting company that sells CarbonView, the "vital technology layer needed to support each phase".
CarbonView is essentially accounting software. It will work out, if you drive X kilometres with a type Y truck loaded with Z tons, how much carbon dioxide you emit. If you permit working from home, you can work out the difference in heating, lighting, transport and technology emissions. If you source from supplier A which doesn't meet standard P, it can tell you the emissions penalty over buying from company B which does.
Provided, of course, you have all the relevant data, lest your activities get scored simply as average.
Klein glibly notes that most of this information is in your ERP systems already, which not only assumes that you have expensive ERP software, but also that it really does contain the data needed to know emissions numbers for particular truck types, or building designs, or heating options, or efficiency measures, or supplier choices.
That carbon emissions cause global warming was just an assumption, and many reasons for making this assumption have since been undermined or refuted.
Ivo Vegter, freelance journalist and columnist
Once your new office full of salaried, company-car-driving carbon accountants have added up the beans (or rather, the hot air they produce), you presumably get to undergo audits, so that you can meet some or all of a raft of standards and regulations with fancy-sounding acronyms.
And even if you do all of this, as BP has done, someone will do "a survey of journalists, sustainability experts and political groups", and accuse you of "green-washing". This is the environmental equivalent of calling you a fraud, and if said about your financials would constitute either an accusation of corporate crime or grounds for a libel suit. So much for the supposed corporate reputation benefits.
If the cost and complexity of carbon accounting hasn't floored you yet, perhaps the admission of David Evans will. He devoted six years to the subject, building accounting models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions.
While his work initially appeared to have a sound, albeit somewhat speculative basis, what he has since discovered was a "global warming gravy train". He says he was "making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; there were international conferences full of such people. We had political support, the ear of government, big budgets. We felt fairly important and useful (I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet!"
Thing is, that carbon emissions cause global warming was just an assumption, and many reasons for making this assumption have since been undermined or refuted. "The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990," he says, "and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming."
He points out that the theoretical causation between carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature seems to point in the wrong direction, that key effects predicted by the theoretical greenhouse models can't be found, and that alternative theories that better explain observed data now exist.
His bet - in cold, hard cash - is that global warming will slow in the next two decades, something those with vested interests in global warming alarmism say won't happen even with onerous carbon taxes or accounting bureaucracy or emissions trading schemes.
The question is who you're going to believe. The guy who's flogging expensive software in support of a vast new layer of tax and administrative deadweight, or the guy who admits what he was doing is just a scam to fleece businesses of their profits.
* Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist and columnist, who blogs at http://ivo.co.za/.
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