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It's not obvious to me that there is double counting. The study says, "Individual carbon emissions can be divided into personal consumption emissions, emissions

by 7e 2y ago

It's not obvious to me that there is double counting. The study says, "Individual carbon emissions can be divided into personal consumption emissions, emissions through government spending, and emissions linked to investments." Someone needs to be accountable for corporate emissions, and that someone is the owners. That's entirely reasonable. If a dollar is spent by a corporation on a person, and that person uses it to buy something else that took carbon to produce, yes, you could imagine double counting the emission. But that can be fixed simply by rolling up the carbon emission to the ultimate consumer: a person, a government, or the owners of a corporation. Corporations can pollute by themselves: buying and using corporate jets, for example. Those can't be attributed to upstream consumers. If anything, this undercounts the emissions of the super rich, since they also are responsible for a good portion of government spending, too--either directly, because of the outsize taxes they pay, or indirectly, because of corporate taxation of profits of companies that they own. But since they don't control that government spending (at least in theory) it seems OK to not attribute it to them.

ars 2y ago
We're talking about investments, they count for example if someone invests in an appliance factory, the emissions of the appliances are billed to the investor. But of course those emissions are also the responsibility of whoever buys, and operates the appliance. Because virtually every company and factory is owned by somebody, they've managed to put all the emissions into the responsibility of the owner of the factory, and they give regular people zero responsibility. I'll ask you: if I fly on a plane, who's responsible for the emissions? Me for flying? Or the owner of the airplane for operating it?

by 7e 2y ago

ars 2y ago

We're talking about investments, they count for example if someone invests in an appliance factory, the emissions of the appliances are billed to the investor. But of course those emissions are also the responsibility of whoever buys, and operates the appliance. Because virtually every company and factory is owned by somebody, they've managed to put all the emissions into the responsibility of the owner of the factory, and they give regular people zero responsibility. I'll ask you: if I fly on a plane, who's responsible for the emissions? Me for flying? Or the owner of the airplane for operating it?