Heatmap News just published Are We Too Obsessed With Carbon Accounting?.
Heatmap News reports on a Searchlight Institute paper by Jane Flegal, a former Frontier Climate market development lead, that critiques the dominant corporate climate paradigm built around carbon accounting and net zero targets. Flegal argues the system pushes companies to optimize their individual footprints while ignoring more impactful systems-level work, like easing transmission constraints or interconnection backlogs on the grid. She points to the data center boom as a case where corporate power purchase agreements satisfy clean energy claims without fixing structural barriers. The paper suggests alternative metrics, including whether company investments cause additional clean infrastructure to get built and how firms engage in policy proceedings.
Our take (Methodology shift): The structural critique is fair: cheap offsets and PPAs can crowd out harder, more useful work on grid and policy. The harder question is measurement. Replacing tonne accounting with judgments about additionality, policy engagement, or transmission financed is more honest but also more subjective, and easier to game through narrative. Worth reading alongside the methodology, not just the framing.
-> Read the full piece at Heatmap News
Captain Drawdown is flagging this. The reporting is Heatmap News’s. Go read them directly, not a rewrite from us.
Source: Heatmap CDR