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ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: emissions

economist.com

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Re: ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: emissions

#131

Post by kitbrennan »

tracker1 wrote: post #96

Pay-walled, so only got the summary... but even "emissions" isn't a simple calculation... do you include the electricity generation you get your power from? What about emissions on what went into something you buy? The mining, processing, shipping, refining, manufacturing and distribution of the final product, and many component hierarchies in play? Depending on how you look at something, getting an electric car is a…

but event "emissions" isn't a simple calculation No one is claiming that it is, but there are standardised reporting practices to ensure proper coverage of emissions when published. These are the Scopes 1, 2, and 3 (which includes 12 sub-scopes), listed in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. They are the GAAP of the sustainability industry and is required by every major reporting mechanism (e.g. CDP, etc).

All the items you listed are covered within the scopes, include power generation, fuel processing (typically called well-to-tank), transmission loss, emissions embodied in purchased assets (e.g. construction emissions of a vehicle), employee commuting, waste, etc.

Depending on how you look at something, getting an electric car is a horrible thing to do. Even then, is that better or worse than charging it at night from a coal power plant? A common claim by climate-deniers that has been widely debunked for almost every power network in the rich world (where electric cars are most common). If I remember correctly, only two countries in all of Europe were found to have lower emissions with a petrol engine than plugging into a dirty grid.

I think a lot of the woke efforts in and of themselves are short sighted, and not very well thought out at all though. Woke? Not thought through? You wrote a long comment about carbon reporting when you clearly don't know the first thing about how carbon is reported or calculated...

Re: ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: emissions

#132

Post by robswc »

ESG always seemed like a sham to me. One of those things that emerges when we've reached a point where there's more people than work to do. So new things like ESG gets invented, lol

I get the principal behind it but its clearly just been gamed at the best and used as a weapon at worst.

Re: ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: emissions

#133

Post by dghlsakjg »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #122
JacobThreeThree wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many activities generate emissions that have nothing to do with the sale of fuel. Who gets to decide what counts as emissions?

If that's big enough to worry about, then tax carbon at the point oil, gas, and coal, come out of the ground.

Does ethanol, wood and other non fossil carbon sources get a pass?

Re: ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: emissions

#134

Post by bseidensticker »

clairity wrote: post #125
WalterBright wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The easiest way to get rid of coal plants is to tax the carbon content of fuel. Natural gas has twice the energy per C atom, so this would naturally(!) favor gas power generation over coal power. Tax it, and let the market sort it out.

carbon taxes are the exact kind of roundabout measure that creates distortions and unintended consequences[0] rather than directly tackling the core issue. we need to tax pollution directly, as happened with CFCs in the 80s, because what we want to get rid of is pollution and that's how you directly internalize externalities while minimizing gaming potential (and we should use the funds for further clean-up efforts).…

We must be thinking of different things because imo carbon taxes are the most direct way to internalize the externality. Crude oil, coal, and natural gas now cost more, proportional to their GHG potential, and the free market figures out how to minimize the cost.

It gets tricky when importing finished goods and with non-fuel sources of GHG, but it's way less complicated and more effective than any of the other proposals.

Re: ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: emissions

#135

Post by livueta »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #98
livueta wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I see an argument like this I'm confused by how hand-wavey "just achieve societal change" is. Like, sure, there's various issues with various technological approaches, but it's not as if the kind of broad social change that'd see private cars outlawed develops overnight. If anything, the last couple of decades demonstrate pretty convincingly and depressingly that putting together real momentum (read: won ref…

Worth noting that Washington implemented a plan that is basically the same as that proposal: https://ecology.wa.gov/About-us/Who-we-are/News/2021/Aug-6-S...

That's true, though the intent behind posting the referendum was as a reflection of (lack of) direct public support for potentially personally painful measures. Getting something done through legislative channels obviously isn't worthless or meaningless, but it's not as direct of a reflection of a willingness to incur changes as a referendum is. In a unipolar state like WA, the actions of the legislature can be pretty divorced from actual popular sentiment, and runs the risk of being undone by referendum - which has a lot of precedent in fairly recent WA history.

Re: ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: emissions

#136

Post by clairity »

bseidensticker wrote: post #134
clairity wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

carbon taxes are the exact kind of roundabout measure that creates distortions and unintended consequences[0] rather than directly tackling the core issue. we need to tax pollution directly, as happened with CFCs in the 80s, because what we want to get rid of is pollution and that's how you directly internalize externalities while minimizing gaming potential (and we should use the funds for further clean-up efforts).…

We must be thinking of different things because imo carbon taxes are the most direct way to internalize the externality. Crude oil, coal, and natural gas now cost more, proportional to their GHG potential, and the free market figures out how to minimize the cost. It gets tricky when importing finished goods and with non-fuel sources of GHG, but it's way less complicated and more effective than any of the other propos…

no, because the amount of carbon in each energy input doesn't directly correlate with the amount of pollution and harm, and it's a courser measure than taxing the polluting components relative to their externalized impact on health and wellbeing. we need to directly tax each of the things we don't want proportional to harm, rather than trying to simplify the problem and thereby creating unintended distortions and consequences.

Re: ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: emissions

#137

Post by livueta »

cardanome wrote: post #83
livueta wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I see an argument like this I'm confused by how hand-wavey "just achieve societal change" is. Like, sure, there's various issues with various technological approaches, but it's not as if the kind of broad social change that'd see private cars outlawed develops overnight. If anything, the last couple of decades demonstrate pretty convincingly and depressingly that putting together real momentum (read: won ref…

Transitioning from car-centric to human-centric cities is not about sacrifice. It is about understanding how cars actually keep cities from being places that could be much more enjoyable to live in. Having finding trouble an apartment? Without all the wasted space for cars we could have much denser cities. Problem solved! Want to have a place where children can actually play outside safely? Again, ban cars and you do…

You're preaching to the choir: I personally agree with much of this (lived in metro Tokyo), but that's honestly quite irrelevant. The point of contention isn't whether it'd be better in some absolute sense - it's whether you can convince enough people of the correctness of your vision to attain the support required to implement it.

It's not like your average American isn't aware of these arguments; they're just not broadly convincing (even if, from your or my perspective, they are). If they were, population flows would be headed in the other direction.

I'm pushing back here because your solution appears to be to continue to make the same arguments that have, so far, failed to convince enough people to deflect us from our current trajectory. More of the same, but louder? And given the urgency of the position, it's not like waiting on natural generational shift is much of an answer.

That's more or less why I take the exact opposite position and am bullish on anything that involves supply-side efficiency and bearish on anything that involves people having spontaneous moral awakenings.

Re: ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: emissions

#138

Post by hunterb123 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #67
sjaak wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shell: AA https://www.msci.com/our-solutions/esg-investing/esg-ratings... Higher than TSLA

Shell have committed to being net zero by 2050, including the products they sell and have some kind of a plan in place to make it happen. There's bits of their plan that seem dubious to me, like mentions of carbon capture but overall, since I believe that the problem of climate change wasn't "oh no, we can't do this, because it's impossible" but rather "we're not going to do this", that commitment and plan is all I'm…

Now do BP

Re: ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: emissions

#139

Post by WalterBright »

clairity wrote: post #136
bseidensticker wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We must be thinking of different things because imo carbon taxes are the most direct way to internalize the externality. Crude oil, coal, and natural gas now cost more, proportional to their GHG potential, and the free market figures out how to minimize the cost. It gets tricky when importing finished goods and with non-fuel sources of GHG, but it's way less complicated and more effective than any of the other propos…

no, because the amount of carbon in each energy input doesn't directly correlate with the amount of pollution and harm, and it's a courser measure than taxing the polluting components relative to their externalized impact on health and wellbeing. we need to directly tax each of the things we don't want proportional to harm, rather than trying to simplify the problem and thereby creating unintended distortions and con…

Uh, the carbon content of fuels winds up as CO2 emissions, which are blamed for climate change. Taxing the carbon content of fuels is a very targeted, direct tax. It's simple, too, orders of magnitude simpler than any other proposed method.

Re: ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: emissions

#140

Post by WalterBright »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #133
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's big enough to worry about, then tax carbon at the point oil, gas, and coal, come out of the ground.

Does ethanol, wood and other non fossil carbon sources get a pass?

If the goal is to reduce CO2, then the source of the fuel is irrelevant. The only relevant thing is the carbon content, which gets turned into CO2 via combustion.
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