Measuring Your Emissions - Climate Plug
A strong foundation || Newsletter topics; info on the top greenhouse gases/effect || How to measure greenhouse gases/and an intro to scopes || What organizations/we/you could do next
THE FIRST POST! 🍾🎉🥳
Hello! My name is Brenden. Welcome to the first-ever post of Climate Plug. I’m stoked you’re here. 👋
I am starting this newsletter to support current and future professionals interested in the climate space. I hope you’ll find this an approachable, quick-read newsletter.
The biggest obstacle for me, and one of the core reasons for writing this newsletter, was the sheer amount of information in the sustainability and climate space. When I started my new role in this industry, I wanted to equip myself with the knowledge I thought I’d need. So I started reading, Googling, talking to co-workers, and quickly realized just how much there was to learn. I took a moment to step back, like many new skills you take on, and focused on building a good foundation. So let’s look at some introductory knowledge.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
My day-to-day consists of helping companies understand how they should get started. For most organizations, the first step seems to be, know where you’re at and where you want to go. An example that comes to mind is that you can’t lose 10 pounds if you don’t know the weight you’re starting at. Measuring seems to be the best starting point. The three things I want to cover in this post around this topic:
A little info on the top greenhouse gases/effect
How to measure greenhouse gases/intro to scopes
What organizations/we/you could do next
A little info on the top greenhouse gases/effect 🌍
The greenhouse gas effect, what is it? This is pretty important to know but, luckily, simple. The greenhouse gas effect is the trapping of heat within a greenhouse. In our instance, the greenhouse is the earth and our atmosphere helps trap that heat.
There’s a balance to maintain here, and we are throwing that balance off with increased greenhouse gas emissions. There are a lot of greenhouse gases, but the primary sources emitted by human activity tend to be Carbon Dioxide, Methane, Nitrous oxide, and Fluorinated gases.
Each of these gases has a GWP or global warming potential. As shown in the visual above, GWP is defined relative to Carbon Dioxide (the most common GHG). When measuring emissions these gases will typically all be consolidated into one metric labeled Carbon Dioxide Equivalence. (Co2ₑ)
Where do these gases come from? A lot of places but primarily the production of our electricity, industry, and transportation.
I think that’s a good base for now on GHGs and the GHG effect. We’ll revisit this a lot.
How to measure them 📈
This is one topic we’ll talk a lot about. Primarily because this is what I spend a lot of my day talking and learning about.
This first bit will be focused on companies and organizations. These entities will measure their emissions in scopes, which you can think of as buckets across scopes 1, 2, & 3. The simplest way to explain scopes is with 3 words; burn (scope 1), buy (scope 2), and beyond (scope 3). The visual below explains this in more detail. For scope 1, think of burning fuels in your facilities, like natural gas. For scope 2, think of purchased electricity, buy. And scope 3, as I mentioned, is everything beyond your immediate touch. Think of traveling for a business conference or shipping your product via a third party.
Organizations will tend to follow the Greenhouse Gas Protocol framework to measure and manage their emissions. The GHGP has established these emissions scopes. The GHGP is a globally adopted framework that sets the standards for measuring and managing emissions. We can skip the details for now, but it is good to know as it is the leading framework organizations will use.
Organizations will want to look at their operational structure to identify emitting sources. These sources could be the buildings they occupy, vehicles they may own, or business travel they use. Based on those findings, the next step is determining if they have the data needed to derive the emissions associated with those sources. Things like utility bills or vehicle fleet fuel usage.
This should be a good overview of some of the emissions measurement basics for organizations.
As an individual, measuring your emissions doesn’t have to be that deep. I’d recommend using a free app/resource like Klima, Terrapass, or Wren. Though the implication of reducing emissions shouldn’t fall exclusively on individuals but more heavily on companies and organizations. It’s great to be conscious of it, though, and it certainly doesn’t hurt.
What organizations/we/you could do next 🤷🏽♂️
A lot to unpack here and lots of possibilities. Start with the low-hanging fruit, and start measuring. Find out where you’re at and take action from there. Remember, those highest emitting sources from earlier were transportation, production of electricity, and industry. Let’s be hyper-focused on the things we can control now. There is a ton of stable tech in these areas that are cleaner, more efficient sources. The following steps for an org could be purchasing renewable energy and supporting that market. Finding more efficient machines or vehicles that run on cleaner sources, like electricity, or sourcing higher quality, more sustainable materials for your product. The list is expansive.
What is something we, you or I, could do now? A great place to start is where we spend much of our time, our workplaces. We should engage our organizations and employers to urge them to focus on sustainability. Volunteer for a green team or ask leadership what the organization is doing for sustainability.
We’ll stop there for now. I don’t want to dive too deeply into this last piece, as it nicely sets up our future newsletters. Something to look forward to! 😊
In the meantime, let me know what your organizations are doing or plan to do in sustainability.
Dear reader, thank you again! I’m excited to continue producing these newsletters for all current and future professionals joining the climate space looking for a bit of a north star in their beginnings.
Be sure to subscribe for the next one!