International Carbon Units - The Carbon Currency

Jamie

CRAGger Hackney CRAG Wychwood

I think it’s a good idea but there’s lots of related stuff out there already. I’m presuming you see this as something primarily for awareness-raising rather than as fully scientifically robust to form the basis of a policy?

I’d be interested if you could explain how you see ICUs relating the following:

http://www.carbon-label.co.uk

http://amee.cc/?page_id=66

The biggest challenge will be applying the idea broadly enough quickly enough, without getting bogged down in different calculations. I’d also be very keen for you to avoid having to ‘start again’ in rating different products/activities. The whole area is pretty fraught with difficulty (the Carbon Trust’s methodology has been criticised quite a lot), and I’d want to know that you were working directly with a body like the GHG Protocol – http://www.ghgprotocol.org – to do the ratings.

If the idea was to gain momentum, I think there’d be a risk of lots of time/effort being put into it under current policies, whereas what we really need to do is direct all efforts towards implementing new policies immediately rather than continuing to ‘prepare the ground’. In that sense I’d want to know which policy you would ultimately be advocating (http://teqs.net or http://www.capandshare.org for example) as that would likely have a bearing on how you calculated the carbon/which areas of the economy you focused on etc.

Do you plan to approach Government with this suggestion? It seems to me that you are basically calling for mandatory carbon labelling at the point of sale now, in a way that allows easy comparison between different products and services. I think you need to be very clear about what your role is – aside from lobbying Government to adopt it, I can’t really see what other practical measures you can take to develop it much past the point you’ve got already.

In general, I like the idea.

Jamie

david

website team CRAGger Sevenoaks

Is not the ICU just a rebranding (or redefinition) of the carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2eq) (not to be confused with equivalent carbon dioxide (CO2e)!)? This is already widely accepted and used by governments and in international treaties, so I don’t see the use of introducing yet more terminology and confusion.

Your definition also does not address the issue of the variable lifetimes of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In the case of CO2eq, for example, it is common to assume a 100yr timescale to assess the effect of other gases. What timescale does the ICU assume?

The other half of the scheme is embedded carbon labelling. How will you deal the issues of the expense and uncertainties associated with life-cycle analysis of individual items (eg. as discussed in Carboon Footprint Labels on products. Good for CRAG footprints?)? Its is a massive task and I very much doubt we have the time to implement this.

I’d argue we already have a popularly accepted generic unit: “Carbon”, with symbol C, defined in CO2eq, and measured in kg or tons. Why bother changing?