Bloomberg reports:

For an invisible, odorless gas, carbon dioxide turns out to be somewhat straightforward to track.

Businesses now routinely report their carbon dioxide emissions in three categories: Scope 1 for the direct burning of fossil fuels in generators, facilities, and vehicles; Scope 2 for purchased energy, such as electricity or heat; and Scope 3, the most complicated, for supply chains and customers.

For as much CO₂ as that system covers, it’s still incomplete. Many businesses pollute very little themselves but do much to aid and abet the emissions of others—think public-relations and advertising firms, lobbyists, consultancies, law firms, and other professional services. These businesses certainly contribute to carbon pollution by promoting high-emissions activities, and yet there’s still no way to quantify their responsibility for the damage caused by climate change.

Solitaire Townsend, co-founder of the U.K. PR firm Futerra, has one idea. She wrote an op-ed over the summer calling for universal recognition of these so-called “Scope X” emissions.

Since the Paris Agreement was finalized in 2015, Futerra has issued annual statements about the carbon makeup of its clients and signed up some 300 other PR firms around the world to do the same. The firm’s direct emissions footprint is “smaller than a kindergarten,” she said in an interview. Last year, according to its own reporting, about 1% of its annual revenue came from polluting industries.

This kind of transparency would be an essential part of Scope X calculation and reporting. Here’s another: InfluenceMap, a U.K. research nonprofit, has spent the last several years developing a methodology to score the effect companies have on climate policy, for better or for worse. Climate lobbying—or “Scope 4” emissions, as InfluenceMap once labeled them—is graded on an A to F scale that reflects a company’s “readiness for a transition to low carbon policy globally.” [Continue reading…]