Attention Carbon Scorers: Don’t Forget Barges
Carbon scoring—that is, measuring and assessing the various ways that certain activities emit carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases—is becoming more and more important for two reasons. It is being built into the prices of various goods and services, and it is being used to justify ever-increasing regulation of activities that produce emissions.
As long ago as 2001, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a joint effort by the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development to create worldwide standards for measuring greenhouse gas emissions, published its first set of corporate standards, introducing what it called Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions to the world. Scope 1 represents direct emissions that a company generates while performing its business activities. Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from purchased energy. Scope 3 emissions—the hardest to measure—cover indirect emissions in the value chain. Those early efforts helped familiarize the public with terms such as “net zero,” which doesn’t mean zero emissions, but that an entity balances the carbon emissions it generates with actions to reduce or remove an equal amount of emissions.
In the United States, the transportation sector has widely adopted a standard known as GREET, developed by the Argonne National laboratory. The acronym stands for Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy Use in Transportation.
Transportation is important because the emissions generated in moving a product to market are part of its overall emissions.
Apart from the inherent difficulty of getting exact and accurate measurements of activities and their emissions, these provisional and evolving measuring systems can be “gamed” in various ways both intentional and unintentional, leading to accusations of “greenwashing” by some monitoring groups. Hundreds of third-party groups exist for the purpose of measuring and monitoring emissions of various business entities. To date, there’s no single universally accepted method for carbon accounting. Instead, different industries or regions use different frameworks (e.g., GHG Protocol, ISO standards) to assess carbon footprints.
Barge advocates should never stop reminding customers that barging remains the cleanest transportation mode per ton-mile—yes, even with older engines. Including barges in your supply chain, if you are able to, automatically lowers your supply chain carbon score by whatever fair method is used.
As carbon scoring becomes more and more baked into our economy, its various measuring methods will continue to evolve and contend in the marketplace and in the halls of regulatory agencies. The data collection alone may be complex enough to daunt even the latest artificial intelligence. Still, whatever method triumphs or becomes a universal standard, it should highlight the environmental advantages of barge transportation.
