The LOT mission depends on the belief that carbon atoms can be counted. It’s harder than it sounds. In this post we will think about carbon as a ‘currency’. Usually we think of money as currency, like US dollars, British pounds, or even Bitcoin.
A little bit further afield, you can think of calories as a currency. Some people count calories that go into their bodies, and they count calories they burn in a workout. Sometimes they can even count calories as part of a metabolism burn rate.
It’s important to note that calorie counting, for example, is usually inexact. I personally have noticed the the stair machine at my Planet Fitness is much more stingy counting calories than the elliptical machine. You can guess that I gravitate more frequently towards the elliptical!
At its foundation, LOT’s value to individuals depends on advancements in carbon counting along several fronts. These include:
- Centralization: Counting things is a lot more satisfying and useful when brought together in an “account”. Oftentimes we organize a project with a spreadsheet that counts and adds things. A bank account is kind of like a spreadsheet except the counting is done by an institution, and what it counts are actual currency units issued by a government.
- Longevity and Transferability: Currency is much more interesting and useful when the count is maintained over a long period of time–perhaps a lifetime or even longer. What if carbon credit and debt were transferable between generations or between friends? How about willing a carbon credit to a friend or contributing it to someone on the other side of the world?
- Universality: Carbon is not quite a currency today, but what if it were? It would be important for a wide range of participating institutions to acknowledge each other’s accounting. Potentially it would be important for a Central Bank of Carbon to emerge some day.
- Accuracy: Individualized carbon footprints are not well measured today, and are limited by several factors:
- Lots of knowable information is self-reported, like whether you recycle or not.
- Lots of well-measured information must be either manually provided or gathered directly from wary institutions, like how many kilowatt hours of electricity you use each month
- Lots of information is simply hard to know, like how much carbon was generated by the production, manufacture and shipping of the wool sweater I’m wearing.
- LOT aims to invest heavily in improving accuracy of carbon consumption. It also hopes to build heavily on the good work done measuring carbon offsets.
- Simplicity: Today it’s not easy to measure a carbon footprint, and LOT plans to cover ground to make it easier.
- Clarification: Of what does a carbon credit actually consist? Specifically (in anticipation of LOT’s mission of giving individuals a participatory method of offsetting carbon) I propose the separation of a carbon credit into a “reputational” and “economic” components. Individuals can claim a “reputational” credit when they do a project offsetting their carbon footprint, and make a claim that they are carbon positive. In addition, companies and other institutions may buy the same credit generated by the individual and claim the “economic” credit. This allows the company to claim tax deductions and claim carbon neutrality just as they do today.
We’ll write more about each of these ideas as we build up our app and the underlying accounting system that supports it.
