[apillar]

This reminds me of something a friend of mine told me, he works for a small company that hauls equipment for oil and gas drilling. Several years back, the state decided to require every company even peripherally attached to oil and gas drilling to “report” their greenhouse gas emissions, even though there is no state law regulating such emissions. The problem is, the reporting form contained absolutely no formula or method to calculate these emissions. After weeks of fruitlessly trying to figure out how to calculate the number, when he called the state DEP, the only advice they would give is that we could hire an environmental consulting firm (for $100 an hour) to conduct a “greenhouse gas assessment”. Finally in exasperation, the company owner said “Give me the form!”, he pulled a number out of thin air, wrote it down, signed his name and sent it in. Never heard a peep back from the DEP. I wonder how many other companies use that method.

[palmer]

It is an interesting exercise in pointlessness. To get the exact number for some ingredient, let's say some corn, you have to add up all the fuel used to make the corn. But really you also have to add the fuel used to make the equipment to tend the corn and harvest it. Plus the fuel used to extract the raw materials used to build the equipment and the portion of the energy used in the factory amortized over the life of the equipment.

But really you need to add the difference between the carbon burning of the employees working on the corn, the equipment, the repairs, the raw material extraction etc and how much carbon they would burn if they sat at home and did nothing. Then you have to figure out how much more Corn Flakes they needed to eat because they came to work and burned those extra calories. Now the calculation has a bit of recursion in it.

Or they can write a random number on the form and send it in.

[hattend]

That’s called the POMA method

Pulled Outa My A$$