The making of the corporate carbon footprint: the politics behind emission scoping

The key measurement standard used by the private sector to measure the carbon emission impact of an organization is the corporate carbon footprint. Known as the GHG Protocol, this standard was created in 2001 through a multi-stakeholder collaboration and is now used by thousands of companies globally. This article discusses the origins of the Protocol to better illuminate the politics surrounding the counting and measuring of carbon emissions as environmental intangibles that serve as a critical first step towards corporate climate action. Using archival research and interviews with key stakeholders, I underscore the actors involved and their motivations, which combined led to the development of certain internal accounting technologies, namely the practice of scoping. Scoping was proposed as a way to categorize emissions according to levels of legal ownership and control and avoid ‘double-counting’. Using Chiapello and Engels’ suggesting that integrating scoping was an effort to forge a compatibility between economic growth and climate protection and protect the financial interests of businesses by narrowly enclosing climate mitigation responsibility. To conclude, I discuss the lasting implications to measuring carbon with the corporate carbon footprint for meaningful climate action.