The technical working group for the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol’s rules for calculating emissions from electricity, a.k.a. Scope 2, will reconvene in September to “reconcile” more than 1,100 comments submitted about the organization’s pending overhaul of the standard.

That work will continue alongside GHG Protocol’s project to unify its corporate carbon accounting rules with the ISO 14064-1 standard from the International Organization for Standardization. A consultation draft for the unified framework is due in Q2 2027. 

The 122-page feedback summary of GHG Protocol’s much-anticipated Scope 2 overhaul, published July 29, shows very low support for the standards organization’s proposal to require companies to match their electricity consumption on an hourly basis, rather than annually, in order to claim emissions reductions. 

The Scope 2 framework creates a dual reporting structure related to purchased electricity: Location-based inventories reflect the emissions intensity of the grids where a company actually operates, while market-based emissions totals include deductions related to an organization’s renewable energy contracts. The update in process is the first big revision since 2014.

Just 22 percent of all those commenting on GHG Protocol’s feedback draft strongly favored the hourly matching proposal, which is part of the market-based accounting rules. Support was even loower among the businesses that submitted comments about the proposed update, at just 12 percent. The sentiment was especially negative among companies from Eastern Asia and North America.

Nonprofit organizations and academic representatives were split on the proposal: Roughly the same percentage of respondents from these fields supported hourly matching as those who opposed it.

The top three reasons cited for opposition were:

• Concern that the requirement would discourage corporations from buying clean energy
• Worries about administrative, data management and audit challenges
• Sentiment that hourly matching should be optional

Compromise sought

This feedback, along with divided views on other parts of the Scope 2 update, convinced GHG Protocol that changes are warranted. That mirrors a decision by the Science Based Targets initiative to make hourly matching for electricity option under its new corporate net-zero standard, for now. 

“The plurality of the respondents want a more rigorous standard,” said Tim Mohin, CEO of GHG Protocol, referring to the Scope 2 comments received by the organization. At the same time, “there’s a lot of differing opinions on where it should come out.”

The technical working group will meet to work out a compromise, which must be reviewed and approved by GHG Protocol’s independent standards board.

Mohin declined to discuss potential revisions or a timeline. One discussion that the group will definitely reconsider is the so-called “consequential” reporting approach for electricity, which would recognize corporate investments in energy storage or contracts for solar and wind electricity on fossil fuels-heavy grids (even if the company doesn’t have local operations).

That proposal was previously referred to the workstream for GHG Protocol’s emerging Actions and Market Instruments methodology, created to guide how businesses can report on emissions related to investments in supply chains or other areas, sometimes known as insets.

Energy strategists urged the technical working group to keep an open mind by allowing companies to report on an hourly basis if they choose, without making it a requirement. The strategists were encouraged by GHG Protocol’s renewed attention to consequential reporting, which they believe will motivate corporate investments in electricity grids that are still heavily fossil fuels-based.

“It’s as if there were two competing views here: one being between stricter, more environmentally impactful standards in the form of hourly matching and the other being less strict, less impactful,” said Gavin McCormick, co-founder and executive director at nonprofit WattTime, who was “encouraged” by the shift in dialogue. “I keep saying there’s a third option, which is cheap but more impactful options.”

Fewer unique businesses have signed power purchase agreements for solar and wind power this year, because high project demand stoked by data center companies is pushing prices higher and sustainability professionals want more clarity about the electricity accounting rules first, said John Powers, former vice president of global cleantech and renewables at Schneider Electric.

“Getting clear guidance and allowing solutions that are truly impactful, but also possibly feasible and affordable, is what we really need to do,” he said.

The post What’s next for the GHG Protocol’s Scope 2 overhaul appeared first on Trellis.

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.

Many companies are confused about whether they should purchase only removal credits. These are credits that pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere —  from planting trees to novel technologies, such as machines that pull CO₂ from the air. By contrast, other credit types reduce emissions at the source, by destroying methane emissions from a landfill, reducing deforestation or other methods.

Which type should your company buy? The guidance is mixed: The Science Based Targets initiative’s (SBTi’s) Corporate Net-Zero Standard historically defined a role only for removals, driving many companies to focus solely on this credit type. Meanwhile, the Oxford Offsetting Principles suggest a dynamic portfolio mix, consisting of a higher percentage of reduction credits today and transitioning over time to removals. 

Recently, the two have converged. SBTi revised its guidance and now recognizes reduction credits as a way for companies to manage responsibility for ongoing emissions in the near term (before their “net-zero” target deadline). Here’s how things stand now:

Wrong reasons to buy removals

Removals are ‘more beneficial to the atmosphere’

A classic analogy is that emissions fill the bathtub (the atmosphere), while removals are a drain removing water from the tub. But today, the bath is being filled more than 20 times faster than it is being drained. And the drain — which today consists almost entirely of forest-based removals — is about 2 billion metric tons of CO₂ per year, while the tap, mostly fossil fuel emissions, is 42 billion a year. In short: We desperately need to turn off the tap. Whether we stop a ton of CO₂ from being emitted or remove a ton, the impact on the level of water in the bathtub is the same.  

Removal credits have ‘higher greenhouse gas integrity’

There is no intrinsic quality difference between removal-based credits versus reduction credits. Calyx Global has generated more than 1,000 carbon credit ratings and finds a wide quality range within both categories. In short: Removal is not a proxy for integrity. Some removal projects are excellent, some are hollow, and the same is true of reductions. Removals and reductions are nearly equally distributed across the rating scale.

Planting trees, for example, is the top generator of removal credits. But many reforestation credits available today are from monoculture plantations designed for harvesting and selling the timber, not carbon removal. At the same time, reduction credits can be high quality. For example, reducing powerful greenhouse gases from old refrigerant equipment, particularly in countries that do not have facilities to destroy the material, is among the highest quality credit sources in the market today.

Right reasons to buy removals

We need to rapidly scale carbon removal capacity 

Although it is critical to “turn off the tap,” there are good reasons to support removals by investing in such credits. The goal, after all, is to reach global net-zero, and removals will be critical to offset residual emissions. Furthermore, the world is on a pathway that is likely to exceed safe climate change. To pull temperatures back down after this “climate overshoot,” the drain must get much bigger. Scientists estimate that the world will need to remove around 10 billion metric tons of CO₂ per year by mid-century to align with Paris Agreement goals. Building that capacity will take concerted effort for decades.

Right now the cost of novel removal technologies is prohibitively high. They need support to bring down their cost — what Bill Gates calls ‘paying down the Green Premium.’ According to Gates, “Unless we can bring these green premiums down by about 95 percent through innovation, I don’t think we’ll hit the goal of zero by 2050.” Purchasing novel removals credits contributes to reducing green premiums for technologies we will absolutely need.

Nature-based removals are good for people and the planet

Nature is responsible for more than 99 percent of carbon removal today. Managing and restoring ecosystems are time-tested and affordable carbon removal solutions. Furthermore, these solutions can have numerous benefits beyond carbon removal. Intact ecosystems protect water, buffer against floods and hold most of the planet’s terrestrial biodiversity. Tropical forests generate much of their own rainfall and seed rain far downwind, so losing them puts agriculture across whole regions at risk. For hundreds of millions of people, forests directly supply food, fuel and income.

However, often the best thing we can do for a forest is to protect it from destruction. Again, label isn’t a proxy for impact: A reduction credit that stops irrecoverable carbon loss often has a greater impact than a removal credit from planting trees. Restoration earns its place where deforestation pressure is low or restoration opportunity dwarfs what’s left to protect.

The way forward: How to decide on removals or reductions

This is not an either/or question: We need both types of credits. The more salient question is what is the right portfolio mix? Removals are more expensive, especially novel removals. Credits that reduce emissions, such as reducing methane from manure or destroying refrigerant gas, tend to be less expensive, but are often less charismatic and harder to explain.

So what should companies purchase? Our guidance is simple:

Spend what you can

The phrase “common but differentiated responsibility” is often used within international climate negotiations. It means every country should reduce emissions, but wealthier nations are expected to do more. This applies to companies as well: A more profitable company might have a higher percentage of removals in their portfolio, while a less profitable company could focus on relatively cheaper reduction credits. Find the portfolio mix that fits your budget. 

Focus on quality 

High-quality credits exist across both removals and reductions for those who work to find them. For example, super-pollutant credits (such as landfill gas) often sell for $5 to $10 a metric ton and can be very high quality.

Neither type of credit is superior; there’s no such thing as  “second class” climate action. The only useful differentiation is between the quality of the credits themselves — and between the companies who do something and those who do nothing.

The post Here are the right reasons to buy carbon removal credits appeared first on Trellis.

The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol is extending the timeline for big updates to its corporate carbon accounting standards, which haven’t seen major revisions for more than a decade.

The extension reflects both the nonprofit’s deepening partnership with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the flood of feedback that GHG Protocol received about proposed changes to the rules for calculated emissions inventories related to purchased electricity, which fall under the Scope 2 category.

GHG Protocol and ISO are aligning their respective standards into a unified framework that corporations can use to calculate their GHG emissions. The goal is to simplify corporate emissions reporting as disclosure regulations come into effect in more jurisdictions — from California and the European Union to Japan and Singapore.  

“The real paradigm is moving from a voluntary system — which is still very much with us today, through things like the Science Based Targets initiative — into this new mandatory world where we’re seeing jurisdiction after jurisdiction take up the mantle of mandatory climate disclosure,” said Tim Mohin, who took over as GHG Protocol’s first CEO on June 1.

What’s affected

Virtually every major organization uses GHG Protocol rules to assess and report their emissions. Its work is developed through a partnership between the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). 

ISO is the world’s largest standards organization; its work reflects 177 member countries.

The ISO-GHG Protocol partnership will align the ISO 14064 series with the GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard. Both methodologies define how corporations should create comprehensive inventories for operational emissions (Scope 1), purchased electricity (Scope 2) and indirect sources including supply chains (Scope 3). 

A public consultation draft for GHG Protocol’s high-level corporate standard was due in the second quarter, but it has been postponed in anticipation of a first draft for the unified standard in the second quarter of 2027, Mohin said. The unified standard is set to take effect in 2028.

GHG Protocol and ISO will follow their existing governance guidelines during the development process for the unified standard, meaning that stakeholders for both organizations will have a say in the final edition.

Updated Scope 2 workstream

Alongside the unification work, GHG Protocol’s Scope 2 technical working group is planning an in-person meeting in September to “reconcile” the close to 1,100 comments it received on proposed changes to the carbon accounting rules that cover electricity, a major source of emissions for many companies. Close to two-thirds of the responses came from corporations, industry groups and sustainability consultants.

“The plurality of the respondents want a more rigorous standard,” Mohin said. At the same time, “there’s a lot of differing opinions on where it should come out.”

The Scope 2 framework covers a dual reporting structure: location-based inventories, which are based on the emissions intensity of the grids where a company operates; and market-based emissions, which also include an organization’s renewable energy contracts.

Themes from the feedback, which GHG Protocol published for review, included:

• Very low support for a proposal that would require corporations to match their electricity consumption on an hourly basis, on the same electricity grid region, in order to claim market-based emissions reductions.  
• Interest in a provision that would only allow companies to make voluntary clean electricity claims if the projects added capacity on grids underserved by renewables.
• An emphasis on feasibility, with many respondents encouraging a phased introduction of the new rules. 

It’s unclear whether another consultation draft of the proposed Scope 2 changes will be published after the technical working group’s meeting, Mohin said.

GHG Protocol plans to align the Scope 2 workstream with the one for the emerging Actions and Market Instruments standard, which proposes methods for companies to report on the emissions-related impact of their investments in climate solutions and their use of mechanisms, such as purchases of sustainable aviation fuel certificates. 

“It’ll get pulled into the overall package,” he said. “A lot of our stakeholders have been asking for exactly that.”

The feedback cycle for the Actions and Market Instruments methodology closed early this year, and GHG Protocol plans to publish a summary in the near future. The first formal draft is due in the third quarter.

The timeline for GHG Protocol’s standard covering corporate value chains, a.k.a. Scope 3, may be updated. The public consultation draft is due in the second half of 2026, but may be adjusted to align with the ISO-GHG Protocol integration work.

Stay tuned

ISO and GHG Protocol are also collaborating on a new standard for a product-level GHG accounting standard that builds on two existing frameworks: ISO 14067 and the GHG Protocol Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard.

The end result will be a co-branded standard, one that will help corporations prepare for the enactment of national carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAMs), such as the one adopted by the EU. CBAMs are a form of import fee that consider the embodied carbon intensity of hard-to-abate materials such as steel.

“We believe that an international standard for the carbon intensity of products is absolutely necessary,” Mohin said. “We also know that the [existing] standard needed a lot of updating and work, and that’s what’s going on today.”

The joint technical working group met in mid-July, but timelines for the joint standard haven’t yet been released.  

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Here’s a question that’s been keeping me up at night: Are sustainability professionals — all of us, individually and collectively — working at the wrong level? That is, are we making incremental changes inside a shareholder-primacy system that isn’t going to fundamentally shift on any timeline that matters, while the actual root causes sit outside our job descriptions entirely?

That’s the juicy topic that Solitaire Townsend and I tackled in this week’s episode of our “Two Steps Forward” podcast. Fortunately, my co-host had a lot to say on the topic. I think I came away from the conversation able to sleep a bit better.

The random acts of greenness problem

Most of the work we do exists in the middle of a bell curve — the big, fat hump between the incremental (“first, do no harm”) and the consequential (“transform the entire system”) — what I’ve taken to calling “random acts of greenness”: real work that doesn’t necessarily add up to a coherent theory of transformation. Some product changes here, some supply-chain work there. Facilities, employee engagement, philanthropy — disconnected dots that don’t necessarily move the needle in today’s capitalism, where shareholder returns can trump sustainability professionals’ purpose and passion.

For many, sustainability can feel like a Sisyphean task.

Townsend’s advice isn’t to feel bad about that. It’s to stop expecting external validation for it. Reducing emissions and building resilience won’t likely vindicate any of us within our own professional timelines, she said: “We will work our entire careers for a world we don’t get to live in” — the same, she noted, as the suffragettes who never got to vote or the civil rights leaders who didn’t live to see the country’s first Black president.

Narrative identity

Her counter to despair is a framework called narrative identity: treating the current moment — the self-doubt, the sense that you’re not doing enough — as the “cave” stage of a hero’s journey, a test where the only failure is quitting.

I pushed back: A hero’s journey is a personal tale, and this fight is a collective one where none of us is the hero. We’re bit players in a collective drama.

But we landed in a similar place from different directions: The point isn’t whether any individual effort is sufficient, but rather whether you keep going.

Filling in the boxes

The best evidence either of us has that incremental work eventually adds up: renewable energy. Townsend grew up in coal-heated government housing; she now lives in a solar-powered home (as do I) — a complete energy transformation within a single generation.

I had my own version of this story: research that a group of us did 25 years ago into what it would take to make solar cheap, ubiquitous and dominant. Our work produced a 3×3, nine-box roadmap — technology, policy and finance crossed-referenced with standardization, education and aggregation — that we envisioned would take a Herculean effort and decades to bear fruit.

But solar now costs as little as 30 cents an installed watt, well below the $1-per-watt target that once felt like a moonshot. Getting there involved naming the goal and plotting a path. We just kept filling in those nine boxes without much evidence along the way that the approach was working. Until it did.

Beyond incrementalism

This isn’t to argue that a plodding incremental approach by itself is sufficient — at least not without one or more moonshot goals. It’s an argument for separating the question of whether your work matters from the question of whether it feels like it’s making a difference. Those turn out to be different questions.

We also got an update on a topic we’ve covered before on this podcast: Townsend’s “spheres of influence” framework — developed by her firm, Futerra, in partnership with Oxford Net Zero — which would enable companies to claim credit for climate influence beyond their own emissions. Think: product impact, investment influence, policy advocacy and other things. “Spheres” has now been adopted by ISO for its forthcoming net-zero standard, ISO/DIS 14060, currently open for public consultation. Suggested KPIs will be forthcoming at Climate Week NYC in September.

Two Steps Forward is available wherever you get podcasts, including on Trellis.net. Find past episodes at twostepsforwardpodcast.com.

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New data centers purpose-built for artificial intelligence are stoking a natural gas generation boom, forcing double-digit emissions increases at Amazon, Google and Microsoft. But Elon Musk’s frontier AI company, xAI, has the most potential to cause the new pollution, according to a new tracker from climate communications firm Climate Power.

The Data Center Air Pollution Tracker considers planned and operational data centers as listed by research firm Cleanview, evaluating their carbon-intensity using grid pollution metrics from the Environmental Protection Agency, the United Nations and two media organizations, The Financial Times and The Guardian.

The data is useful for corporations ramping up their AI and cloud services usage who want to keep tabs on how those decisions might impact emissions reduction commitments. 

What the scores mean

The eight companies on Climate Power’s list were rated from 1 to 100, based on two factors: how many of their projects plan to use (or already use) behind-the-meter natural gas generators and the electricity mix of the local grids where their data centers are located. A grid that produces 200 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour (CO2/MWh) was considered the cleanest; the least clean grids produce 1,000 lbs. CO2/MWh.

A score of 100 would indicate that the company uses only grid-connected power sources from the world’s cleanest electricity grids. 

Amazon was closest to that elusive number, with a score of 68 and an average of 716 lbs. CO2/MWh. It has the lowest ratio of behind-the-meter natural gas projects of the eight companies.

It was followed by Microsoft with a 64 (757 lbs. CO2/MWh) and Google and Meta, which both earned a 61. Google’s lbs. CO2/MWh score was 857 versus 802 for Meta.

Anthropic and Open AI, the two most widely used frontier AI models, were close behind with a 59 and 56, respectively. Oracle received a 51, although its average carbon intensity was lower than Google’s or Meta’s.

xAI’s score was just 6. Its Colossus data center in Memphis uses smog-producing gas turbines that are largely unregulated.

The information is updated on a daily basis; these scores were current as of July 24. 

Why it matters

The great AI data center buildout has inspired fierce community opposition not just because of their voracious electricity appetite — an estimated 194 gigawatts by 2035, or 20 percent of U.S. power production — but because the Trump administration is encouraging the use of new coal and natural gas to run them rather than clean generation sources.

That runs counter to Climate Power polling from June that suggests voters are far more likely to favor data centers that promise to use clean energy for their operations. Projects that used coal or natural gas had far less support among voters than those linked to solar or wind.

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