Episode 10: Tax Ourselves? Why Companies and Institutions Are Pricing Their Own Emissions
Internal Carbon Pricing Part I
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
What is "internal" carbon pricing? And why are more and more private companies and institutions using the tool to reduce their emissions? We hear from Elizabeth Willmott (Microsoft, Carbon Program Director), Anirban Ghosh (Chief Sustainability Officer, Mahindra Group), Kim Hellstrom (Strategy Lead, Sustainability, H&M Group), Alex Barron (Assistant Professor, Environmental Science and Policy, Smith College & Co-author, "Internal Carbon Pricing in Higher Education Toolkit"), and Long Lam (Lead Author, CDP's "How-To Guide to Corporate Internal Carbon Pricing").
Notable quotes:
On how to choose the right price for carbon emissions:
Alex Barron: “They should not get hung up on the carbon price that they pick because you can always change it later. If you are not including the carbon price in your decisions right now, you may effectively be using a carbon price of zero. And that's the one number that we know is not right.”
On the power of internal carbon pricing as a decarbonization tool:
Elizabeth Willmott: “We all have busy jobs, busy days, and many priorities and it's easy to lose the signal in all the noise of the work that we all do every day…We see the fee as an important power tool in helping establish the business case internally for our internal stakeholders to invest in de-carbonization strategies.”
On the business case for internal carbon pricing:
Anirban Ghosh: “One of the things any business wants to do is to reduce cost of operations and what the carbon pricing did is to give businesses a new lens to look at ways in which businesses can drive costs down or become more productive…We would have been looking for ways in which we could drive costs down. It so happens that there are many projects which drive costs down as well as drive emissions down at the same time.”
Further reading on today’s episode:
How-To Guide to Corporate Internal Carbon Pricing from CDP, Ecofys, Generation Foundation
Internal Carbon Pricing in Higher Education Toolkit, Second Nature
Microsoft’s Carbon Removal Program
“Putting a Price on Carbon Will Be a Game Changer for Us,” H&M
Mahindra & Mahindra Strengthens its Commitment to Achieve Carbon Neutrality
Review of internal carbon pricing and the development of a decision process for the identification of promising Internal Pricing Methods for an Organisation, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews
Photo by Sean Pollock on Unsplash