There is a pernicious thing in purchasing carbon dioxide offsets where folks will complain when avoidance is blended into their removals. Avoidance, especially where the mode is a replacement of fossil fuel consumption with electricity, is 100x better than removal in terms of impact over time, yet.
If Microsoft, offsetting their annual emissions rather than cleaning up their own emissions, purchased ton for ton avoidance credits annually they'd snowball net emissions reduction over time instead of treading water.
When your emissions are certainly under-reported already treading water is bad.
Instead, perhaps because the messaging is cleaner, Microsoft purchases annual removal offsets because it makes the storytelling clear even if the impacts are sub-optimal.
It feels better with removal than counterfactual emissions avoided; but the removal is the avoidance you pay for every year.
Highly recommend this report by Joe Romm which makes the example even worse. He basically found that in that specific case Norway had already CLAIMED those credits, and MS/Norway were double counting. bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/web.sas.upen...
Microsoft and Orstad? Yeah. Nations were a mistake ;-)
Only half in jest. Modern industrial supply chains can have 200 factories in 12 countries producing your iPhone, offshoring industrial emissions is a thing that happens even within a single value chain, we're not equipped to observe this.
The 2021 Article 6 conversation at the end of the IPCC session made it clear public credit was the non-negotiable objective and real world impact a bit of a distraction in the space.
How can a Nation assert they own their emissions when multi-nationals already evade local taxes on revenue?
The 5 largest chemical companies all have annual emissions on the order of Germany. In terms of people you have to influence in order to effect a change: company scope counting might be better for owning the end to end.
Ultimately, it is all one environment, despite what some might try to sneak by.
Upfront I'm not super clear on the Scope 1/2/3 details, but imagine yes with multinationals its incredibly complex. To be fair - countries are a lot more permanent entities than companies. The power dynamics and enforceability etc. are also quite different (for better and for worse).
