VSEach product that we consume or manufacture should have, alongside its price, the weight of greenhouse gases (or “carbon”) that its production and consumption have emitted or emit; each company, each investment, should be able to indicate, alongside its financial performance, its contribution to decarbonization.
The Carbones sur invoices collective, which recently launched a “call for environmental competition », relies on a revolutionary instrument allowing accountants to measure the evolution of companies’ carbon emissions: the environmental accounting measure (ECM).
The MCE was invented simultaneously by several university teams in several countries (“E-Liability” in the Anglo-Saxon world). The idea is simple. If each company can read, on its purchase invoices, the quantity of carbon emissions from its suppliers, adds those from its manufacturing, and, in turn, passes this information on to its customers throughout the supply chain. production, the carbon weights of all products will be known, through a very simple calculation for each accountant. The calculations are reliable because they benefit from all the rules already applied by accountants for the establishment of accounts and monetary invoicing.
Change habits
The potential for decarbonization is immense: the MCE allows competition by carbon weights, which pushes them downwards, just as competition by prices acts on them downwards, throughout the production chains. Decarbonization is carried out continuously by letting everyone take their responsibilities to change their production, consumption or saving habits, in line with their values.
Today, very small businesses (VSEs) and small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) do not have an instrument to measure their basic environmental performance, due to a lack of a solution adapted to their limited means in terms of time, money and in expertise. But they all have an accountant who keeps their accounts: VSEs and SMEs can therefore all apply the MCE, thanks to the free and open-to-use tools offered by the Carbones collective on invoices.
A tutorial allows the accountant to master the MCE in less than an hour. A calculator allows it, once a year, to produce the basic environmental performance of the company, based on some data available to it to close its accounts: its turnover, the additions of its purchase invoices – we distinguish between energy and non-energy. An annual environmental assessment is only necessary if the company captures or emits carbon beyond the fuels burned, therefore if it is in specific activities such as livestock breeding or cement production.
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