An Aspen Institute Gathering on Carbon Accounting Will Make History

But what will that history be?

Photo by Caleb Kastein on Unsplash

Last week I was very pleased to hear about a gathering next week (February 24-27) at the Aspen Institute to discuss carbon accounting. The invited participants are a very distinguished group of people from companies, investors, NGOs, think tanks, and academia. It will make history. The only question is what that history will be.

A Timely Meeting

This is a very timely meeting. The prevailing narrative on this topic is one of this being a competition between the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol) and the E-Ledgers approach, now associated with the new NGO Carbon Measures. This is silly. These methodologies do different things, and each is important. For the GHG Protocol, established in 1998 by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), the company is the unit of analysis. The GHG Protocol enables companies to report on their entire Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, data that are useful for investors and other stakeholders, and the company itself. In 2023 97% of S&P 500 companies( which represent about 82% of total U.S. market cap of $71 trillion from around 4.700 public companies) disclosing to CDP (86%) used the GHG Protocol.

For those of you who aren’t accountants (like me), let me run the numbers for you 🐥: 500x.97x.86=417 companies (rounding down). It’s hard for me to imagine these companies one day saying to their shareholders, “Hey guys, big news! We are ditching the GHG Protocol which we’ve been using for years and are going to start using this new thing called E-Ledgers which nearly nobody really understands—including us 😍!”

The unit of analysis for the E-Ledgers approach is the product, not the company, and is a way to measure the carbon intensity of a product. The E-Ledgers Institute was started in 2021 and Carbon Measures launched on October 20, 2025, and how has 23 members. On September 9, 2025 the GHG Protocol announced a cooperation with ISO to develop product-level standards for carbon accounting. While the underlying methodologies are different they can complement each other. At a high level, E‑Ledgers can operate as an implementation and data‑transfer layer that uses ISO–GHG Protocol LCA/PCF methods to calculate product footprints, then moves those footprints consistently along supply chains.

Amy Brachio and Carbon Measures

On October 8, 2025 I wrote about the good things that could happen if advocates of company level and product level carbon accounting work together to develop an overall framework for carbon accounting and reporting. I also wrote about the bad things that would happen if this becomes a competitive one due to the usual issues of institutional protectiveness, individual egos, and misunderstanding.

Then less than two weeks later Carbon Measures, led by CEO Amy Brachio was announced. We first met on LinkedIn, then met in New York in person in December, and this past Monday I published this interview I did with her. I encourage you to read it. It will give you a good sense of who Amy is as a person (growing up in Minnesota, college at the University of Alabama, and her career at EY), why she took on this role, the importance of product level carbon accounting for decarbonization (the basis for carbon intensity standards which will drive demand for low-carbon products), and how she sees the relationship between E-Ledgers and the GHG Protocol. In brief, contrary to much that is being said and sometimes augmented by the nature of press coverage, Carbon Measures isn’t trying to replace the GHG Protocol and is not trying to stop companies from reporting on their Scope 3 emissions. I am a big fan of Amy and what she’s doing as the CEO of Carbon Measures.

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Contributions to Product-Level Carbon Accounting

The E-Ledgers approach, basically applying principles of financial accounting, data science, and statistical analysis to carbon is based on the work of a number of people including Thomas Annicq, Mike Berners-Lee, Robert Kaplan, Mika Morse, Karl Richter, Karthik Ramanna, Stefan Reichelstein, and Ulf von Kalckreuth. The names most associated with are the accounting professors Kaplan (Emeritus from Harvard Business School) and Ramanna (at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford), the co-founders of the E-Liabilities Institute. I am most familiar with their work because they have been prolific authors. They are professors 🧑‍🏫 , after all, and that’s what us folks do !

But learning about the work of these other people reminds me of a course I took in the Sociology of Science when I was getting my Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard. When an idea’s time has come it pops up independently and and more or less simultaneously in a few places. The classic example is the Calculus discovered by Isaac Newton and Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz. Other well know examples are evolution by natural selection by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace and the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray. What’s obvious from these examples is that typically all the credit only goes to one person. Maybe the one with better marketing 😉?

Closer to home here are some examples of other contributors to the basic idea of product-level carbon accounting, in alphabetical order.

· Annicq (co-founder of Oneshot.earth) and Morse (founder of Goldfinch Strategies and former policy counsel to SEC Chair Gary Gensler) cofounded the Climate Liabilities and Assets Initiative to put climate on the balance sheet using existing financial accounting standards

· Berners-Lee of Small World Consulting has established Carbon Commons, whose purpose is “setting a common and open standard for carbon accounting so that the level of emissions from different products and companies can finally be compared and used by different companies as products travel across a supply chain.”

· Professor Reichelstein (Emeritus from Stanford Business School) has published extensively on carbon accounting and is the co-founder of the Carbon Accounting Standards Initiative (CASI) whose purpose is “Integrating corporate- and product-level carbon accounting for reliable and decision-useful performance assessments”

· Richter, who lectures at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, through his company EngagedX developed a prototype software approach to product-level carbon accounting in 2019 and an won an award from the Scottish government for implementing an E-Ledgers approach before Kaplan and Ramanna published their paper in HBR

· Dr. von Kalckreuth, whose work predates Kaplan and Ramanna by a few years, is a senior statistician at the German central bank and has shown how input-output (I-O) analysis can help improve reporting under the GHG Protocol.

Just how all the piece parts of the GHG Protocol, E-Ledgers, other variants of product-level carbon accounting, and the use of input-output models would go together to develop a common global framework for carbon accounting and reporting is a complicated, but doable, technical exercise. As is always the case with standard setting, tradeoffs and choices must be made. Standards are a social construct, not something derived from the laws of physics. In “The False Conflict Holding Back Emissions Accounting,” Richter provides an excellent discussion of how all the different piece parts can fit together. It is a very technical and comprehensive analysis and worth reading for those who who want to understand the details of how a framework can be developed which serves carbon data needs for products, companies, and macroeconomic analysis.

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A Tedious and Tendentious Tirade

But since standards are a social construct, it will come down to the willingness of people with different views and different skills (e.g., accountants, data scientists, macroeconomists, and internet experts) to work together. This is always the difficult part. Richter (who knows Kaplan and Ramanna) remains “an ardent supporter of their technical work” but notes they created a “public perception that they picked a fight with the GHG Protocol instead of seeking cooperation. Unfortunately, their seemingly combative style is drawing attention for the wrong reasons.”

I agree with Richter on both counts. I have the utmost professional respect for the important intellectual contribution made by Kaplan and Ramanna. I also think their preposterous and persistent vendetta against the GHG Protocol is unnecessary and unhelpful. It’s not good for them, for gaining acceptance of the E-Ledgers’ idea, for product-level accounting in general, for Carbon Measures, for fostering a collaborative spirit, and for developing a rigorous global comprehensive framework for carbon accounting and reporting. The GHG Protocol isn’t going to disappear—nor should it. Broad-based adoption of product-level carbon accounting, obviously very important, will be determined by an institutional social process, not technical fiat by any particular expert(s), whatever their pedigrees. And it doesn’t require or will benefit from the death of the GHG Protocol.

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What Will Happen in Aspen?

The Aspen gathering has the potential to hit the reset button on the current narrative, which is a competitive one, and lay the foundations for a collaborative one. I see three potential outcomes for this meeting, each of which will make history in a different way.

The first, and worst, is that it devolves into some kind of name calling contest where people through verbally adroit faux polite insults at at the ideas of others, sometimes thinly masked personal insults (although the inside crowd will see through this). Given the quality of the people there I think the probability of this is very low.

The second is that it becomes a four-day boondoggle elite gab fest in the Rockies of people largely talking past each other, pretending to listen when they really aren’t, and focusing on defending their own views rather than looking for ways to integrate their views with others. This will all done rather deftly and politely. These are all smart and accomplished people 🐥! As a realist and as someone who’s attended a lot of meetings like this, I’m afraid there’s a decent probability here. Ironically, due to the diversity and quality of the people attending this event since I’m sure all of them will have legitimately strong views which they will articulate very well.

The third possibility, less probable than the second one but the one I’m obviously hoping for, is that this gathering makes history for getting all of us started down the path towards a global framework for carbon accounting and reporting. Will this be easy? Of course not. Standard setting is always messy and contentious. I’ve lived this experience this myself as the founding Chairman of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) through the establishment of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) and now watching them and EFRAG’s Sustainability Reporting Board (SRB) work towards harmonization and interoperability to create a global baseline.

I am looking forward to early reports of the Aspen Institute gathering next week. I am hoping it will go down in history as the beginning of a broad and deep collaboration among everyone involved in carbon accounting and reporting. Decarbonizing the world is more important than a standard setting contest which no one can win. And leaving all of us losers in the fight against climate change.