10 Tonne Rule

Caution: This is a work in progress.

Andy Gove, the founder of Intel (one of the most successful companies of our generation) once said "Whatever you measure, improves". [1]

The UK Government has declared a climate emergency [2] and had committed the country to being carbon neutral by 2050 [3]. Many activists would like to see that happen sooner, perhaps as soon as 2025 [4].

In order to know how well we are doing towards becoming a zero carbon economy we need to measure how much carbon is being released by the services we buy. This is currently being done on a sector level [5] but we need more fine grained measurement in order to improve. After all, what you don't measure you can't control.

In order to reduce carbon emissions we need to choose solutions that use less carbon over ones that use more for the same amount of money spent. The only way to do this is if we measure how much carbon is associated with different solutions but this is currently hard for providers to do accurately because the skills and data are hard to obtain.

To create the right incentives for measurement, allow Government to make good purchasing decisions and to begin to grow the necessary thinking and action within the economy, we are proposing the 10 tonne rule to start within government procurement as follows:

• Cabinet Office asks for minimum and maximum tons of CO₂ released per year of the service, as well as cost estimates on all Government procurement tenders
• Simple tools are provided to help bidders obtain a the range of estimates of the CO₂ associated with the delivery of their bids
• The range on the estimates can be as broad or narrow as the bidder likes, they must make their own commercial decisions as to the effort to put into the estimates
• Any estimate that has a range that overlaps 10 tons of carbon gets reported transparently in an OGL [6] licensed spreadsheet on data.gov.uk, much like the current £25K spend data

The columns of the spreadsheet might be:

• Name of supplier
• Description of service
• Number of years service is active
• Minimum CO2 released per year
• Maximum CO2 released per year

Seperate columns could be added for any offsetting that the bidder uses to mitigate the impact, or the locations in the world where the CO2 is released for example but the aim would be to report the raw impact of the service.

This is good because:

• Whatever you measure improves, and we'd be measuring tons of CO₂ until the number of tons is zero by 2050.
• Decisions can be made based on carbon as well as cost
• Interested parties can scrutinise the data and exert pressure where they feel they need to
• Government can hold bidders to account if they are overly polluting
• There is an exceptionally low barrier to entry. A bidder can simply state a very wide range on their estimate for the delivery of their service. For example a simple IT service could state a carbon impact of between 0 and 1 million tons of CO2 (even if the real figure is just 5 tons) and that would be perfectly acceptable. Over time as skills improve, some companies will provide more accurate estimates to gain a competitive advantage. Another company might specify a range of 4-11 tons per year for example. As more accurate estimates occur, journalists and the public who scrutinise the 10 tonne spend data might well ask why Government chose a service that could potentially release 1 million tons of CO₂ when there are competing services available for 4-11 tons. Companies won't want to appear vague for long, particularly as the trend to look as green as possible continues, this will drive skills in carbon reduction in the market
• Other Government departments would likely follow the Cabinet Office lead - after all no department would want to be seen to be the least green
• Once suppliers get used to thinking about and reporting on their carbon impact they would be likely to choose lower carbon options themselves in their own supply chains. Suppliers that offer lower carbon solutions would be at a competitive advantage and might advertise their low levels of carbon impact outside of Government tenders too. This would have a knock-on effect in the wider economy.

Why might Cabinet Office get on board?

• The UK governement has been and continues to be a world leader in Transparency and Open Data. We are also the first Government to announce a date for a zero carbon econonmy. The opportunity to publish 10 tonne carbon spend would cement the UK's position at the forefront of both the transparency and climate movements and continue to set an example to the rest of world.

What do you say Cabinet Office? Are you prepared to start this snowball rolling?

What do others think? Would the incentives envisioned here work the way they are designed to in practice? What could be tweaked to ensure they do?

About the authors:

• James Gardner - An early advocate in the transparency and open data movements who worked with Cabinet Office and Defra on data.gov.uk before the establishment of GDS. Former lead of the CKAN open data portal at the Open Knowledge Foundation that now powers over 200 Open Data portals worldwide.
• Chris Adams - Your bio here!

To the extent possible under law, James Gardner has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to 10 Tonne Rule. This work is published from: United Kingdom.