Accounting for the Expanding Carbon Shadow from Coal-Burning Plants

Steven Davis of the University of California, Irvine, and Robert Socolow of Princeton (best known for his work dividing the climate challenge into carbon "wedges") have written Commitment accounting of CO2 emissions, a valuable new paper in Environmental Research Letters showing the value of shifting from tracking annual emissions of carbon dioxide from power plants to weighing the full amount of carbon dioxide that such plants, burning coal or gas, could emit during their time in service.

This makes sense because of the long lifetime of these plants once built -- typically 40 years or so -- and the long lifetime of carbon dioxide once released.  (I'd love to see some data visualization experiments on this idea from Adam Nieman, building on his work showing the volume of daily CO2 emissions from cities and the like.)

Accounting for the Expanding Carbon Shadow from Coal-Burning Plants