Green Accounting Expert Bruce McCabe: How Many Stars Does your Breakfast Cereal Have? (Part 2 of 3)
Submitted by EnergyTechStocks.com
Shopping for food in a giant supermarket chain like Britain’s Tesco is about to take on a whole new dimension. Within a couple of years, every jar, package of breakfast cereal and so on will carry a label showing that product’s “carbon footprint,” according to Bruce McCabe, “green accounting” expert and managing director of Australian IT research firm S2 Intelligence Pty Ltd. in Sydney.
At first, McCabe told EnergyTechStocks.com, the system will be something simple, quite possibly a five-star system where products produced with the fewest emissions generated carry a five-star rating. But as information technology for measuring every step in the manufacture and marketing of that product becomes increasingly sophisticated, McCabe expects labels to more closely resemble an ingredients label on a food item.
But instead of being a measure of the sugar, salt, etc. in that box of breakfast cereal and so on, these sophisticated carbon footprint labels will be a precise measure of the amount of CO2 released during each and every phase of that product’s life, McCabe said. Every aspect of that product’s life will be accounted for - from the growing, mining, etc. of the raw materials, to the various stages of production or manufacturing, to the impact of distributing the finished product. Eventually, McCabe said, literally every energy- consuming aspect of that product’s life will be precisely measured and accounted for, right down to the electricity used by the lights in factories and warehouses.
As complicated a task as this will be for businesses - requiring in many cases sophisticated new computer networks that will cost a major multinational firm upwards of $50 to $100 million - the advent of carbon labeling likely will mark the beginning of a new age where energy efficiency is maximized throughout the developed world. This likely will result in brand new calculations of how much more oil, coal, natural gas, etc. countries really need to consume in order to keep up with rising standards of living.
All of which could throw investors’ assumptions for how much a given energy company is worth right out the window!
Coming tomorrow, March 28, in Part 3 of `Green Accounting’ - Which IT companies are going to make lots of money meeting the demand for green accounting
