Frankly I don’t think this is an accounting tool anymore. I feel like having something in scope 4 does not happen by accident. If I am emitting CO2 when running a bikes manufacturing company, that’s like a cost (I think the correct term is an externality) that I can measure and try to minimize, balance it with the profitability of the business, etc. Ultimately it is a goal to make my activity carbon neutral.

Of I have scope 4 emission it means that I am doing something, like improving the efficiency of fuel refining for instance. It is the activity itself that causes the problem in an unfixable way. The only way out of it is to stop the activity.

I struggle to find an example of an activity with scope 4 emissions that would still provide a the same function to society if it put that scope 4 at zero?

The problem of that scope is that I don’t see a good way to turn it into a hard number of tons of CO2. At least with kWh or kg-km of transport you can approximate, but how do you translate a scope 4 action into tons of CO2?

Yes, some studies are trying very hard, but it is difficult to make EVs looks worse than thermal cases almost in every case and every country. What drives me crazy is that the main criticism geared towards this technology would disappear if they were built in a different location with a renewable electricity mix (like Norway). It is not the product we ought to criticize, but the production ecosystem!

Scope 4 is pretty niche isn’t it? I would argue that scope 1 2 and 3 have a use to lower one’s impact on emissions. I would assume that a company involved in scope 4 activities probably do not care much about these anyway. Actually I struggle to find an example that would not be related to oil industry or oil lobbyism?