Time to recycle my best publication. A joke that the Economist published, in the wake of the Enron and World.com debacles. Short version:
An economist is someone who is good with numbers but lacks the creativity to be an accountant.
It turns out there are undereducated and humor-impaired economists out there who didn't get the joke. So if I have caught any more of them in my trawl, be assured that one of my offended correspondents reflects my own position and experience perfecty. She said,
"I'm an economist and I think my modelling requires a great deal of creativity. "
Thank you for the excellent analysis. I think it makes compelling reading. But then I make accountant jokes, so YMMV.
My grandfather learned accounting at the dawn of the 20th Century at Colorado College, and went to work in banking. Not bad for a kid from a homestead. When the farm-bank crisis came, he was right there to liquidate banks. His daughter introduced me to the debits and credits when I was a child.
That guy in the opening scene of Grapes of Wrath, auctioning off the Joad homestead, would have worked for my grandfather if the Joads had been a few miles north, in Kansas.
In the energy industry, for many years firms have tracked their exposure to carbon prices, or more generally to carbon pricing (think of a set of books valued in Tonnes Avoided CO2, debit, Tonnes Atmospheric CO2, credit, firms who think the $/TAC rate will increase work their balance sheet to optimize their exposure. Which is to say: maximize Avoided CO2. Good incentives, and a driver in the ongoing transformation of our energy systems. Hat-tip to Duke Energy, which started running away from coal a long time ago. And to the Berkshire-Hathaway utilities, similarly.
This approach has jumped to the forestry industry.
I saw it [t]here first maybe a decade ago: Sierra Pacific Industries, the largest owner of private forests in the United States, put a doomsday-counter on their website, reporting the Tonnes Avoided C02 held in their forests.
More recently, I learned that the United States Forest Service had stopped doing the books for its new Forest Stewardship Agreements in carbon terms. Of course this was bad news delivered by a dedicated first-responder in the climate crisis.
Except that USFS is the only participant in these agreements that can be required to ignore the dominant value in forest restoration. The State (where else but California would one expect to find carbon Economics in practice), with its carbon fund as Bank, and the various other private and public partners) keep following the carbon-capture logic, and the USFS acts as a passive cooperator.
I am an accountancy hobbyist. My role here in the sticks is above all as a trusted advisor on the political economy. I am the wrong person to explain the accounting, or after that the role of the forests-in-recovery as a reserve asset in a carbon-capture economy. We need help. ("We" being the logging communities, who are not immediately obvious as trusted stewards of the forests our forebears destroyed, and have often been despised in the power centers of Marin and Sonoma Counties, especially given the voting proclivities of many-not-all of us).
Catnip!
Time to recycle my best publication. A joke that the Economist published, in the wake of the Enron and World.com debacles. Short version:
An economist is someone who is good with numbers but lacks the creativity to be an accountant.
It turns out there are undereducated and humor-impaired economists out there who didn't get the joke. So if I have caught any more of them in my trawl, be assured that one of my offended correspondents reflects my own position and experience perfecty. She said,
"I'm an economist and I think my modelling requires a great deal of creativity. "
Thank you for the excellent analysis. I think it makes compelling reading. But then I make accountant jokes, so YMMV.
My grandfather learned accounting at the dawn of the 20th Century at Colorado College, and went to work in banking. Not bad for a kid from a homestead. When the farm-bank crisis came, he was right there to liquidate banks. His daughter introduced me to the debits and credits when I was a child.
That guy in the opening scene of Grapes of Wrath, auctioning off the Joad homestead, would have worked for my grandfather if the Joads had been a few miles north, in Kansas.
LOL
Truly great piece! Thank you!!
Not embracing FDR and the New Deal is one of the modern Democratic Party's biggest strategic errors.
And now, with serious intent.
In the energy industry, for many years firms have tracked their exposure to carbon prices, or more generally to carbon pricing (think of a set of books valued in Tonnes Avoided CO2, debit, Tonnes Atmospheric CO2, credit, firms who think the $/TAC rate will increase work their balance sheet to optimize their exposure. Which is to say: maximize Avoided CO2. Good incentives, and a driver in the ongoing transformation of our energy systems. Hat-tip to Duke Energy, which started running away from coal a long time ago. And to the Berkshire-Hathaway utilities, similarly.
This approach has jumped to the forestry industry.
I saw it [t]here first maybe a decade ago: Sierra Pacific Industries, the largest owner of private forests in the United States, put a doomsday-counter on their website, reporting the Tonnes Avoided C02 held in their forests.
More recently, I learned that the United States Forest Service had stopped doing the books for its new Forest Stewardship Agreements in carbon terms. Of course this was bad news delivered by a dedicated first-responder in the climate crisis.
Except that USFS is the only participant in these agreements that can be required to ignore the dominant value in forest restoration. The State (where else but California would one expect to find carbon Economics in practice), with its carbon fund as Bank, and the various other private and public partners) keep following the carbon-capture logic, and the USFS acts as a passive cooperator.
I am an accountancy hobbyist. My role here in the sticks is above all as a trusted advisor on the political economy. I am the wrong person to explain the accounting, or after that the role of the forests-in-recovery as a reserve asset in a carbon-capture economy. We need help. ("We" being the logging communities, who are not immediately obvious as trusted stewards of the forests our forebears destroyed, and have often been despised in the power centers of Marin and Sonoma Counties, especially given the voting proclivities of many-not-all of us).
I love the smell of debits at dawn!