Started thinking about this after reading about scope 3 emissions (supply chain carbon). For personal finance, I’m curious: can I track the carbon cost of my spending alongside the financial cost?
For example: flight to NYC costs $500 and emits ~1000 lbs CO2. Local pizza costs $15 and emits ~5 lbs CO2. In Beancount, I could tag both with metadata (amount, CO2 impact). Then query: “what was my total spending vs total emissions?” Or: “which categories have the worst CO2/dollar ratio?”
I haven’t seen anyone do this. Is it possible in Beancount’s current design? Would need to embed CO2 impact somehow (external database lookup? hard-coded in ledger?). Curious if anyone’s tried this or if it’s silly.
I’m seeing this from clients now. Not “track my carbon,” but “we need ESG reporting for investors.” Large companies have to disclose carbon footprint (regulatory pressure). For bookkeepers managing multi-location businesses: if you’re building them a chart of accounts, should you include “scope 1 emissions,” “scope 2,” “scope 3”? Or is that a separate system? The messy part: carbon accounting requires data from vendors (supplier emissions, shipping methods) that your business doesn’t generate. Can Beancount bridge that gap, or stay pure financial?
Have you tried storing CO2 impact in the transaction metadata and querying it with BQL? Prototype that first before worrying about data sources.
None of my clients ask for this. But I remember when nobody asked for cloud accounting integration, then suddenly everyone did. ESG reporting feels the same—niche now, mandatory in 5 years. If I start building it into chart of accounts templates now, I’m ahead.
SEC is already pushing carbon disclosure. It’s coming whether we build for it or not.