Accounting issues: What is not accounted for in the project?

Carbon accounting relies, first of all, on invoices. Therefore, everything that is not captured in monetary transactions falls out of view. Exceptions to this are related to movement: Visitor traffic, the travel of nGbK employees to workplaces, and transport of material from A to B, as this can be investigated and easily estimated on the basis of addresses on receipts.

·       Many trips were unpaid: when someone brought us along in a private car during research trips; community mobility when larger groups volunteered to coorganize events; small trips forgotten, or trips we didn’t financially account for—such as picking things up or moving around in Berlin during event preparations (by e-bike or car).

·       Emissions from the production and disposal of the food we consumed during our research trips, meetings, community events, and residencies. We also surely did not account for the emissions from the food that fueled our work on this project.

·       The energy used in our home offices and mobile workspaces, powering our devices (the working group mostly worked outside of nGbK).

·       The emissions related to our online meetings (Zoom or Webex); an estimated 200 meetings over the course of the project would amount to around 100 kg of CO₂.

·       Translations and text work using AI, all of our online research, Google searches, Google Maps, Google Drive, and so on.

·       The CO₂ impact of the preexisting structures that were the focus of our project—power plants, repositories, mining—which we did not build but engaged with thematically.

·       All the public transport tickets we lost…

·       All the things we forgot …

·       All the things we did not document. If we had documented everything in the project, Elie would be able to reconstruct a much fuller picture.