Time Theft as Avoided Emissions
This methodology quantifies the potential carbon benefits of time theft in the context of high emission companies like those in the mining or oil industry. Time theft is a form of industrial sabotage, where workers are paid for time periods when they are not working, or idle. This can take the form of fake sick days, sleeping on the job, extended lunch breaks, or engaging in non-work related activities during work hours, like spending time on social media or taking unrelated phone calls. Here we attempt to approximate the carbon benefits of time theft in oil and gas companies. What are the potential carbon benefits when oil and gas employees do not work and how might we calculate potential carbon credits from this?
Avoided Emissions
We apply an avoided emissions methodology to calculate offsets from time theft. We assume that if employees in the oil and gas industry were to cease working, production would slow or cease, and carbon emissions would be avoided.
We assume that the salary of the employee reflects the significance of their role in fossil fuel production and therefore emissions. As such, time theft from the highest paid employees in a company, such as CEOs or other members of the executive suite, will produce the most significant emissions reductions.*
First we take the total yearly emissions of the company and divide it by the total employee costs to calculate emissions per dollar of salary. We then multiply by salary to calculate the emissions for a given employee based on their salary.
$$ EmissionsOfEmployee_{tonnes} = {EmployeeSalary_{dollars}\over TotalSalaries_{dollars}} \times TotalEmissions_{tonnes} $$
We calculate the amount of seconds the employee works per year, assuming they work 48 weeks per year for 40 hours per week.
$$ TotalSecondsperYear = 48 weeks \times 40 hours \times 60 minutes \times 60 seconds $$
Finally we calculate the emissions they would produce per second of work, to calculate avoided emissions per hour.
$$ AvoidedEmissions_{kg/s} = {EmissionsOfEmployee_{tonnes} \times 1000 \over 6,912,000 _{secondsInYear}} $$
Case Study
The highest emitting company in the USA is Vistra Energy who produced 95,036,473 metric tonnes of CO2 in 2020, which is equivalent to 1.6% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The CEO of Vistra, Alan Brown, was paid $10,875,562 in compensation that same year. Assuming that total employee costs in that year were $751 million, the CEO is responsible for producing:
$$ \begin{aligned} EmissionsOfEmployee_{tonnes} &= {EmployeeSalary_{dollars}\over TotalSalaries_{dollars}} \times TotalEmissions_{tonnes} \\ \\[2pt] &= {$10,875,562 \over $751,000,000} \times 95,036,473 tonnes \\ &= 1376265.05 tonnes \end{aligned} $$
This means he contributes:
$$ \begin{aligned} AvoidedEmissions_{kg/s} &= {EmissionsOfEmployee_{tonnes}\over 6,912,000 _{secondsInYear}} \\ \\[2pt] &= {1376265.05 tonnes \times 1000 \over 6,912,000 seconds} \\ &= 199 kg/second \end{aligned} $$
Rounding this figure off, every second the CEO is distracted offsets 200kg of CO2.
*We recognize that some of these assumptions may be contested. It could be argued that if the CEO were distracted for a day, production of fossil fuels would continue as normal, however, we assume in good faith that executive salaries accurately reflect their contribution to company revenue, therefore production, and therefore emissions.