The Carbon Bureaucracy Nobody Voted For

By Aiden Buzzetti

Most Americans have never heard of the International Organization for Standardization.

That is exactly how its architects prefer it. While Washington debates energy policy in public, a quieter project is underway in Geneva, one that could reshape how American companies produce energy and what it costs them to do it, without a single public vote being cast, a single hearing being held, or a single elected official being consulted.

Last September, the ISO announced a strategic partnership with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol to “harmonize” global emissions accounting standards. The GHG Protocol was developed by the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, two organizations funded by the full cast of progressive philanthropy, including Bloomberg Philanthropies, the MacArthur Foundation, and several European governments, to be the world’s dominant framework for corporate carbon reporting.

The partnership’s stated goal is to combine the ISO’s technical standards with the GHG Protocol’s corporate and supply chain frameworks into one unified system. This could embed a global emissions reporting regime developed by international bureaucrats into American regulation..

ISO standards are technically voluntary, but there is a well-established process by which ISO standards move from suggestions to requirements. Government agencies often incorporate them into regulations. Federal programs, procurement rules, and even contracts can all require accreditation consistent with specific standards. The ISO itself acknowledges that standards frequently become de facto legal requirements once incorporated into law or referenced in commercial agreements.

The GHG Protocol framework has a specific flaw that makes this coercive practice particularly dangerous for American industry. It measures emissions in aggregate, meaning a company that doubles its oil and gas production while cutting its emissions per barrel in half looks worse than a company that simply produces less. There is a bill in Congress, the PROVE IT Act, that has begun to push back on this by requiring intensity-based comparisons across countries. The intensity measurement evaluates output per unit of production, not the aggregate output, but the international bureaucracy is moving in the opposite direction. This hurts our domestic producers.

In addition, the GHG Protocol requires companies to estimate and report emissions from their entire supply chain: suppliers, transportation networks, product end use, and customer activity. Tracking emissions across networks a company does not own or control requires extensive modeling, third-party verification, and reporting infrastructure that large multinationals can absorb and small manufacturers cannot. Capital that could fund a new facility, hire more workers, or develop cleaner technology is redirected into compliance bureaucracy under this scheme. Ultimately, those costs show up in our energy prices.

What makes this especially troubling is the opacity of the process behind it. The ISO does not publicly disclose how national standards bodies vote. It does not release committee working documents or the names of the individuals driving these decisions. The people writing the rules that could shape American energy policy are deliberately shielded from public scrutiny. When the Trump administration moved to withdraw from more than sixty international organizations that had become vehicles for ideological overreach, the ISO was not on the list. It should be on the radar.

Theodore Roosevelt, whose legacy the Bull Moose Project takes seriously, had a clear view on the relationship between American resources and the American people. He wrote that “if we of this generation destroy the resources from which our children would otherwise derive their livelihood, we reduce the capacity of our land to support a population.” He was warning against short-term exploitation. But the principle runs the other way too. Allowing unaccountable foreign institutions to constrain how America develops its own resources, in service of a framework funded by progressive foundations and European governments, is its own form of failure. It is a failure of foresight, and it is a failure of sovereignty.

The United States has every right to develop and adopt transparent, scientifically grounded emissions reporting standards through its own democratic processes. What it should refuse is the laundering of activist policy preferences through international standards bodies designed to make those preferences look technical and inevitable. The GHG Protocol is not neutral. It is an advocacy framework, and the ISO partnership is an attempt to give it the kind of institutional permanence that will survive any single administration.

The SEC, the EPA, and Congress should be paying close attention to where this leads. The people who would bear the costs of this regime, workers, manufacturers, consumers, energy producers, deserve a say in how these standards are built.

Aiden Buzzetti is the President of the Bull Moose Project.

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.