thanks

First, think like an Input-Output Analyst to answer the question "How can I measure, or meaningfully estimate, the total upstream negative CO2 load (nett carbon footprint) of all inputs, direct and indirect, from all processes, organisations and staff and their suitably apportioned upstream CO2 loads, direct and indirect, repeating until the some of all CO2load increments at a particular 'degree of remove' is less than your acceptable margin of error by the amount of maximum variability in error you are prepared to accept.?'

If you can't do that, then you don't have a meaningful project. You will just join the ranks of so-called economists that are happy to make courageous approximations and assumptions, on the basis of the lack of data, and work with what is available.

This introduces a serious data bias. The gathering of all data is driven by the purposes for which it is gathered. Our data is gathered, and its value assessed, to the extent that it serves the needs of the system of economic relationships and governance which is paying for it to be gathered. That direct beneficiaries of the value generated by the system from which you need to gather data benefits from the lack of the type of information that you need, in the face of people like you wanting it.

Or you can join the ranks of people demanding that governments claiming to represent the people, and to have been fairly elected by them, force all of commerce and their own governments activities to report fully on all their activities so that all the questions we need to analyse and plan for effective climate control can be answered.

The answers and the uses to which people like yourself will put that data in terms of policy recommendations will necessarily deeply affect the manner in which all economic activity takes place as it will deeply affect the goals and hence metrics by which it is measured and managed. That in turn will deeply affect the manner in which governance and public administration itself operates in relation to commerce and the civil/public service structures, as opposed to the people they claim to act in the interests of. That in turn deeply affects the relationship of political activity and its interactions with their public and the commercial activities which utilise the labours and consumptive capacity for their own benefit of both their public and their own administrations. This in turn deeply affects the relationship between politicians and their access to the power to control and influence, whatever their espoused and private goals for doing so may be. They, on the whole will not like change. People with any particular skill set that actively serves them well will always resist any changes which devalue that particular set of skills and endangers the benefits which they receive from using them.

Marlon, you just want to do your Masters thesis. If you are true to the tenets of academic integrity you have to seek the axiomatic basis (the truths to be worked with) that lie at the root of your questions. If you do this with integrity you quickly see that in behavioural 'sciences' every question, asked within the current paradigm, is essentially an act of revolution and potentially disruptive at planetary scale.

My advice, if you just want a good job, a nice home and a quiet life, is to put on neo-liberal blinkers like most, employed, policy advisers around the world and ignore everything I have just told you. Make the politically acceptable assumptions and approximations, and linkage models, required of you and smile as you present the conclusions of your thesis and receive your First Class mark, knowing that the results are not much better than a thumb suck. No one will call you out, least of all - very likely - the Professors marking your work!