Camco International, has just bought BRADSHAW Consulting, a software business which helps companies in the UK and United States to find ways of reducing their carbon emissions, energy consumption and waste for up to £1.5m.

I'm all for computer software playing a bigger role in carbon accounting - if only because there might be less room for selective interpretation of what is a carbon-offset, as recent controversies attest whether over biofuels or tree-planting or something else.

Still, whilst you could theoretically keep track of all your emissions at the micro level, I still think there's one giant hole in carbon accounting; at the macro level. What about the energy input produced from bought-in goods?

That is to say, if a firm buys computers/electronics components online from www.anymanufacturer.com, have they any idea how many carbon emissions that took to build the at least 90% or so of components that were made in China or Taiwan?

Was that energy powered by coal, nuclear or hydropower?

Right now for those firms, these are impossible questions to answer. And for the forseeable future, rightly or wrongly, China has no intention of decoupling economic growth from rising carbon emissions. So whatever Western firms think they're doing at the micro level to reduce carbon emissions, their reductions will quickly get overtaken by China's record-breaking coal-fuelled economic growth.