Give and Take

Parties may relate to each other by giving and taking parts of their carbon budget.

Parties may "give" a part of the carbon budget to others. Those others may "take" it. Taking what was not given by the peer would be stealing, and is forbidden by the rules of accounting.

When a single party description holds both "give" and "take" values, then they will first be resolved internally, to conclude whether the overall effect is one of "give" or "take" or possibly neither (for zero outcome). This leads the action towards the other party. It is unusual for a party description to toggle between effective "give" and effective "take" behaviour.

The "give" and/or "take" values may occur in "peer" and "special" parties, as well as in values in "parent" and "child" nodes.

Capturing Policy in Models

It is possible to model carbon emissions as they result from policy. This could be used in proofs or simulations to test if the World (or a party) is doing a good job in general.

TODO: Choose from options:

  • The most complex form is to encode the policy in (say) Python3. These might be passed through a Monte Carlo simulation to see if all goes well.

  • Much simpler is a linear local approximation, which connects incoming "take" to outgoing "give". This is likely a differential that indicates how each "give" value depends on all "take" values. It would be trivial to detect if that can lead to negative carbon budget.

  • Slightly more complicated models might incorporate tensors or polynomials. Be careful not to smear the budget over parties that need to work it out together; always direct to retain responsibility.

Note that models can be updated at any time with a new upload. Their value is mostly in simplifying the handling of small changes, and to avoid the necessity of immediate responses to upstream changes, which may cause a ripple effect and possibly even infinite cycling of updates.

Note that a model implies that a party that relies on a "take" is made responsible of doing these computations based on the "give" values elsewhere in the network.

Especially the localised linear model can be easily combined into an overall model that can be quickly analysed to keep the carbon budget non-negative.