A world with CO₂ caps

Excerpt

There is today a general agreement within the life cycle assessment (LCA) community that there are two types of LCA (e.g., Tillman 2000; Guinée 2002): These are often called attributional and consequential LCAs, although other terms sometimes are used as well (Ekvall and Weidema 2004). Consequential LCAs study the consequences of a choice. Ideally, the system boundaries and the data used should, then, reflect the actual changes taking place as a consequence of the choice. These may depend on the scale of the change and also on the time over which the changes occur. Attributional or accounting studies aim at describing a system as it actually was (or is, or would be) at a specific time. In such studies, the system boundaries and data should reflect what was actually happening in the system. A number of papers have been published discussing the methodology and case studies of consequential LCA (e.g., Andrae et al. 2007; Dalgaard et al. 2008; Ekvall and Andrae 2006; Frees 2008; Hofstetter and Norris 2003; Kløverpris et al. 2008; Lesage et al. 2007a, b; Sandén and Karlström 2007; Schmidt and Weidema 2008; Thiesen et al. 2008; Thrane 2006). …