It also matters what the company does -- like, what direct and indirect impact does it have upon the physical economy, in terms of what the company does to generate a profit.

Extreme thought-experiment: suppose our company is just one person with a pen and notebook and a head full of ideas and a bicycle. Suppose this one person in our company is rather clever, and invents a new technique to make it cheaper to extract certain oil reserves that would not previously have been profitable to extract.

To the right company, in the right context, this clever new idea could be valuable. Let's suppose a second company estimates that if the technique works, they can use it to extract 10,000,000 additional barrels of oil that they previously would not have been able to extract, at a profit margin of 6% instead of 0%. So roughly this might be worth something like $50 / barrel * 10 million barrels * 6% so $30m in profit to the second company if everything pans out.

Maybe lets say that the second company estimates that it will cost $5m in testing to see if the clever idea works when scaled up, and they estimate there's a 50% probability the test will succeed before they've spent the money to try it out. So they might be happy to buy exclusive rights to the idea from our company for $1m -- if it doesn't work out, they lose $1m + $5m, if it does work out, they make $30m - $6m = $24m. Pretty good odds if you've got a lot more than $6m to fund speculative R&D projects.

So our company has a $1m sale, and we haven't directly done anything except thinking and talking to people.

But if our idea pans out, the value of our idea is based upon being able to extract and sell +10,000,000 barrels of oil that weren't otherwise going to be extracted and sold on the market and eventually consumed by some other part of the physical economy. Let's assume that there's no greenhouse gas impact involved in extracting the barrels (hah) or transporting them (hah). The greenhouse gas footprint in consuming all 10,000,000 barrels is something like 4.3 million tons of CO_2. We don't know if the idea will pan out yet, so the expected impact is half that -- lets call it an even 2 million tons of CO_2.

So, arguably, the carbon impact of our company is 2 million tons of CO_2 . Or something like $ 0.5 of revenue per ton of CO_2 , which is maybe two orders of magnitude a worse trade compared to what people might think a reasonable carbon price was [+]. But superficially our company might look very environmentally friendly: it's just one person goofing around all day with a notebook, cycling to meetings with executives or other researchers.

Part of this environmental impact attribution is book-keeping. In the above example I've blamed all emissions from the (assumed) consumption of 10 million barrels of oil to our one little company with one clever idea. Is that "fair"? Maybe part of that environmental impact should be blamed on the company that does the extraction, or the end consumers of the oil. Maybe if we didnt extract that oil, someone else would have extracted 10,000,000 barrels of slightly more expensive oil, which would have had a similar impact, but put a little more pressure on some consumers to switch away from oil to other cheaper energy sources...

[+] this is maybe getting a bit silly, but in this example it might even make sense for environmental groups to fundraise and pay $5m to outbid an oil extractor and buy exclusive rights to your idea so that no one can actually use it to extract additional oil, if that $5m buys 10,000,000 barrels of oil that stay in the ground.