Before we dive into the Time Value of Carbon (TVC), it’s helpful to understand a related concept from finance: the Time Value of Money (TVM). TVM says that the money you have today is more valuable than the same amount in the future.
The reason? Cash in hand has earning potential. Whether you put it in the stock market, a savings account, or under your mattress, how you manage your money today influences its future worth. In short, TVM helps us understand how the value of money can fluctuate over time.
Now, let’s apply this idea to a critical part of combating climate change: understanding the impact of carbon.
Just like the Time Value of Money, the Time Value of Carbon (TVC) emphasizes that acting today is more impactful than doing it at some point in the future. Specifically, TVC helps us understand why removing one ton of CO2 from the atmosphere now is significantly more valuable than removing that same ton years down the line. As carbon builds up in the atmosphere, it accelerates climate change, making each passing year more critical than the last.
Delaying action compounds the problem—similar to how failing to invest your money means you miss the opportunity to grow it faster over time. However, unlike money, when carbon compounds it leads to exponentially worse outcomes. In other words, the longer we wait, the harder and costlier it becomes to combat climate change effectively.
At Artyc, the Time Value of Carbon is especially relevant because we deal with refrigerants—gases with a massive environmental impact.
For context, most cooling systems, from refrigeration to HVAC, rely on potent greenhouse gases like HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons). Refrigerants like R-134a, commonly known as Freon, are short-lived in the atmosphere but up to 1,000 times more potent than CO2 in their warming effects. TVC underscores why addressing refrigerants now prevents irreversible damage. Waiting means that these gases will continue to escape into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change, and making it more costly and harder to reverse.
Linking back to Artyc, our mission is to tackle this head-on by offering immediate, tangible solutions like replacing noxious refrigerants with battery-powered, reusable shippers. With this approach, our goal is to minimize emissions from the cold chain now, when it matters most. For us, TVC is more than just a theoretical concept—it’s the lens through which we prioritize immediate action.
Stock gasses, such as CO2, build up in the atmosphere at a much quicker rate than they can naturally be absorbed. In contrast, HFCs behave more like a flow than a stock. As a result, since these gases have shorter lifespans, we have less time to absorb them once they’re in the atmosphere, making prevention far more effective than after-the-fact removal.
For businesses, this means that factoring TVC into decisions is crucial because waiting only increases the challenges and costs of addressing climate change. The sooner emissions are reduced, the easier it is to avoid the buildup of carbon that will make future efforts much more difficult and expensive.
Taking action today not only helps mitigate risks down the line, but also ensures that companies are better prepared to meet regulatory demands and consumer expectations.
While the analogy between carbon and finance is useful, it certainly has its limitations. For example, with the Time Value of Money, you’ll likely come across the term “discount rate”—a formula that quantifies the difference in value between today’s money and future money. When we apply similar thinking to carbon, the key difference we run into is the concept of tipping points.
In other words, delaying carbon reduction could push us past critical thresholds where damage is irreversible—unlike financial losses, which can eventually be recovered. This makes early action on carbon not just preferable, but essential.
When discussing the importance of TVC, it’s also key to remember that climate action doesn’t occur in a vacuum. By this, we mean that every decision made by governments, companies, and individuals contributes to the overall system. Our challenge today is that many of these decisions are made in isolation, leading to fragmented efforts that don’t add up quickly enough to avoid dangerous tipping points.
As a result, taking TVC into account and implementing strategies that focus on rapid and high-impact carbon reduction become even more critical. Simultaneously, we need to act with urgency and target solutions that have the greatest ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—especially given the complex nature of global coordination. The faster we act, the more we can reduce the risk of crossing irreversible climate thresholds.
As vital as it is to address carbon emissions, we have to keep in mind that it’s still just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Other forces, like biodiversity loss, land use changes, and methane emissions play critical roles in our climate system as well. It’s also at this point in the discussion where the concept of Global Warming Potential (GWP) really comes into focus. GWP is a metric that compares the warming impact of different greenhouse gases relative to carbon dioxide over a specific period.
For example, refrigerants like HFCs often have GWP values exceeding 1,000. So, while they stay in the atmosphere for less time than CO2, their warming effect is far more potent. The high GWP of certain gases highlights why immediate action is so crucial. As mentioned above, in the case of HFCs, we have less time to absorb them once they're released.
This is why, at Artyc, we use both TVC and GWP to guide our approach to cold chain shipping and sustainability. Our focus is on immediate, actionable solutions—like replacing high-GWP refrigerants with battery-powered reusable shippers and real-time tracking—to minimize carbon emissions now. Additionally, by targeting high-GWP refrigerants, we reduce not only CO2 emissions but also the impact of other potent greenhouse gases.
TVC is a useful concept to think about how individuals and organizations should apply their time, energy, and resources to tackle climate change. It offers a way to measure the impact of a particular solution across a system, and over time—two variables that can be forgotten in many impact analyses. When you extend TVC to a time-bound-GWP analysis, it creates an apples-to-apples comparison of various solutions and a framework for understanding their impact. The key point is that by responding now, we can avoid the compounding effects of delayed action and steer clear of the most dangerous climate scenarios.
For us at Artyc, we’re passionate about working on projects that can be executed today, without waiting for the perfect regulatory environment or subsidies to align. By taking into account both TVC and GWP, we can see that it’s not just about what we do—it’s also about when we do it.
And when it comes to climate action, sooner is always better.
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