The work, and the auditor.
A senior environmental auditor with thirty years of practice. A research file that started as the homework for a separate product-development project and grew into the publication you are reading. The framework that came out of it. Why none of it is for sale.
Murphy O'Neal
Senior environmental auditor. Thirty years of practice across the environmental industries. Lead author of the DRL Thesis Codex and the companion documents published on this site. Currently based in Florida.
For the better part of three decades I have been the person engaged to read the file before a decision gets made — environmental impact assessments, life cycle reviews, regulatory compliance audits, sustainability disclosures, remediation files. Across that work, a particular pattern accumulated. Real progress on industrial pollution and material stewardship was being polished over for marketing purposes. Testing protocols were being designed to produce outcomes that the underlying science would not, on its own, support. The instruments that the public sees — certifications, ESG ratings, carbon-neutrality claims — were not produced by the science. They were produced by a different process, and the science was being asked to validate the result after the fact.
That observation accumulated for a long time without becoming anything formal. The DRL framework is the place where that thirty years of audit experience finds its full expression. It is the work I wanted to do, in the way I would do it, with the auditor's posture I have spent a career refining.
How this came to exist
No one paid me to do this work. I am not affiliated with a conservation organisation, an environmental advocacy group, or a competing industry. I have not been retained by anyone's law firm. What is on this website began as the research file for an industrial product-development project of my own — an aluminium modular housing system, with eight completed pilots across two countries, designed under a full-boundary accounting standard. The recomputation of timber buildings was a side effect of trying to choose the most defensible material for that system.
What I noticed, doing that research, was that the cradle-to-grave map for timber had pieces missing. About half a tree is below ground. Roots, soil carbon, the fungal network. Standard life cycle assessments do not count it. I asked auditing colleagues why. The answers were variations of "the standard says so." I went looking for what the standard actually says, and found that EN 15978 explicitly excludes the forest-side processes — soil dynamics, foregone sequestration, the consequences of clear-felling at landscape scale. The exclusion is a methodological choice, not the absence of data.
Then I started looking at the second half of the life cycle. End-of-life methane from mass timber in landfill. The peer-reviewed literature has been clear since at least Ximenes 2008. It is not in the building LCAs either.
I have been in rock quarries. I have been in mines and processing facilities. I have audited factories. When a factory has a chemical spill the size of the carbon flows we are talking about here, the spill is in the local news within days. There are investigations, lawsuits, permit reviews, executive testimony, reputational damage that takes a decade to repair. When a forestry operation removes the same amount of carbon from the same land — distributed across soil and atmosphere over the following two decades — almost no one notices. The factory and the forestry operation are doing materially similar things to the local environment. They face very different sets of rules. That is the divergence DRL is named for.
I built this site because what I found in my own research is, as far as I can tell, not in any single public place. Pieces of it are in academic journals. Pieces are in agency footnotes. Pieces are in lobbying disclosures. Pieces are in trade-press case studies and certification scheme documents. Nobody had pulled them together for a non-specialist reader. So I did. The recomputations are my work. The biases — if any — are mine. The calculator engine, every emission factor, every citation is on this site and can be challenged line by line. That is the standard I learned in thirty years of audit practice and it is the standard this site is built to.
One last thing. I am not anti-forestry. Short-rotation plantation grown for paper or cardboard, certified properly, harvested on a 7–15 year cycle, is the most defensible use of forestry that exists. The critique here is narrower: long-rotation structural timber harvested from primary or near-primary forest, accounted for under the biogenic-neutral convention, with the soil and end-of-life flows omitted. That is the configuration this site documents. It is not the entire industry. It is a particular slice of it that has, for the past fifteen years, received outsized regulatory and policy support relative to what the carbon arithmetic actually supports.
Disclosures of interest
The work on this site is published under my own name and at my own expense. The following are the relevant disclosures of interest, in the format an audit document would carry them in.
- I have not been compensated by any client, sponsor, advocacy group, conservation organisation, or competing industry to produce any document published on this site.
- I am the developer of the Anyplace Modular System, an aluminium modular housing system referenced in the Codex and in the Reagan companion paper as a worked example of full-boundary alternative construction. That system is patented in the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia (US9598852B2, NZ722998, AU2015349919B2) and has eight completed pilot projects. It is a legitimate competitive interest of mine in the building-materials market. It is disclosed in every document where it appears as a worked example. It is not, however, the reason for the DRL framework; the framework grew out of the research, not the other way around.
- I have not been retained by any law firm or litigation party in connection with any matter the DRL framework relates to.
- The site is self-funded. Domain registration, hosting, and document production costs are paid out of my own resources.
- This work has not been formally peer-reviewed in the conventional academic sense. It draws on peer-reviewed primary sources throughout, and is offered openly for review, citation, replication, and disputation. The feedback channel on this site is the working mechanism for that review.
Auditor's posture
Every document on this site is written in what I call auditor's voice. The voice is not stylistic. It is the working posture I learned in three decades of practice, and it is what makes work of this kind survive review.
The posture has three rules. First: name institutions only from their own disclosures, filings, lobbying records, or peer-reviewed outputs. The permitted verbs are disclosed, classified, funded, participated, authored, lobbied, voted, co-sponsored. The prohibited verbs are fraud, deception, knowing, deliberate, lied, conspired. Second: describe the configuration; never characterise intent. Configuration is observable. Intent is not. Third: trust the reader. If the configuration is bad enough, the reader will reach the conclusion on their own. The work is more durable when the reader makes the move, not the auditor.
The auditor's posture is what lets the work survive coordinated opposition. The Codex names many institutions by name. None of the naming is accompanied by an intent claim. Every fact is sourced to a public document. The result is a document that is hard to attack on its own terms — because its own terms are the terms the named institutions themselves used in their own filings.
How to reach me
The working channel for corrections, citations, disputes, requests, and feedback is the feedback page on this site. Every submission is logged with timestamp. Substantive corrections result in updates to the document and an acknowledgement on the page.
For media, legal, or institutional correspondence, please use the feedback channel and identify yourself in the submission. I read every submission.