If you’re reading this, then you are interested in learning more about pollution and ways to reduce it. You want to know how much you contribute to global warming, and you want to understand all the ways in which your lifestyle affects our Earth. Hopefully, you also want to take the next step of doing something about it.
I recommend the Institute of the Environment at Berkeley’s Cool Climate Carbon Calculator, or the Nature Conservancy’s Carbon Footprint Calculator. Have your monthly expenses, your most recent energy bills, and your car’s yearly mileage and miles per gallon ready before you start. Results are provided in tons– tons of carbon you produce and emit into the earth’s atmosphere each year.
The best calculator I found during my research is part of a site called Low Impact Living. Click on the “Calculator” tab at the top of the screen to get going. Your results display across the top of each page as you progress. The final screen provides suggested actions to “green-up” your home are presented. Checking the box for any projects you have already completed improves your overall emissions score. Check out “What is a LILI?” under your final score (mine was 37) for more information.
LILI does not calculate tons of carbon monoxide emissions per person per year. It gives a score based on a U.S. household average of 100 points, and with the goal of helping people find easy ways to reduce their carbon footprint and their score. This calculator is the most detailed and complete of those reviewed. Households that use the LILI Carbon Calculator have the option of saving their results, and improving their scores with every environmentally-friendly project they complete.
Here are links to several online Carbon Footprint Calculators, and comments on their performance:
An Inconvenient Truth: Calculate Your Impact. This calculator gives you an indication of how well you are doing compared to everybody else. It also allows you to take immediate action in reducing your carbon footprint. Unfortunately, the first question about vehicular emissions is out of date. My 2007 Nissan Versa, one of Newsweek’s Top Ten Fuel Efficient Cars, was not listed in the options. Also, the calculator only considers your transportation and home energy use in its analysis of your carbon footprint. These are important, but they do not provide a complete picture. My estimated footprint was 5.9 tons of Carbon Emissions per year, with the Altima as my false vehicle selection. The average in the U.S. was put at 7.5 Tons.
The Nature Conservancy: Carbon Footprint Calculator. This calculator lets you decide between calculating your individual impact, and your household impact. It breaks down your footprint into several sections, including recycling, food consumption, energy consumption, vehicles, etc. It is up to the test-taker to honestly represent their lifestyle habits, however. The results are calculated several ways on the last screen of the test, breaking down each section of questions by average responses. My estimated footprint was 15 tons of carbon per year. The average in the U.S. was put at 27 tons. The world average is stated as 5.5 tons. Test-takers are given several options for offsetting their carbon footprint, tips for reducing impact, etc.
The Carbon Footprint Calculator. Self-represented as “the web’s leading carbon footprint calculator,” the user must select a country, and then click through several sections, remembering to calculate each page’s answers before continuing. The test was fast, and information about offsetting emissions, changing lifestyle practices, etc were easy to access. There is a section for businesses as well. My estimated footprint was 8.6 tons of carbon each year. The average for my country was reported at 20.4, and the average for industrial nations was about 11 tons per person per year. The website also informed me that to combat climate change, the world wide average needs to be reduced to 2 tons. Wow.
The Carbon Counter website and Personal Calculator. This gives you a choice between estimating your footprint, and getting an exact calculation, via tabs above each section of the test. There are only three sections. My score was 10.72 tons of carbon emissions each year. This website places the U.S. average emissions at 16.64 tons per year, and the world average at 4.4 tons. The site recommends that I donate approximately $16.00 a month to projects that reduce CO-2 in the environment to offset my footprint.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Individual Emissions Calculator. This website provides some interesting facts about the average response for each question, based on the number of people in your household. It also calculates the amount of carbon emissions for each answer you provide. The calculation did not take multi-vehicle households into consideration, and the results were for my entire household, rather than my individual contribution to global warming.
The University of California, Berkeley Institute of the Environment’s Cool Climate Carbon Footprint Calculator. This is my favorite calculator. It shows the average number entered in each space, and takes a moment to calculate the number you type in for each answer. It does not take organic food methods into account, but seems more exact than the other calculators. Final calculations show the world average for each category, the U.S. average, the average for other households like mine, and finally the calculations for my individual household. The Cool Climate Calculator tells me that my household emissions are 45% of other households like mine, but that we emit 220% more than the global average. My emissions are also calculated out in barrels of oil, and in acres of forest. You will want to click on the button to “find out what’s in each category” before you enter your budget calculations.
If you’ve located a detailed and helpful Individual or Household Carbon Footprint Calculator that I didn’t review here, we’d love to learn about it! Write your own Factoid, and share important information online.
