While I’ve already written quite a bit about calculating our footprint for certain activities like flying and buying offsets, I’ve frankly been overwhelmed by the thought of estimating the footprint for our entire household. So, this past week, I bit the bullet and tried a few different sites. Before turning to specifics, I have a few takeaways from the experience.
First, the comparison will almost always be apples to oranges across sites. For example, one site I tried based the footprint estimate on transportation, home energy, and waste. By comparison, the other site used travel, home energy, food, goods, and services as the inputs. Even within categories, things get murky. While I forget which is which, I know one site accounts for air travel, the other does not. These discrepancies lead me to believe that taking the maximum estimate across sites, or in some way adding them, is the most sensible approach. Really, there’s no harm in buying extra offsets, especially since we all really need to get to a point where we are not only net carbon neutral, but also reducing the carbon generated.
Second, and contrary to expectations, the most useful part of the exercise wasn’t obtaining an estimate of our total household footprint. Rather, the biggest benefit was that some sites helped identify ways for us to reduce our energy consumption. Even better, each reduction was accompanied by an estimate of how much a given action would impact our footprint. For example, is it better to turn down the A/C, or wash our clothes on cold? Some of the sites provided information on exactly those sorts of tradeoffs, and let us know how much a series of actions would reduce our overall footprint (see below).
After having gone through the process once, I would recommend two carbon footprint calculators, one from the EPA, the other from The Nature Conservancy. Both do a good job of showing how particular actions can reduce your energy consumption, including helping prioritize the most impactful actions. Plus, the EPA version tells you how big an impact the actions you commit to would make if 100 of your friends took the same actions over five years.
At the end of the day, one site put our footprint at around 8 tons of CO2, the other at 44 tons. Quite a difference. In a future post, I’ll try to lay out our rationale for how much in CO2 offsets we plan to purchase, including whether to pay as you go for something like flying versus settling up at one point during the year (maybe when/if tax returns come?).
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