Thursday, August 31, 2006

Personal greenhouse gas (CO2) calculations

Greenhouse gases are a topic of much discussion, and many people are left at the end wondering, "What can I do?" or "How bad am I doing?" To answer the second question here are a bunch of personal calculators that will estimate your emissions. I included my own data for comparison, and comments on how the figures may be skewed. Scattered through many of the calculators was tips and suggestions on what you can do, in some cases updating emissions to what they would be if you adopt the changes.

No site I found seemed interested in some of the most critical CO2 data: how much meat you eat (1 pound of beef uses more water than not bathing for 6 months), how far your food traveled (average distance 1900 miles), how many pounds of trash you produce (2-4 pounds per month). Some calculators were interested in how much you recycle (I'm at 80-90% recycled/reused) but none of them asked how much trash was produced. No one asked how many trees per yard or per person were planted, nor the number of indoor house plants used to offset CO2. No site claimed to include other greenhouse gases like Nitrous Oxide or Methane.

reference.aol.com 3697 pounds per year.
My utility bills are split 2 ways. This calculator adds CO2 for each person in a family, instead of dividing the resources among people. We share refrigerator use, and that is the best way to cut down on power consumption. Using household numbers for utilities, 6156 pounds. I think their explanation is simple, but they don't make it clear that they provide per household data, instead of per capita data. Public transportation wasn't included.

ClimateCrisis 300 pounds per month(?)
The biggest flaw is they don't say what they measure. Looking at the calculation page, they compared usage based on month. Public transportation wasn't included. Electricity production based on region was used, so they adjust figures based on how my region gets its power. (hydroelectric, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind/solar in that order.)

GreenHouseImpact

This site doesn't offer a complete calculator, but talks about how to calculate facts and figures. Also has some great minor suggestions.

ConservationFund .82 tons per year=1640 pounds (see below)
I couldn't input my data. I use a lot less trash than the average person, I know the amount, it only allows me to use typical data for most fields. They wanted to charge me $5 to pay $3.28 to plant a single tree to offset my usage. I know the figure they gave is wrong, I couldn't input my data. So I need 2 trees.

Nef.org.uk 932 pounds per year
They actually show the conversion data, which is really nice. They do use British measurement (BTU, etc) mixed with the metric system (Kg) so a bit of conversion was needed. Google calculator does that quite well.

EPA.gov 4,972 pounds per year
Another site where you need to input your portion of the bills to get your footprint. They excluded public transportation, gave me a discount for my recycling but didn't ask what my actual trash was. (1 typical grocery bag per month not recycled, 4-5 bags recycled) This estimate is higher than the other by about the weird trash penalty. They suggest recycling more, but didn't suggest having less trash to begin with.

Misc EPA Calculators
A lot of miscellaneous calculators here sorted by scope (home, individual, business), focus (travel, car, solid waste, etc) and calculators from other countries. I think this is a great resource for people who want to make their own calculations or software.

I'm still composing a list of what settings and fields should be in these calculators in case someone wants to write a (hopefully) much better one.

56 comments:

Unknown said...

A friend of mine is very interested in writing a database that is more effective in answering this question.

I'd like to see a sustainability calculator which measures our total impacts on the sustainability of human life on the planet. Everyone's impacts could be broken down into how they impact 4 major areas for sustainability of human life, air, water, food and shelter.

Ian Smith said...

There are other criteria to take into effect, like a merging of footprint calculators that include how much of each atom we can give to everyone. Stainless steel is expensive because it uses nickel, a relatively rare element. There isn't enough nickel mined to give everyone in China or India a stainless steel sink according to a statistic I read. I haven't been able to calculate it, because I haven't been able to find out how much nickel has been mined, etc.

We need a very solid definition of "sustainable" in order to do decent math. I do know one thing in my study of systems theory, we won't be able to reliably do math on open systems. That means if we depend on forests, oceans, etc, a sustainability metric is an estimate at best. Turns out that the oceans are becoming acidic due to the CO2 already present in the atmosphere. We have no way of knowing how much CO2 can be maintained sustainably. Right now, we need negative emissions to reduce the CO2 level under 300ppm at most, likely under 270ppm. I don't know, and I don't think we can know.

Measuring sustainability in a closed box is easier, because all wastes must be dealt with locally.

I'm interested in contributing to the database design for calculating CO2 emissions. Ideally we would include infrastructure like cement (5% of world CO2), indirect processes that release CO2, dietary changes, and how far food is shipped (1800 miles on average), etc.

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