Isramart : Rethinking the Personal Carbon Calculator

Isramart news:
TIME Magazine recently named the personal carbon footprint one of the “50 Best Inventions of 2009,” alongside the AIDS vaccine, NASA’s Ares Rockets, and a human powered vending machine. Although the concept may not literally have been invented this year, there’s no doubt that tools to help individuals estimate and mitigate their climate impact are spreading and multiplying. But while great strides have been made in ensuring offset credibility, the methodology behind environmental footprint estimates remains opaque and inconsistent.
Businesses increasingly recognize the importance of looking at all the emissions they are responsible for, not just those from sources they directly control. But few individual footprint calculators look beyond the emissions from homes, cars, and flights. These three sources make up only a third of the average American’s emissions. The other two thirds come from the public and private goods and services we consume. Look around and think about the energy that went into producing the stuff that surrounds you – energy to mine, refine, assemble, and transport raw materials; energy to manufacture the machines that performed those tasks; energy to construct and operate the buildings where these goods were made and sold; energy to provide the financial, medical, legal, and governmental services to keep it all going. These are emissions that, as consumers, we’re ultimately responsible for. Ignoring them not only understates each of our impact on the climate, it also dramatically understates our power to make positive change.

At Brighter Planet, we took the recent launch of the new brighterplanet.com as an opportunity to rethink the accounting process behind an individual’s carbon footprint. Our goal was to give a complete picture of all of the emissions that result from a person’s lifestyle, so we decided to start by assigning users an average footprint, which we adjust as they enter data.

To ensure accuracy, we base our calculations on the EPA’s annual inventory of US greenhouse gas emissions. To ensure completeness, we make a few adjustments to the EPA data:

• We account for carbon leakage through international trade using data from an economic input-output model. Since the US runs a net trade deficit, this increases the average American’s footprint.

• We adjust the EPA’s landfill emissions estimate to reflect only the gases that will be produced by waste generated this year. Since the data in the EPA inventory lags by two or three years, we estimate current year emissions based on trends in the EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook.

The result is an average footprint of 28.3 short tons, which is gradually personalized as a user provides more information. This approach also allows users to answer questions in any combination and order of their choosing, and get powerful instant feedback as they watch their emissions estimate change in response to each new datum.

At the end of the day, what’s important in an individual carbon calculator is that it give people a picture of their footprint that’s complete, accurate, and user-friendly enough to give them handle on the real impacts of their lifestyle. In giving a voice to that silent majority of emissions that result from consumption, and in using a flexible refinement process rather than a linear ground-up process, we hope our new calculator will help empower folks to take much more informed steps toward reducing their impact.