Carbon Footprint

Hopefully, by now, everyone has seen An Inconvenient Truth, watched a nature documentary about, read an article on, talked with someone about, or at least heard about climate change, and humanity's role in that change. Every year, every day, we as a race actively, whether knowingly or unknowingly, impact the environment around us. Right now this very second, as I type this, or you read this, we are negatively impacting the world's climate.

One of the major topics of interest lately has been CO2, and other greenhouse gas emissions. We as humans produce CO2 in a variety of ways. Every time we breath, we take in mixed air and expel primarily CO2. Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is also produced by humans when we burn any type of fuel (gas, diesel, oil, coal, wood, ect...) for a wide variety of purposes. The chief purpose of which, is energy production. All of the products we use and consume daily result in some sort of energy production/use, and therefore put more carbon into the atmosphere.

I recently decided to try and figure out how much of an impact I was having (i.e. my carbon footprint) on the climate/planet/environment. I was easily able to find 5 free, and there's plenty out there, websites that provided carbon footprint calculators. I tried each of these calculators. I used the same (or as close to it as allowable) information in each calculator. The results varied somewhat, but all gave some sort of result listed in number of tons of carbon emissions per year (tons of CO2/year).

The site who's calculator I liked the most was CarbonFootprint.com.

The five calculators are as follows:

CarbonFootprint.com's Calculator

ClimateCrisis.net's Calculator

The EPA's Calculator

Nature.org's Calculator

BP's Calculator

Try them out! Test for yourself!