Your total personal emissions
See how your personal choices may affect the climate.
To measure the
footprint of your personal lifestyle, the CoolClimate calculator (Flash)—an
ongoing PhD project from University of California, Berkeley—assesses
everything from the food you eat, to your mode of transportation, to how you spend your money on clothes and furniture.
http://bie.berkeley.edu/calculator.swf
The Environmental Protection Agency has a fairly rudimentary Personal Emissions
Calculator that looks at transportation, energy
use, and waste produced. The site also gives you some greenhouse gas saving
tips, showing how much you would save by replacing incandescent bulbs with
compact fluorescent light bulbs, buying more efficient appliances, or turning
down your thermostat a few degrees in winter.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ind_calculator.html
How much energy is
your home using?
Give yourself a free audit (the IRS shouldn't get all the fun) and see how to lower your
energy bills.
If you are looking to cut down on your electric bill,
heating expenses, and household carbon emissions, look to the in-depth (and
fairly complex) Home Energy Saver calculator from Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory. This calculator works as an online home energy audit,
telling you how you can make your home more efficient and what government tax
incentives or efficiency programs will help you get there
fastest.
http://hes.lbl.gov/
Plane, train, and automobile
(emissions)
Find out how much you emit getting from here to there, and
read about your public transport options.
The
Individual Emission Calculator from Travel Matters part of the
not-for-profit Center for Neighborhood Technology, gives an up-close look at your transportation
emissions throughout the year. After you find out what you put into the air, you
can weigh the public transportation options in your area and see how much they
emit to compare with your current footprint.
Calculator: http://www.travelmatters.org/calculator/
Planning: http://www.travelmatters.org/calculator/transit/
Click here to see how you stack up against the average American, the average human, and two DISCOVER employees.
