Calculating your carbon footprint

In an increasingly environmentally conscious world, keeping track of our impact on the environment has become as essential to our lives as understanding the food we eat. And if the comparison seems forced, consider that Japan recently announced it would be including carbon footprint information on products, strikingly similar to existing nutritional information.

In fact, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that tracking our carbon footprint has become something of an obsession, even to the point of making consumers cautious when making any decisions at all. From energy-efficient homes to a campaign of “green” marketing campaigns so ever-present they’ve been given their own name, environmental consciousness has become a global pastime.

But with the current focus on greenhouse gas emissions, one of the most popular measures of our environmental impact is the carbon calculator. Easily accessible and simple, these electronic resources help measure the impact of your daily energy use in metric tonnes of carbon dioxide, sometimes even including a few spiffy interactive components to while your day away.

Online, there are literally thousands of resources available for calculating your energy use. It’s worth noting that many such carbon calculators, like EcoNeutral’s, are tied into carbon dioxide offset programs, with the results of your consumption bumping you to a dollar amount of offset credits. Airlines in particular, including Air Canada and WestJet, have made carbon offset credits a part of their business models, often making the credits available during the ticket purchase process.

The carbon calculator has even been taken advantage of as a political maneuver, as in the case of the Nova Scotia Conservative Party. In response to federal Liberal leader Stephane Dion’s “Green Shift” carbon tax plan, the provincial Tories posted a carbon calculator purporting to show the increased tax burden on Nova Scotians in the event of such a tax.

But not all carbon calculators are designed to sell a product or win political points.

The federal government has assembled many of the available energy calculators created by various governmental bodies on its ecoACTION website, and on provincial websites like the Ontario region’s. From appliance efficiency to vehicle idling, these calculators offer measurements of many of our most common energy consuming behaviours, albeit without the simplicity of a single set of basic questions, as with SafeClimate’s.

There are a dizzying number of factors that make up our individual carbon emissions. Broadly, for example, we already know there’s a direct relationship between wealth and our carbon footprint. In particular, we contribute to greenhouse gas emissions whenever we eat (meat or vegetables), drive or contribute to a wide range of essential Canadian industries. Together, these add up to megatonnes of CO2 emissions nationally, which may or may not eventually find its way into our atmosphere.

The bottom line is that, while knowing Canada produced 1,920 kilotonnes of CO2 emissions in forestry and agriculture in 2006 might seem like a daunting number, knowing exactly how much you personally produce is a far simpler place to begin evaluating your energy use.

Add calculators, subtract energy use. How much simpler can it be?