Now armed with the knowledge that the average person in the US emits 20 tonnes / 22 tons of carbon per year, I could just rejoice with the flattering results Make Me Sustainable gave me: I only emit 2.6 tons a year according to them! And after like 10 minutes on that site, I quickly got it down to 2.3!
The thing is though — this calculator is just not very accurate…. As you know, I already recommended The Nature Conservancy’s calculator instead — That one’s still imperfect, but better.
For ex: I took 3 long flights last year — 2,765, 2,669, and 1,828 miles respectively, for a total of 7,262 miles — which cost me .39 lbs of carbon emissions per mile (a buncha sites concur on this per mile figure), which comes out to 2,832 lbs or 2.8 tons of carbon emissions — which alone is higher than Make Me Sustainable’s 2.3 tons figure.
It’s odd, because Make Me Sustainable’s calculator actually DOES have a Q or two about flights — but somehow they’re not properly accounted for. And I can’t go back to check or revise my initial inputs — No revisions allowed.
Now let me say the overall idea’s cool: Let people tangibly see what enviro costs their current habits have, then suggest enviro actions, then give people a way to track the eco impact their individual eco actions make as motivation.
However, Make Me Sustainable’s not a very robust — or accurate — site. It only accounts for 4 areas of your life: electricity, heating, travel, and transportation (there’s a fifth area offering offsets) — with what seems a very low precision as evidenced by my flight info.
Plus, the eco-actions recommended — a half dozen or so for each area — do weird stuff on the site. For ex: Raise your thermostat in the summer, it recommends. Put aside for the moment the fact that I get no option to specify I don’t have any AC. Make Me Sustainable just asks how much I’m raising my thermostat by, instead of what temp I’ve raised it to. This means an idiot can get the same points for going from, say, 55 to 59 as an eco-masochist gets for going from 101 to 106.
More annoyingly, though I specified that I don’t have a car in the initial calculator, I still got a whole buncha actions to take specifying how I could make my driving more eco-friendly.
And some of the actions recommended are rather questionable. One action item’s “Install better power management on your PC” — a good enough tip, except that it advises you to download Local Cooling. Now we’ve discussed Local Cooling here, and beyond the techy qualms about the program a few readers raised, Make Me Sustainable doesn’t let you know that you can make similar changes without installing a questionable piece of software on your computer — and doesn’t let you get green points for taking other, but similarly effective, eco-computer action.
Conclusion: Make Me Sustainable has laudable goals, but to realize them, it first needs to first make its carbon emissions calculations more — realistic. It then needs to account for more areas of people’s lives, and to individualize and specify its eco-actions and suggestions based on the info its members painstakingly fill out. If different answers spit out the same recommendations, that’s not exactly interactive, as good websites should be.
So I’ll be going through my carbon calculations more manually sans Make Me Sustainable. Instead I’ll glean a little help from the gals at Riot For Austerity: the 90% emissions reduction project. And I’ll try to do ‘em in a way that you readers can do it too with releative ease –
Update, 7/8/07: Here’s part IV — another calculator, another result.
I don’t think any online calculator is going to provide that much accuracy or precision.
But you don’t need that much accuracy or precision to create an effective education tool. But we are nowhere near ready for a regulatory tool. The need for that seems inevitable at this point.
Comment by Rafi — July 5, 2007 @ 1:41 pm