Didn’t get to watch much of the Live Earth coverage, but I did try the Live Earth ECP Carbon and Lifestyle Calculator by Earthlab. Earthlab sets the annual carbon output for the average US person at 20 tons — pretty damn close to the 22 tons figure that Jamais said comes closest to accurate.
My carbon output, according to this calculator: Just 3.8 tons!
However, considering that The Nature Conservancy‘s calculator put the average at 27 tons and gave me a 12 tons score, I really don’t know what to believe. I get that no calculator can be 100% accurate, but what’s up with one result being 300% bigger than the other when I’m putting in close to identical data?
I was hoping these two would be close so I could have a rough guesstimate of my carbon output, but I think I’m really gonna have to do it all manually.
My ECP — apparently a “scaleable scored representation of your unique personal earth conservation profile developed by EarthLab” — is 295. As this is an EarthLab specific number, I really have no idea what to make of this except that lower numbers are better and I’m at the lower end. EarthLab’s full site launches on July 10, with what I believe’ll be a site geared toward lowering this mysterious ECP score –
I ran into a similar problem pricing vehicle carbon offsets. Using the carbon emission calculators provided on the sites I looked there was a pretty wide variation in the estimated annual CO2 emmissions for my car. The amount of information required to do the calculation varied quite a bit too. Some sites wanted the year, make and model of the car, others just a ballpark estimate of car size (e.g. small or midsize). Finally, there was quite a range in carbon offset costs. I can see how cost would vary between providers, but at least the calculation results should be the same. Time to require these providers to use a common calculation tool.
Comment by Ian Parnell — July 8, 2007 @ 10:10 am
Well, the offsets being all over the map I can sort of understand more than why there’s such wide variation on the CO2 emissions data. I’d prolly go with the calculator that takes in the most specific details into account — Were you able to get the figure down to a somewhat narrowed range, at least?
Comment by Siel — July 8, 2007 @ 11:22 pm
Yeah, the range was 2 to 3 tonnes of CO2 per year for an annual driving distance of 12,000 Km. The site that asked for the most specific information was http://www.carbonfund.org (result was 2.63 tonnes), it also provided a link to the details of the formula it used to calculate emmissions. I think a lot of the variation in the emission calculations comes about because the sites just ball park the input to the formula, e.g., allowing the user to select only set driving distances from a drop down list. Incidentally, the carbonfund site also provided the lowest cost offset for my emissions ($14 dollars vs. ~30-40 dollars over the other sites I checked out.)
Comment by Ian Parnell — July 8, 2007 @ 11:37 pm
Yes, Carbonfund is indeed one of the least expensive. Did you end up buying offsets?
Comment by Siel — July 9, 2007 @ 11:12 pm
Not yet. Still doing background research on where the money actually goes. In the meantime, we’ve reduced our driving considerably by working from our home office.
Comment by Ian Parnell — July 10, 2007 @ 1:02 pm