So today I came across Make Me Sustainable (via GO), a site that’s sort of like a green 43 things — with the “sort of” part emphasized.

Better analogy: Make Me Sustainable’s like a web diet tracker — for your carbon diet. By joining, you can track — with spiffy charts and graphs and stuff — how eco-conscious your life’s getting. Plus, you can show off your green success to a community of environmentalists who’re also members.

I’m wary of joining yet another web community, but I love sites that make charts and graphs for me, so I signed up, made a profile, and put in my living and transportation stats to find out that I had an initial footprint of 2.6 tons.

Well WTF does that mean? Is that a lot? A little?

Seeking the answer to this Q at once forced me off the site to figure out the average carbon emissions for a US resident — which, I gotta say, isn’t easy to get a clear answer on. An Inconvenient Truth‘s calculator says 7.5 tons is the nationwide average — though reading the fine print, the number may just go for housing and transportation, making the calculator as a whole rather confusing. Friends of the Forest puts it at 10.73 tons. The Nature Conservancy says it’s a whopping 27 tons!

And of course I went ahead and tried using all these calculators, and got personal results ranging from 4.07 to 12 tons. WTF? I shoulda just called it a day with the lower 2.6 ton figure.

At this point I emailed Jamais — the most serious carbon calculating dude I know, as evidenced by his work on figuring out the cheeseburger footprint.

I’m crossing my fingers he’ll just know off the top of his head. So more on this — along with an actual review of Make Me Sustainable — to come. You may wanna put off signing up until then –

For now, take this post as a lesson on how one click can lead to hours and hours of amusement — aka wasted time — in the web vortex.

Update, 7/4/07: Here’s part II, with a more accurate average carbon output number.

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