Recently as I was checking out the Treehugger site, I noticed a bar on the side for Climate Culture Calculators. Intrigued, I clicked through to check them out. What I found really blew me away.
I love the idea of lifestyle carbon footprint calculators, but they always have the same set of problems:
1. They aren't configurable enough. I heat exclusively with a wood stove. (Which is carbon neutral, by the way!) That's never been an option on any carbon footprint calculator I've found so far.
2. The numbers vary widely from one calculator to another. Most calculators lack transparency. Where are these numbers coming from? Who knows!
3. You quickly get the feeling that the entire exercise is just to make you feel bad, or smug, rather than to provide valuable feedback.
There's no good answer on a carbon footprint calculator. Either you are shocked and horrified at the amount of carbon your lifestyle produces a year, or you feel smug about how small your footprint is compared to most people's.
Being shocked and horrified isn't really useful. You want to direct people towards best practices, maybe help them identify which areas of their lifestyle needs improvement. That kind of thing.
Being smug REALLY isn't useful. We can all do better, even Smuggy McSmuggersons could trim their carbon footprint a little farther. Reducing your impact on the planet isn't a singular goal - it's an ongoing project of improvement.
Compare this with the calculators Treehugger is offering. For one thing, each calculator is specific to a single purpose. What's the carbon footprint of your current alcohol consumption, and how much can you save by cutting that down? I only spend $5 on wine a week, but if I cut that in half, I was shocked to find that I could save 144 pounds of CO2 per year.
The calculators also mix obvious issues - like commuting to work - with interesting problems like alcohol. I had never thought about it before, but alcoholic beverages take a lot of resources to produce. From growing the grapes (with pesticide), to shipping the grapes to a factory, processing the wine, making the glass bottles, shipping it all to the store - it's actually pretty significant.
The final thing that I like best about these calculators is that they let you see what a difference you can make just by adjusting your consumption slightly. The calculator didn't just tell me "YOU'RE DESTROYING THE PLANET WITH YOUR HABIT OF BUYING TWO CHEAP BOTTLES OF WINE A MONTH." It encourages you to play with the numbers. What if you only spent half as much? What if you only spent a dollar less per month?
It's these incremental changes which will get people's attention. It's neither fair nor realistic to expect people to give everything up entirely. Telling people to give up all consumption of beer, wine, and alcohol is a losing proposition. But I bet a lot of people would be willing to cut $10 of one of those out of their budget a month, if they felt it would make a difference. And it will!
Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user draggin