The 2008 Carbon Calculator Round-Up
If anyone is here to remind you what’s important in this world, its people like me who work in advertising. Lately our focus in the ad world has been on something Al Gore told us about called “the environment,” specifically carbon emissions. The advertising industry is particularly at risk because your carbon emissions play a dramatic role in drowning our mascots. And we cannot stand idly by while rising sea levels turn our cereal soggy.
Our latest obsession is the Carbon Calculator. The companies that offer them range from Esurance to BP (Formerly “British Petroleum” but now “Beyond Petroleum.” They totally fooled us!) to Greenpeace, so you can pick whichever one makes you feel best about yourself. Here’s how it works:
- Guess wildly about your yearly consumption of items like petroleum, electricity, coal, shale, firewood, Triscuits, etc., and enter the appropriate numbers into the oracle.
- The oracle then converts the data into a figure indicating your carbon emissions in pounds, tons, or puppy lungs.
- In exchange for your results, your good will is harnessed and applied to our brand. We’re saving the world, together, you and us [insert global brand here], one online quiz at a time. Please enjoy your results - they are an empty vessel into which you can pour your guilt, sanctimony, desire, etc.
Or, for the purposes of this review, enjoy MY results – the delicate carbon slipper print left by a bike-commuting, public-transit-taking, canvas-bag-toting, habitually recycling locavore (and I VOTE). Are you getting that metallic poor-steward-of-natural-resources taste on the back of your tongue yet? Then let us proceed.
At the online home for An Inconvenient Truth lives a remarkably convenient carbon calculator. Too convenient, perhaps. Or maybe just convenient enough to cast our capricious and selfish lifestyles into glaring relief. That, my friends, is most likely the point. Being environmentally responsible takes a lot more than clicking around a web browser for a few minutes. Think about that next time you go home to turn on your “light switches” and your “hot water” and “other wasteful luxuries.”
The good news? A few more clicks lead you to nativeenergy.com, where you can purchase credits toward sustainable energy resources. Choose from wind turbine, farm methane (read: cow farts), or a noxious sounding 50/50 blend of both (turbine-powered cow farts?). My carbon-offset rang out at about $60. Equivalent to one tank of gas for the SUV that I don’t drive.
Score: 5.05 tons CO2, US national average 7.5
This futuristic-looking carbon command center seems at first blush to be the most optimistic of the bunch (disclosure: the interactive advertising agency which employs yours truly is responsible for developing this site. I, however, had no hand in it).
A nifty animated introduction displays a few basic facts over lush nature scenes, and then exhorts you to do your part. Actually, this may be subliminal advertising at work, because the words “do your part” animate on under a picture of a parrot, causing my brain to read “do your parrot.”
Hidden orniophilia messages aside, this simple web app gets straight to the point. Whether you choose the Quick, Simple, or Detailed offset calculations, your impact is calculated directly in dollars due to Conservation International for your selfish actions, with a “check out now” button next to the number. Furthermore, this subtly joy-deflating application allocates donation amounts required to offset such joyous life events as a wedding, a road trip, a new home, or a family reunion. Not ready to check out yet? Just keep reading, the sad-eyed baby orangutan with the word “HELP” printed over it should assist you in making your decision.
Score: 9.1 tons CO2 ($109), US national average 24 tons ($288)
3. BP Carbon Footprint Calculator
This effort from global oil giant British/Beyond/Beneath Petroleum could easily be seen as an effort to scrub their corporate image by associating themselves with energy conservation. Seeing as how energy consumption, not conservation, is responsible for approximately, oh, 100% of their profits, this is probably not a stretch.
Anyway, this carbon calculator uses cute little digital avatars in a virtual home to show energy conservation at work. From the looks of it, they conserve considerable amounts of energy by doing very little, making only short trips from the energy-efficient stove to the energy-efficient lamp next to the stove. Lead by example, my pixilated little eco-friends!
Score: 12 tonnes (silly British people) a year, US national average 18.58
4. Erin’s World Esurance Carbon Calculator
Despite being featured in utterly mystifying/strangely alluring television commercials starring animated fugitive/heroine Erin Esurance, the Esurance Carbon Calculator required a lot of my natural resources to actually locate it on their website.
Once located, it becomes apparent that it is actually operated by a shadowy virtual entity named Earthlab, which I can only presume is a superhero-associated web-design company hidden deep within the Earth’s mantle. The application is pretty boilerplate, fill in form fields blah blah. But when you finish, you are given your output in tons of carbon and a mysterious “ECP score” (mine was 252). To ascertain what this corresponds to, you must now enter information far more personal than your monthly electric bill, and that’s not something I am willing to do. And if you’re thinking about doing it to get on Erin’s good side, may I just remind you: she’s a cartoon.
Score: A measly 7 tons (multiple vehicle policy, here we come).
5. EPA Personal Emissions Calculator
The US government is not an entity known for its technological savvy or clear presentation of information, but the EPA Personal Emissions Calculator is probably the most useful thing to come out of an American-style bureaucracy since socialized medicine the Post Office.
When you enter your numbers, you are given a line-by-line breakdown of how many carbon pounds each mode of energy consumption generates. Then, you are shown how your numbers compare to the national average in each category. To further aid your conservation efforts, users can plug in numbers and see just how much carbon offset is gained from different conservation methods (recycling, buying efficient appliances, etc.) Trés re-useful.
There are no flashy graphics, and no guilt-producing pleas for help or money. It’s just a solid, useful application that appears to have been developed by experts working with good data. I’m sure a civil servant somewhere is earmarking millions of dollars to have his nephew’s web-design firm muck it up.
Score: 19,599 lbs., national average 41,500 lbs.
Snark offset: while carbon offsetting is, generally speaking, a Good Thing To Do, the guilt-for-money exchange is what we’re taking issue with here. The lifestyle changes that conserve energy on an individual level are generally easy. Carpool, put on a sweater, turn off lights, ride a bike, reuse what you can, recycle what you can, consolidate your car trips…you know, What Would Jimmy Carter Do? The point is that millions of media and advertising dollars have been spent either convincing us to donate or convincing us that they are being ecologically responsible by doing nothing other than spending said media dollars.
Remember in the 80’s when CFC’s were burning a hole in the ozone layer? Through a combination of consumer pressure and regulation, non-CFC emitting products were developed and the ozone layer actually started to repair itself. Vertical hairstyles continued unabated. That’s my fingers-crossed hope for with the green movement and climate change, only with day-glo sneakers from Tokyo instead of Garden Weasel hair.
What calculator did you try? And how did you do?
About The Author - Ben is a formerly aspiring icthyologist, musician, and theologian. He is now a advertising copywriter living in Brooklyn, where he resides with his wife, two cats, and a basement full of bicycle parts. - Visit Ben's site.
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Comments
Hey, Ben, this is a great article (I LOLed several times reading it), but I feel that no discussion would be complete without listing The Nature Conservancy’s carbon footprint calculator at http://www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator/
Not only is it the easiest carbon calculator to use, but it’s also the most accurate — because it includes indirect emissions and includes all greenhouse gases, not just carbon dioxide — and fully documents its data sources. I encourage you to give it a shot and see what you think!
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[...] The 2008 Carbon Calculator Round-Up Pinkomag tries out a few carbon calculators to determine the delicate carbon slipper print left by a bike-commuting, public-transit-taking, canvas-bag-toting, habitually recycling locavore. [...]