Calculating Your Carbon Footprint

(CBS)  It looked like a tedious sales meeting, but the people CBS News correspondent Daniel Sieberg met were about to change the world - or at least their little corner of it.

It is a CRAG: a Carbon Reduction Action Group. It's like the Weight Watchers for the energy conscious.

"It's just like any club," said Shannon Moore, the CRAG's founder. "There's … the peer-support side of it. And there can be, depending on the group, the peer pressure side of it, where people are saying, 'hey, look at your footprint!' Look at my footprint."

"Footprint" means how much carbon dioxide you personally release into the atmosphere through daily life. It's about 26,000 lbs. a year for the average American.

Moore's group aims to be 10 percent below that by year's end.

"All you have to do is pull your bills, and plug some numbers into the calculator - boop, and it'll tell you what your emissions are," Moore said. "Yeah, it's simple."

And there's a bonus.

You're also reducing the amount of money that you spend on your energy bills, and so it's a win-win.

Erin Kline is a soccer mom and on the PTA.

She and other members of the group are on track to save $300 each on their annual energy bills.

Some changes are obvious - like adjusting the thermostat and switching to compact fluorescents and going easy on wash day.

"I always wash with cold water," Kline said.

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Check out the rest of the series, Energy Savers: How Can Big Business Teach Us About Cutting Emissions?
Getting Paid To Drive Green

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But Kline also composts her trash, makes her own baking soda cleaners and, when she volunteers at school, the car stays parked.

It's the group, she says, that helps her "walk the walk."

"There's that accountability factor that, oh, someone else is gonna see how much I use, so that sort of spurs you to stay on track and to stay focused on it," Kline says.

It is easy to calculate your carbon footprint, at any number of Web sites, such as Carbonfund.org.

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From the Blogs: Learn more about how to offset your carbon emissions at Couric & Co. blog.
Find out how Daniel Sieberg reported this story over at Tech Talk.

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First, enter your annual Kilowatt hours and natural gas or oil usage. They're usually right on your utility bills.

Then, include your yearly odometer reading along with your average miles per gallon.

Lastly, enter the approximate number of miles flown.

The calculator will instantly give you an idea how much carbon you're personally responsible for.

Kline's household is now well below the national average. And, by getting the whole family involved, she believes the seeds of conservation are taking root with the next generation.

"They're the motivating factor, saying 'Mom why aren't you doing this?' because they realize they're going to have to clean up the mess," Kline said.

[michellem99-2009]

I have DSL. I have to have the text in large print as a legally blind..Dial up the print is too small.
Grammma I have the drive and sheen to shut down after a set time away and wake up when shake the mouse ..One lady told me I did not know ye can do that. Yep ye can and should. Ye get in yer control penel to set the drives and sheen..

[seafang]

Poor fools; ignorance is hereditary; everybody is born with it; it isn''t a disease.

But stupidity you have to be taught; and there''s plenty of people willing to teach it to you,as you can see from this web site.

Just how are we all going to live on "renewable green energy", when that proved to be insufficient for us to compete with the other monkeys clambering around in fig trees, so the termites ruled the world. It wasn''t till we discovered fire, and released stored chemical energy, that we were able to "eat grass" by cooking the ruminants that already knew how to eat grass.
Now nature has spent 4 billion year storing that energy for us, and they say we already used it all up in a few thousand years and most in the last 200 years; but by switching to using it as mother nature supplies it formt eh sun, we are going to keep up with the level of usage that already burned up 4 billion years of her didlgent storage.

You''re all nutz !

[seafang]

What a scam; I have my own carbon footprint program. I pick up acorns from around the building where I work, and store them in an empty water bottle. If any fellow worker wants to pay me five dollars per week to drive his car to work, I will go out and push one of those acorns into a hole in the ground, and pout a cup of water on it. I charge $10 a week for Hybrids, like the Toyota Pius because we have to save up to clean up those toxic batteries when the go bust.
Sometimes the squirrels see me planting the acorns and they dig them up. But I figure for every one of mine they steal, they forget where one of theirs is planted, so I get a few oak trees that way. I make no warranties as to the viability of the acorns I plant nor do I guarantee a tree; it is just to salve your conscience; not mine.

Besides, Global warming came to a screeching halt in 1998, and it hasn''t warmed a whit since, even though CO2 has continued to climb since then. Actaually that rising CO2 wasn''t caused by our SUVs, it was caused by the Mediaeval warm period which occurred 800 years ago. If you don''t understand that read Al Gore''s book, "An Inconvenient Truth." see pages 66/67 for the reason.
We are actually on the verge of at least a 20-30 year period of cooling and most climate scientists say we may be heading into a mini ice age of the type we had in the so-called Dalton minimum in the 1800s.

[rf35]

Carbonfund.org says I owe them over $200. I guessed on a few things since I live in base housing and don''t get utility bills. I estimated above average on gas & electric because the cats hate the cold, so we keep the thermostat a bit high during winter. The stupid cathedral ceilings don''t help either. Of course, since these folks are more interested in trying to disrupt the natural cycle of the planet than reduce pollution, I''ll keep my money. You see, I%u2019m all for renewable energy and most of what the anthropogenic global warming crowd is doing to clean up the planet and reduce oil dependency. That%u2019s because I want clean air and water. I don%u2019t want to pay a Muslim in order to drive my car. I don%u2019t imagine that humans are causing global warming. The evidence to the contrary is just too overwhelming to ignore.

[mjpenterprises]

and as far as energy savings are concerned if there would not be an artificially induced bottleneck on the supply of wich the lack of new refineries (0 ) new built in the last 37+ years than we all would not be having this discussion would we ?? The oil barrel would only be worth about 60.00 putting it at 2 times the market value from pre bottleneck price ; but i guess that would not be enough profits now would it ? ("being sarcastic here")

[mjpenterprises]

before you go on a rant and get behind any such campaign do you ever bother to do some objective research;increase in c:2 FOLLOWS Global Warming Not CAUSES IT !! Of course if all you want to do is give the corporations another backdoor tax income to thrive than you are doing the right thing if not i would than reevaluate my professional goals and choose something else than journalism or you''ll give it a bad name!!

[grammawhamma]

TomPierre: I just tried it and it worked for me. I have an old slow comp with a snail''s pace dial up connection. Try it again.

[tom-magee]

I want to see the carbonfund.org website but only get this message: "Database Error: Unable to connect to your database. Your database appears to be turned off or the database connection settings in your config file are not correct. Please contact your hosting provider if the problem persists."

Is it just my connection or did this site get hacked?