{"id":94,"date":"2007-05-15T16:11:16","date_gmt":"2007-05-15T21:11:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/climate411\/2007\/05\/15\/yahoo_calculator\/"},"modified":"2008-04-22T11:56:10","modified_gmt":"2008-04-22T16:56:10","slug":"yahoo_calculator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/climate411\/2007\/05\/15\/yahoo_calculator\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside a Carbon Calculator"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Today&#8217;s Guest Blogger, Lisa Moore, is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/green.yahoo.com\/index.php?q=action\">new site on Yahoo!<\/a> that can calculate how much your carbon dioxide (CO<sub>2<\/sub>) emissions go down when you try their energy saving tips. It&#8217;s fun to use, and I especially appreciate the snazzy interactive features because I know how hard people worked to build it. My colleagues and I provided the Yahoo! design team with the data they use in their calculations.<\/p>\n<p>I hope you&#8217;ll visit the site to see how simple changes in your house and car can save energy and lower emissions. But first, let me take you behind the scenes to the complicated world of carbon calculation.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>When Yahoo! turned to us for help in calculating the environmental impact of different actions, they gave us an impressive list of things to quantify. I don&#8217;t know if they expected the equally long list of questions they got in reply! Here are just a few examples of the questions you need to ask when building a carbon calculator:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Which emissions do you count?<\/strong> For the Yahoo! calculator, we focused on emissions from home energy use, personal driving, and commercial aviation. We could make solid estimates of average emissions from these activities, and there are easy steps individuals can take to reduce those emissions. These three activities account for 9.4 tons of CO<sub>2<\/sub> per person per year, which is about half of the total CO<sub>2<\/sub> emissions per person in the U.S.<\/li>\n<li><strong>How do you count those emissions?<\/strong> Greenhouse gas emissions are often higher when you consider gases other than CO<sub>2<\/sub>, but non-CO<sub>2<\/sub> emissions can be difficult to calculate. Many carbon calculators ignore all non-CO<sub>2<\/sub> emissions. The Yahoo! calculator includes non-CO<sub>2<\/sub> gases for flying and dietary choices.<\/li>\n<li><strong>How much information from the user?<\/strong> The more information I have, the better job I can do calculating your baseline emissions and your savings. What&#8217;s your current average annual electricity consumption? What state do you live in? How long do you keep each of your light bulbs on every day? What make and model are your appliances? Obviously that approach can get ridiculously cumbersome to users. So instead we often use national averages.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Do you include regional differences?<\/strong> Some factors, such as the amount of CO<sub>2<\/sub> emitted per kilowatt-hour of electricity, vary enormously from state to state. The national average emissions rate is 1.34 pounds of CO<sub>2<\/sub> per kWh. But in North Dakota it&#8217;s 2.24, and in Vermont it&#8217;s a clean 0.03! We accounted for these differences in our calculators on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fightglobalwarming.com\/\">www.fightglobalwarming.com<\/a>; Yahoo! uses the national average.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Designing a tool like this involves a lot of interesting discussions and decisions (and headaches from boring federal reports like the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.epa.gov\/climatechange\/emissions\/downloads06\/07ES.pdf\">EPA&#8217;s emissions inventory [PDF]<\/a>), but the end result is very useful. Americans have a huge impact on global warming, there are many things we can do to make a difference.<\/p>\n<p>So click around the site, get a sense of which changes will have the biggest impact, and pledge to do something. Did an item on the list surprise you? What have you already done? What do you plan to do next? I look forward to the discussion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s Guest Blogger, Lisa Moore, is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program. There&#8217;s a new site on Yahoo! that can calculate how much your carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions go down when you try their energy saving tips. It&#8217;s fun to use, and I especially appreciate the snazzy interactive features because I know how &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Inside a Carbon Calculator - Climate 411<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/climate411\/2007\/05\/15\/yahoo_calculator\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Inside a Carbon Calculator - Climate 411\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Today&#8217;s Guest Blogger, Lisa Moore, is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program. 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