No, not your phone number. Not your cholesterol (I mean, you should know that too) either. I mean, what’s your carbon foot print number? How do you figure it out? Why should you figure it out?

Essentially - the climate crisis is a great big math problem - well the crisis bit is a humanitarian crisis and ecological disaster - but trying to avoid the worst necessitates a bit of math. The good news is, you don’t have to be a genius or a billionaire (looking at you Bill Gates - I’ll get to you later, please wait your turn) to figure out this math problem. Take it from me, I’m self-diagnosed dyslexic with numbers (it really is a thing, and its super annoying seriously don’t tell me your phone number - I won’t get it right) and I could still figure out my carbon foot print. Or various formulations of my carbon foot print.

See - there is a “direct footprint” that’s pretty easy to figure out with the calculators available on the Internet and your basic bills for the previous year. Then there are more intensive calculators - once you get hooked on counting things.

The thing is - you don’t need an EXACT number. What we are looking for is a starting point, and then some changes. And then a downward trend. There may not be cookies for an exact number - but there MIGHT be cookies - from me - for a downward trend.

If all it took was me giving out homemade cookies to clean up the air and water a bit, I’d do it.

Maybe that’s where we’ve gone wrong.

I digress.

So here is a simple way to start. Either gather up your paper bills or log on to your online accounts for you electricity provider, your heat provider (might be electric, natural gas, propane, etc.), your car mileage for last year (if you are good at getting timely oil changes this could help you ballpark it at least). Make some notes if you flew last year or took the train or public transportation. For many of us last year could be different from previous years because of Covid-19. That’s okay, right now we are investing a little time, a little energy, putting a little skin in the game to understand our current situation and current reality. Get us thinking and understanding.

Now pour yourself that cup of coffee and let’s go to Terrapass.org and select the individual calculator.

The first section will deal with transportation - vehicle (my so-called friends make fun of how I pronounce “vehicle”), public transport, train and plane travel.

The second section will be your home energy. You can choose to enter the dollar amount you spent last year in each category, or you can enter the quantity of energy you used, kWh for example for electricity, or ccf for natural gas. The challenge I had for natural gas is that my bill shows Therms, so you’ll need to do a little calculation if you go this route.

And wallah! Now you can see how your emissions compare to the “average” - note the American average is excessive compared to the rest of the world. Extremely excessive. Which is why we need to work on dropping our footprints. You can toggle between lbs and metric tons.

Now, you have the options to purchase carbon offsets. This is really just a way to match your emissions level with charitable giving to projects that specifically are addressing the global need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and/or support communities that are unduly affected by climate change (when they are contributing so much less to the problem than we are).

I would avoid thinking that carbon offsets get you in the clear though - and that we can keep on keeping on with our use of fossil fuels and high rates of emissions. Its kind of like how exercise doesn’t really make up for eating that whole sleeve of Oreo cookies . . .

Now that you’ve figured out your carbon footprint starting point for last year, we can look ahead to this year and actions to take to reduce your footprint, as well as other factors that contribute to your foot print (if you’re ready to level up). As a preview check out the Nature.org calculator to see impacts of food choices, goods and services. But if you aren’t ready for that level yet, that’s okay, start with the basics and go from there.

Thanks for following along. I’d love to find what you discovered about your energy usage and if there were any surprises for you.

Stay tuned for a deeper dive into what goes into the electricity mix your using based on where you live.