Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Calculate YOUR emissions - and take the One tonne challenge!

Despite the change in government, the One Tonne Challenge program is still up on the government of Canada web site. The Emissions Calculator is actually kind of neat. Basically, you enter information about your household and driving habits, and it estimates how many tons a year of greenhouse gasses you produce. Then, you can select things you can do to reduce your emissions, and it dynamically shows you how much you would save.

My one quibble with the calculator is that it doesn't take everything you may be doing already into account when giving the first estimate. For example, one of the suggestions in the reduction part was to install a low-flow shower head. Well, we already have that, so I wasn't sure if I should check the box (that says you will implement this change), or not.

I suppose I could go through the survey twice - the first time checking off ONLY the items we already do, and the second time checking off what we are planning to do in the future. That should give me more accurate "before" and "after" estimates.

Anyway, here are my results from my first pass at this:

Current emissions estimate: 4.59 tonnes
After planned reductions: 3.184 tonnes

The Canadian average is 5.5 tonnes, and the Ontario average is 5.7 tonnes, so we're not doing too badly. But I know we can do better!

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