Most greenhouse gas footprint calculators ask for your home size or miles driven, and estimate green gasses from that alone. However, they do not factor in how energy efficient your home or car (or transportation) is. Not only can you then not determine your actual impact, but if you make energy-efficient changes in your home or transportation or garden, you can not recalculate to any accurate degree. This page shows you how you can calculate YOUR actual impact, and save it to contrast your efficiency in future years.
This excel spreadsheet is programmed to help you calculate your impact related to electricity, heating, diet, travel (e.g., air travel), and automobile. You may also deduct any credits you have, such as trees or clean energy. Our diet calculator lets you make changes in your diet to learn their effects. Also, the tool works mainly with U.S. miles and gallons, but also converts from or works with liters and kilometers. Final results are shown in metric tons and kilograms on the Totals page. Also a personalized graph shows how each area measures against others. Here is the excel spreadsheet to work with:
What you will need to collect in advance
Calculating Transportation Gas (or Diesel) Use: For a car, the easiest way to estimate miles per year is to observe your current vehicle mileage, then divide that by the number of years owned. We provide a link to help estimate your vehicle’s miles per gallon.
Calculating Electricity and Home Gas (or Fuel) Use: Log into your energy provider’s website(s) to get Electricity use and Natural Gas (or other source fuel) annual usage. You should be able to see your annual use, by month. There is often a way to download an Excel spreadsheet to obtain each month’s usage, and total them to obtain your annual usage.