Carbon Footprint calculators, part 3

Thursday, November 8th, 2007 by Nigel

A green calculator?

Apologies for letting this one drop for a while. I have, as I hope you’ll see in the next few days, been Very Very Busy.

But just to point out that Google are now doing their own Carbon Footprint calculator. Acutally, I came across this first on Smartplanet - which is the Green Guy’s new online magazine, just launched. It looks great - the UK’s answer to Treehugger; it’s smart, stylish and and very nicely put together.

Which is a little more than Google’s calculator, according to the SmartPlanet review. It’s still pretty bare-bones as calculators go, without as many categories and variables as most now have, but given time, hitched to Google’s popularity and its knack of creating layers of information, it could turn into something very powerful. They’ve already got a carbon footprint map and a forum. The clever part is that it’s going, over coming months, to calculate the total cut in carbon emissions taken by Google participants and display that on the UK Carbon Footprint Project site. What we do need is a sense of how much we can all achieve working together, so maybe that’s one way of doing this.

Of course, as SmartPlanet points out, this comes at the cost of letting Google know even more about your personal consumer profile than they do already… which is pretty much EVERYTHING if you already use iGoogle.