What Is Your Household Carbon Footprint?

My city of Concord, New Hampshire recently completed a carbon footprint for the entire community. The study found that just under half of the city‘s greenhouse gas emissions came from residential use, including gasoline for our vehicles (50%), the fuel used to heat our homes (38%), and electricity to power our lights and appliances (10%). The findings emphasized, among other things, the importance of homeowner action for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in our community.

With our city’s Fellow crunching these numbers over the summer, my family of four wanted to find new ways to reduce our own household emissions, but we didn’t know where to start. So, we decided to calculate our household carbon footprint for one year. Here, I’ll tell you about how we went about it, and what we found.

The Tool

There are many carbon footprinting tools available online, including those from Carbon Footprint, The Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). My family and I selected that from Carbon Footprint for ease of use, flexibility, and ability to save results. This tool also allowed us to easily run scenarios to determine the effect of specific lifestyle changes (such as reducing our household meat consumption, or adding one cross-country flight per year) on our overall carbon footprint. We chose June 2019 to May…