Blog Action Day - Not Over Yet

Today was Blog Action Day, a movement to bring focus to the environment on this specific day, October 15, 2007. Since I pretty much forgot about this until now, I didn't have a topic picked out to write about. However, just yesterday I was curious what my carbon footprint was. So, I did a Google search designed to calculate my carbon footprint, and looked at the top three results.

1. The top result is the calculator on the Inconvenient Truth website. According to this calculator, I produce 1 ton of carbon emissions a year, which is much smaller than the US average of 7.5 tons.
2. The second result is a calculator provided by the EU. However, this "calculator" only tells you how much you could reduce your output if you agree to certain actions. Therefore, this calculator was of no help to me.
3. Finally, we come to the calculator at What's My Carbon Footprint? This calculator starts by calculating your current output, and then going through a list of possible improvements like the EU site does, and tells you how you can do better. After I entered my data in this calculator, it returned a result of NaN. This makes me think that I'm not even producing enough carbon to register with these guys, or that their calculator is not nearly sensitive enough for individuals like me.
   

Conclusions: If you want to calculate your current footprint, go with 1 or 3. My guess is that the Inconvenient Truth calculator overestimates, the What's My Carbon Footprint underestimates, or both. Either way, I'm doing okay, but I'm trying to do better. I haven't taken a taxi in close to a year, virtually eliminating car travel from my life (hometown visits being the remaining exception). Now I focus on using my lights as little as possible, and cutting down on my hot water usage. What are you doing to help?