How to Calculate Your Carbon Footprint

< < Part 1When you purchase carbon offsets, your goal is to balance out the part of your carbon footprint that you cant prevent. However how do you know that youre purchasing enough offsets to be carbon neutral? To address that question, youll need to compute your carbon footprint.Add up your lifes emissions.Your carbon footprint is the sum overall of greenhouse gas emissions that are produced from your life. These emissions can come from direct sources, such as lorry emissions from your commute, but they can likewise originate from indirect sources, such as the growing, collecting and shipment of the food you consume every day, or from the quantity of trash your home sends out to a landfill.With many aspects going into your carbon footprint, measuring its specific quantity from day to day is almost impossible. However, simply like your cars producer provides you its gas mileage in a variety of miles per gallon, we can make some basic estimates about your automobiles carbon emissions per mile.We can make these estimates for everything else in your life, too. For example, if youre a family of 5 living in a single-family home, youll have more emissions from food intake typically than a bachelor who resides in a home. Or if your job requires you to take a trip by aircraft when a month, you may have a larger carbon footprint than someone who works from home.How carbon offsets lower your carbon footprint.Just like we can determine the greenhouse gas emissions that come from everyday life, we can measure the quantity of greenhouse gases being prevented or regained by carbon-reduction programs such as reforestation or agricultural soil management. We can measure them so carefully, in truth, that we can bundle these greenhouse gas decreases into licensed carbon credits. Thats what youre buying when you buy carbon offsets.The objective of carbon offsets is to compensate for the emissions you cant prevent by ensuring emissions are removed from the atmosphere somewhere else. When a home or company has the ability to balance out 100% of its carbon emissions, we call them carbon neutral, which indicates they have net-zero carbon emissions.To put it clearly: When you buy enough carbon offsets to be carbon neutral, you make sure theres as much CO2 being removed from the air-- or prevented from entering the air-- as youre taking into it.Theres still a lot that needs to be done prior to we win the battle versus climate change, and purchasing carbon offsets is a great start for homes and services that wish to do their part. Here at Green Mountain Energy, our mission to promote sustainability has led us to end up being a carbon-neutral business, and we make carbon offsets accessible for anybody whos aiming to be footprint free. And someday, in the cleaner and greener future we dream about, we might even have the ability to attain net-negative carbon emissions.