Climate Footprint Exercise
I am asking everyone who got a link to this web page to help me by calculating your own climate footprint and sending me the results.
In addition- if you know one or two people substantially different from yourselves either in race/ethnicity and/or socio-economic status who would be motivated to complete this exercise please forward this link to them.
Overview- a data exploration without judgement
An exploratory exercise- I am planning to pivot the Phoenix Data Project from the pandemic to an examination of climate change and activities around climate change. I am anticipating creating interactive and engaging content and interactions. This exercise is, in part, a small taste of that.
More data than just the Tannourys- I calculated our own family’s footprint to get me started thinking about climate change and how to tackle it. But we are just one family. I would like to get a better sense of the range of impact that is out there.
No judgement zone. This is data collection only- The last thing that I want is for people with large carbon footprints to avoid filling out the calculator, because they feel guilty about it. Please know that I will pass no judgement on what your footprint is and/or isn’t. At the moment this is a data collection exercise to get an idea of the depth and breadth of the problem. I share our footprint as a way of normalizing openness.
Please calculate your own footprint with Berkeley’s tool
After looking around at different climate calculators I found the following website which seems to power the engines of many other websites including The Nature Conservancy and Oregon.gov.
https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/calculator
This calculator does a decent first level approximation of calculating your climate impact. I’ve got quibbles with some pieces of it but it is a good starting point.
This will probably take you a couple of hours of effort. Bless you for doing it.- This is a non-trivial exercise which took me a couple of hours spread over a week to get a basic estimate. I describe what I went through here to give you a sense of the effort. Please if you can swing it use the advanced settings in each of the categories, travel, home, etc. Spend long enough that you feel that your answers are good faith accurate. Don’t let yourself to get bogged down. If you have doubts or questions, don’t let those stop you from completing the exercise, instead just let me know what trouble or questions you ran into and what you decided to do. Again you can look at what I did for guidance.
Please email me the results
Please email the results to peat@phoenixdataproject.org. In the email include the following
a screenshot of the bar graph like I have below in the our footprint section,
can you tell me what you thought about the calculator the good the bad, and the ugly
what do you think about your own results? Was anything surprising?
if you think of it please put coolclimate berkeley in the subject line.
Contact me if you have any questions
I know that this is a big ask, but I’m here to help. Please email me if you have any questions, peat@phoenixdataproject.org.
The Tannoury Family Footprint
Send to the following people- Lydia, Valerie, RJ, Jared, Mark Hamilton, Myriam, Tom Radulovich