EOH Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

EOH - Essay Example The measurements are calculated based on a series of questions answered by the person or institution involved (Carbon Footprint Ltd, 2011; World Wildlife Fund, 2007). Briefly, the questionnaire allows the assessment of how much of the pre-determined emission factors are utilized by the institution. The methodology of such calculations is made by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) of the British government, which is used by Carbon Footprint Ltd. or the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States‘ Department of Energy, which has its own Carbon Footprint calculation program, and is used by Lexington Global Warming Action Coalition. This report enumerates the carbon footprint value of ’s family, as calculated using different web hosts of carbon footprint calculations. Means of reducing the carbon footprint is also suggested. Finally, the idea of purchasing carbon offsets is tackled in this writing. MY CARBON FOOTPRINT VALUE Table 1. Summa ry of Carbon footprint values, expressed as tons CO2,.as calculated using five different websites. ... The average of the calculated values is 34.92 tons CO2, with a standard deviation of 13.54. What could have caused these high variation in results? COMPARISON OF THE FIVE WEBSITES All of the calculators used the activities at home, specifically the use of appliances, for the estimation of carbon footprint. However, US EPA only takes note of the housing energy consumption, as opposed to the other five websites, which also added transportation as an emission factor. As stated by the Lexington Global Warming Action Coalition, assessment of the carbon footprint using household activities alone is the most basic way of calculating because necessary information can be easily obtained from electric bills. Aside from housing and transportation, coolcalifornia.org also reported greenhouse gas emissions from shopping, which most likely caused its resulting carbon footprint calculation to be the highest of the five. Meanwhile, differences in the values obtained by Carbon Footprint, carbonfund.o rg, and Lexington may be attributed to the differences by which they accounted housing and transportation emissions. Looking closer at the environmental costs of transportation, both carbonfund.org and Carbon Footprint found out that most of the family’s carbon footprint was from car use, which, according to calculations, releases 31.74 and 41.74 tons CO2 respectively (see Appendix). These differences should be taken into consideration. A standardized calculation of Carbon Footprint should be made, because it is a reflection of the countries’ concerted effort on saving the environment. COMPARISON WITH THE AVERAGE HOUSEHOLDS According to coolcalifornia.org, the carbon footprint of ‘s family were mostly caused by shopping expenditures. Briefly,