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back to article Carbon emissions - this time it's personal

If last weekend's Live Earth taught us anything, it's that we all need to take responsibility for our combined impact on the environment. Thankfully, monitoring our everyday impact may soon become much more straightforward thanks to the Carbon Hero, a portable carbon-footprint calculator. carbon_hero Carbon Hero (left) and …

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  1. Ramzi Yakob

    Oxymoronic product

    It seems pretty dumb to me to encourage people to get yet another electricity consuming device to tell them how environmentally irresponsible they are.

    I wonder if it tells people how much of a Carbon Footprint people are producing by using this mobile carbon footprint calculator.

    Instead of this - people should just use the governement's official Carbon Calculator that DEFRA have made at http://actonco2.direct.gov.uk

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  2. AndreasZ

    The problem with Carbon Calculator sites

    ..is that they provide a snapshot. If you change your habits you have to go back to the site and go through the whole process again. This is neither realistic or a very efficient use of time.

    Furthermore, the DEFRA site like the rest of the offerings out there provides a snapshot dependent on the quality of the questions asked and honesty/knowledge of the user. Sites also rarely factor in enough of foot powered activity, and realistic representation of an individual should reflect how 'efficiently' they get from A to B.

    And anyway, live information/knowledge vs. static/retrospective?!? Let me see now.....

    Its also entirely short sighted to identify another "elecrictical device" as being a downfall, when the footprint and consumption of the device can be paid back in potential carbon efficiency gains in a matter of days. It is to fail to understand the bigger picture....Reminds me of the farmer who saved his seeds and as a result never grew anything. False economies.

    And finally further development work has already made it possible that even a physical device is not neccessary. The last time I checked, there was a high likelyhood that it was the mobile carrying peoples of this world who were more likely to be the polluters.

    Carbon Hero makes small differences add up to large ones.

    Thanks to James and RegHardware for the posting though.

    Cheers

    AZ

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  3. Ramzi Yakob

    You might be right...

    but at the same time I think you're not giving enough credit to the snapshot effect of the online calculators.

    This snapshot is as capable of causing people to try to reduce their emissions by giving handy tips at the end which people might not have realised would make such a difference such as turning lights off in rooms when they leave them, turning off their PC's at the end of the day at work instead of just leaving them on and walking away.

    The gadget mentioned in the article would only ever appeal to technophilic people with a hint of OCD about them who love nothing more than to look at stats all day.

    You don't need a hand held device which consumes energy to tell you that you should walk the 1 mile from tube station to your office instead of getting a cab - that's just common sense - and indeed most energy saving methods are common sensical which the 'snapshot' diagnoses that the online calculators are able to nudge along perfectly well.

    Think about how change needs to happen - by lots of people rethinking their energy consumptions - not by giving technophiles with money to burn another LCD screen to look at throughout the day telling them how good they are because they took a train instead of driving to work.

    Thanks

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