My carbon footprint according to Defra

As I've been winding down my experiments with carbon calculators, I've been noticing more and more just how variable they can be. The results they spit out fluctuate wildly but as they all ask slightly different questions, that's not surprising. What surprises me are the differences between what they claim the CO2 emissions of your average Briton are, and if your trying to figure out whether you're a relatively big emitter or a teeny tiny one, that can be something of a problem.

Emissions from municipal services such as road maintenance are included as part of indirect emissions © Greenpeace/Steve Morgan

In my last post about carbon calculators, the tricky question of indirect emissions came up. I'm putting my own life through various calculators and seeing how they compare, but in trying to log my daily activities that consume energy and resources there are a number of unknowables.

In the past, I've been a bit sniffy about carbon calculators and have tended to dismiss them, although if I'm honest it's been on principle rather than first-hand experience. From what I've seen, they oversimplify an incredibly complex issue and, as a colleague pointed out, shift the weight of responsibility onto individuals when it should be an energy-efficient government that leads the way.

But then I came across mobGAS, a calculator produced by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre which sits on your mobile phone and allows you to enter daily updates about your energy consumption. Hurray, a new application for me to fiddle with in a borderline obsessive-compulsive manner, and an excuse for a broader look at carbon calculators in general.

While we think it's lovely that Defra has launched a carbon calculator, we can't help but notice that a few other organisations have already developed similar tools (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here, say).

I'm not knocking carbon calculators (they're useful tools and lots of us here in the office use them), and obviously personal action to help combat climate change is invaluable. But really, is this what David Miliband should be spending his time and our money on?