Make Me Sustainable

The folks over at Make Me Sustainable are making it easy to track your personal carbon emissions. The site collects information from users about there carbon emissions in the form of easy to answer questions about your lifestyle. After you create your carbon profile you can choose for a small list of energy saving tasks and track how those tasks are effecting your overall output. I have registered with the site and created a profile, but haven't dug much deeper. The site couples as social networking along the lines of MySpace or Facebook, allowing you to create contacts and see what they are doing to reduce their carbon emissions. At first glance I think they will have to offer more comprehensive and in depth energy saving tasks for this to be an effective tool. For example, they give you the option to select "substituted driving for walking or public transportation" but they leave it up to the user to calculate how many miles they are saving in doing this. Rebekah and I can walk to a grocery store in our neighborhood that is only .7 miles from our house. Let's say we go every week, that's .7 miles a week or 3.5 miles per month. However, what it doesn't account for is that if we weren't walking we'd be going to a grocery store that is much further away (because it is cheaper). All in all I think the site is a great idea, especially because it gives the user cost savings analysis for their various tasks. If I could discover that walking to the local drug store and the local grocery store (which is why we moved to the neighborhood in the first place) vs. driving to Target or Price Chopper (because they offer less expensive products) was actually saving me money in the long run I'd be much more motivated to make that lifestyle change. Anyway, give a whirl and see for yourself...Oh yeah, I've also added their blog, Carbon Crusaders, to my blog roll.