Oil companies are beginning to hint “in their advertising”:http://flickr.com/photos/paytonc/63444879 that “oil will not last forever”:http://willyoujoinus.com. Still, I was a little surprised to find “this at BP’s site”:http://www.bp.com/iframe.do?categoryId=9005522&contentId=7011382, a cheeky little Flash-animated household carbon emissions calculator complete with little Fisher-Price men. (More interestingly, it was advertised at “Slate”:http://www.slate.com/id/2131024/fr/rss alongside an article on Jayanta Sen’s idea to set up an oil importers’ cartel to take OPEC oil profits and invest them back home; the BP tagline is “Small carbon footprints can make a big difference… Learn about ways to reduce your carbon footprint.”)

Since the calculator updates the totals dynamically, you can very easily see how going car-free will *very* substantially cut your household carbon emissions — the gases that cause global warming. Example: a hobo living in a sedan and driving 20,000 miles a year (less than the average American car) produces more carbon dioxide than my entire household, even with my frequent-flyer habit.

The Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology, the folks who own I-Go car sharing, also runs two air pollution calculators, one that measures “carbon emissions from transportation”:http://travelmatters.org and another measuring “toxics from all household activities”:http://airhead.org. “Ecological footprint” analyses come in “simple”:http://earthday.net/Footprint and “more complex”:http://www.mec.ca/Apps/ecoCalc/ecoCalc.jsp flavors.

[adapted from CCM list]