According to the Yousustain website, the average U.S. citizen’s footprint is 16.49 metric tons of CO2 emissions. The average in the industrial nations is about 11 metric tons with the worldwide average being 4. With that said, the worldwide target to combat climate change is 2 metric tons. Sadly, when I calculated my footprint on the site, it came out to be 18.69 metric tons per year not including household costs given that I live in a utilities included apartment and do not have the information for that. It is fair to say that this calculation is a very rough estimate because again, I do not have exact numbers for the required questions presented in the survey.

There are seven categories in the calculation with them being house, flights, car, motorbike, bus and rail, and secondary. My secondary is what hurt me the most with flights coming in second. Given that the largest number entered for secondary was food costs, I will give myself some credit of having to buy costlier food due to trying to shop organic, non-GMO, local, and vegan. This is one example of what the footprint calculation does not take into account. Someone else may consume less food than me, but may be a heavy meat eater and eat foods not in season. That would give them a larger footprint than me, but Yousustain is not as specific as that. Therefore, their calculations are not very accurate, but I can’t blame them. No one wants to spend a whole day trying to get complete accuracy of their yearly CO2e.