Take the Interfaith Power & Light carbon footprint quiz!
Our Cool Congregations Calculator
Use our Cool Congregations Calculator to estimate your congregation’s carbon footprint. It offers a snapshot of your carbon footprint, allowing you to look at the best places to lower your footprint and become more energy smart. We break your carbon footprint down into four sub-components:
- Energy use: we estimate the carbon emissions from your congregation’s use of electricity, natural gas and other fuels.
- Transportation: carbon emissions from congregations and staff travel.
- Goods and services: carbon emissions associated with food, office products, cleaning products, and everything else your congregation purchases.
- Waste: emissions from landfill waste (mainly methane) converted into carbon equivalent units.
Then we give credit for lands your congregation may manage in their natural state as carbon sinks and for any carbon offsets your congregation has purchased.
We provide your congregation’s total footprint in both pounds of carbon and in acres.
Why Acres?
The vast majority of energy we use today is derived from the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas, and coal. Our carbon footprint measures how much carbon we put into the atmosphere through various activities such as driving. The carbon footprint, however, can be expressed in other ways that are more useful and more consistent with the original ecological footprint concept: the area of the Earth’s surface needed to absorb those emissions. On average, it takes roughly 41 acres to absorb one ton of carbon emissions. Other gases that contribute to global warming – namely methane from waste – are converted into “carbon equivalent” units then added to the carbon footprint.
