Home Emissions

Home Electric

Calculating emissions from your home is straightforward for electricity if you are a home owner or someone that pays your own electric utility bill. Most utilities have an online portal where you can access all the past utility bills** which list the kWh per month. Adding all these monthly readings for a year gives you your annual electricity consumption in kWh. To get the carbon emissions from this electricity, multiply the kWh by 0.35 kg CO2/kWh. (For those of you questioning the 0.35 factor: this is a national average. It is possible to be more accurate but also more complicated so for the purposes of Climate Responsible, we are defaulting to simplification.)

**Many utility companies also offer online real-time electricity usage graphs.

Home Natural Gas

Calculating emissions from natural gas requires knowledge of the therms of natural gas used in a year. Your natural gas utility provides the number of therms used on the monthly electricity bill and these bills can be accessed on the utilities online portal. Adding all the monthly therms for 12 months gives the annual therms used per year. Multiply therms by 5.3 kg CO2/therm to get the CO2 kg emissions from natural gas.

* Note that this 10,000 does not include indirect emissions created from infrastructure in the US. This would add another 4000 kg per year per individual but since we have little control over this we are focusing on the 10,000. The 14 tonne annual emissions is found by dividing the US total CO2 emissions by the total population.

Source for kg CO2 factors. EPA Greenhouse Gas Emissions Equivalency Calculator