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The increasingly environmentally friendly and omnipresent Google has launched a carbon footprint calculator. There's plenty of those already available, though, so what has Google done to stand out from the crowd?
It's based on Google's personalised homepage, and features a slightly cheesy green and blue landscape theme. When you first visit, you're asked to fill in a questionnaire with all the usual topics on where you live and how you travel. Unfortunately, though, it misses out some important questions. For example, it asks if you own a car, but doesn’t ask how much you drive it. Someone who owns a G-Wiz but rarely uses it will be penalised as much as someone who drives a Hummer 100 miles to work every day.
On the other hand, it's only designed as a rough guide, and if it was as complicated as a tax return to fill in, nobody would bother. Once you've taken the quiz, you're presented with a score in tonnes which you can add to a map of the UK. Here you can see how other people in your area have done -- the location markers are coloured green for lower scores, through to red for the worst carbon offenders.
You can also set the calculator to feature on your personalised Google homepage, where you can refer back to it at any time. A list of tips offers ways to reduce your footprint, such as changing traditional light bulbs to energy-saving alternatives. If you follow through with any of the tips, you can check them off and see how it affects your score. The actual results are questionable though. One member of the SmartPlanet team's footprint was only 2.79 tonnes, which is probably far too low.
There's also a larger map where you can overlay lots of interesting data onto the UK. For instance, you can use it to show which areas use the most power, where the countries solar power stations are or where the nearest recycling centre is. This will just keep getting more useful as Google adds new layers, and as more people calculate their carbon footprints.
So now Google knows all your guilty secrets -- what you search for online, and even what your carbon footprint is. What was your score?
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