Wouldn’t it be great if you could be personally carbon neutral or even carbon positive? Unfortunately, as it currently stands, few individuals can accurately measure their own carbon footprint, and even if they could, they can’t afford the steps available to accomplish carbon positivity.
- Today your carbon footprint doesn’t really ‘matter’, except in a mind-numbingly abstract way (carbon particles per million in the environment). Wouldn’t it be great if your carbon account ‘mattered’ in some way, to you personally, to your family, to your friends, and to society?
- Today, measurable carbon ‘credit’ is available only to those who write a check for offsets. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to more directly ‘earn’ carbon credit? Wouldn’t it be great if they were inexpensive enough for just about everyone to earn them?
- Today, carbon accounts (aka carbon wallets) are transactional or at best temporary, and associated with individual private and public organizations. Wouldn’t it be great if you controlled your own carbon account, knew the account was permanent, and you could consolidate all your carbon credits and expenses?
- Today your carbon consumption in the form of home utilities is difficult to capture and maintain. Wouldn’t it be great if you could direct your utility company to share your utility bills and consumption history directly to your carbon wallet, so that your carbon footprint from utilities could be more precisely measured?
- Today your carbon consumption in terms of travel is difficult to measure. Wouldn’t it be great if you could automatically direct information about your travel from travel sites and frequent flier accounts, and from gasoline consumption to your carbon account?
- Today it is difficult to measure all of your daily consumption in terms of carbon. Think of it: food from groceries and from restaurants, cosmetics, medicine, entertainment and so on. Wouldn’t it be great if someone could create a great big online database of consumables, and accurately assign a carbon value to them? Then, wouldn’t it be great if you could direct your grocery store loyalty program or credit card company to share those purchase items to your carbon wallet so that it could calculate the carbon cost?
- Today it is difficult to think carefully about living within a carbon budget. Wouldn’t it be great if you could quickly and somewhat precisely identify your biggest carbon expense, the best things for you to change, and to change them?
- I think perfect accuracy is a ways off, but pretty good directional information is within our grasp.
At LOT our plan is to introduce minimum viable carbon accounts in the coming months, and steadily improve them over the coming years. We think these will motivate individuals and households to steadily change their behavior and move towards carbon positivity.
