The GoodyGood Blog

Throw away your carbon footprint calculator

You might have noticed that at GoodyGood, we don't have an online carbon footprint calculator for you to work out your personal carbon emissions. We designed our subscriptions to cover the average carbon emissions of one person in New Zealand (our launch market), which is estimated to be a bit over 8 tonnes/year.

All of our subscription plans offset a nice round 12 tonnes/year and we don't offer plans that offset more, or less. Instead, we decided to throw away the carbon calculator, offset the same amount of carbon dioxide for every GoodyGood subscriber and celebrate the individual climate actions our customers take. One tonne a month is enough to cover the average carbon emissions for a person in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and most of the EU (plus a bit more for good measure). It's also enough to cover about two-thirds of the average carbon emissions for someone in the USA, Canada or Australia.

Why did we do this? Because it's simple and because we're all about progress over perfection.

The sneaky thing about Co2 is that it's everywhere, it's invisible and it's really really hard to know how much each of us create by going about our daily business. There are so many variables and assumptions, like the type of car you drive, your diet, your habits at home, the mix of energy you use or have access to, where you live, and so on. At the end of the day, an online carbon footprint calculator will only give you an estimate, so why argue about the numbers? Too complicated!

Sure, it feels nice to tick a box that says, "I bike to work" on a calculator and yes, you might fly a little bit less than your travelling pop star neighbour, but does it really matter that you're doing your bit by offsetting your 5.6 tonnes, but old mate next door should be offsetting 9.3 tonnes?

At GoodyGood, we say that climate action is like toppings on an ice cream. You can never add too much. The amount you offset shouldn't impact whether you decide to bike to work, cut back on meat or influence your workplace to cut emissions, so we think that works in reverse too. We'd rather you spend your energy doing more and celebrating the action you do take than getting wrapped up in dodgy accounting.

There's lots of different ways to help beat climate change. None are perfect by themselves, but the good thing is you can pick more than one. Or all of them! When it comes to climate action, more is more.

How about giving us a go, or if you have any questions, dropping us a line?