Is our carbon footprint growing or shrinking?

For several years now, I've been buying carbon offsets every year from Carbon Footprint. You can use their calculator to roughly estimate carbon emissions from your home, various modes of transportation, diet, and general consumption, and then donate money to various carbon-reducing projects (tree planting, green power, energy efficiency, and so on) to offset those emissions. The site also shows you how your personal carbon footprint compares to the average person in your own country, the average person worldwide, and the global target we'd all need to reach to halt global warming. In previous years, our household footprint has worked out to somewhere between 12.5 and 14.5 tons (or "tonnes," as it's a British site). Although this is quite a bit larger than the target, or even the world average, I always found it reassuring to see that it was less than half the size of the average American's footprint, which meant that we were doing reasonably well on the grading curve.

This year, however, the calculator threw me for a loop. Two loops, in fact, in quick succession.

The first loop came when I reached the section of the calculator that asks about your car. In a typical year, we put about 11,000 miles on ours, so I use that figure to calculate our footprint from driving. However, it occurred to me that in the past few months, we've been doing a lot less driving than usual, so I checked our gas mileage log to see just how many miles we'd driven since last July. As luck would have it, we'd filled up our car exactly a year earlier, on July 18, 2019, and at that time it had 90,031 miles on it. And as of yesterday, it had 96,645. We hadn't just reduced our mileage — we'd cut it by around 40 percent. And that was over only a four-month period. If our current state of semi-isolation continues throughout the rest of the year, and especially if we can't make our annual long trek to Indiana for Christmas, we'll reduce it by even more next year.

Well, between that drastic cut in our driving and the fact that we're now eating virtually no meat or dairy, I expected our overall carbon footprint to be significantly smaller than it had been in the past. And so it was: 9.63 metric tons, as compared to a previous low of 12.5. But here was the kicker: even our new, smaller footprint was still well over half the size of the average footprint for U.S. residents. The average American footprint, according to the calculator, measured 16.49 metric tons; ours was 58 percent of that. And compared to the average for the European Union (6.4 metric tons) and the world (5 metric tons), our performance was absolutely pathetic.

What happened? How could we slash our carbon footprint by nearly 25 percent and still see it increase relative to the size of everyone else's? The only explanation I can think of is that everyone else in the U.S. and Europe has also been cutting emissions during 2020, and since they had more to cut in the first place, their footprints shrank a lot more than ours did. Thus, even though ours is smaller than it was, it's still a larger percentage of the new, smaller average.

Technically, I guess, this is good news. I mean, it's much better for the climate if all Americans (and I guess all Europeans, too) are slashing their carbon footprints, not just a few hardcore environmentalists. But I must admit, I feel a little bit disgruntled to be scoring lower on the grading curve than I'm used to. I feel like, if the average American — who probably isn't working all that hard at it — can get their carbon footprint down to 16.49 metric tons, then surely we ought to be able to get ours down to 8.24 or less. I'm not sure how we'd manage this feat (go full vegan? switch to an electric car? an electric heating system?) but it ought to be possible somehow.