What's Your Carbon Footprint?
The average American's lifestyle produces about 16 metric tons of CO₂ every year — four times the global average. See where you stand in two minutes, and what it would take to bring your number down to zero.
1Where You Live
The same house uses different amounts of energy — and that energy carries different amounts of carbon — depending on where it sits.
2Getting Around
Your daily driving and transit habits.
3Flying
A round trip New York–London is about 14 hours in the air — and roughly 1.8 tons of CO₂.
4Eating
A single serving of beef carries about 7.7 kg of CO₂ — more than five average meals.
5Operating Your Home
Heating, cooling, and powering a home is often the biggest slice of a household footprint — and the slice your ZIP code changes most.
6Building or Buying New?
A new home's materials and construction carry "embodied" carbon — often 25–100 tons before anyone moves in. We spread it over a 30-year life.
How we calculate this
Your ZIP code: we use it for two things. First, the carbon intensity of your electricity, from the EPA's eGRID2023 subregion emission rates — these range from 243 lb CO₂e/MWh in upstate New York to 1,405 in eastern Wisconsin, against a US average of 771. Second, your climate, which sets how much heating and cooling a house actually needs. ZIP codes are matched to an eGRID subregion and a climate profile at the state and metro level, not by EPA's full ZIP-code crosswalk, so a ZIP near a subregion boundary may be assigned to its neighbour.
Driving & transit: 0.40 kg CO₂e per mile for a gasoline car and 0.26 for a hybrid. An electric car is calculated from 0.32 kWh per mile at your regional grid intensity, so an EV in California carries roughly half the carbon of the same EV in the Rockies. Public transit is 0.15 kg per passenger-mile.
Flying: ~110 kg CO₂e per hour in economy, based on Clever Carbon's flight benchmarks (e.g., New York–London, ~900 kg over 7 hours).
Diet: annual totals from 1.5 t (vegan) to 3.3 t (meat at most meals), anchored to per-serving values such as 7.7 kg per serving of beef (Clever Carbon).
Home operations: split into three parts. Baseload electricity — lighting, appliances, plug loads — at 3.5 kWh per square foot per year, which climate does not change. Cooling at 1.7 kWh per square foot in an average-climate year, scaled by your region's cooling degree days. Heating scaled by your region's heating degree days: natural gas at 0.030 thousand cubic feet per square foot (119.6 lb CO₂ per kcf), electric resistance at 4.2 kWh per square foot, a heat pump at 1.5. Degree-day scaling is relative to the US population-weighted average of 3,692 HDD and 1,633 CDD (EIA, 2024). Home performance and rooftop solar then adjust those figures, and household totals are divided among household members.
New-home embodied carbon: modeled from CNaught's home construction calculator — concrete, insulation type, roofing, solar hardware, other materials, and construction transport — typically 25–100 metric tons per home, amortized over 30 years and shared across the household.
All figures are directional estimates for education, not an audit. Sources: US EPA eGRID2023 summary tables; US EPA Power Profiler; EIA State Energy Indicators (degree days); Clever Carbon pocket guide; CNaught home carbon methodology (Building Green, Circular Ecology, Magwood, LETI).
Ready to erase your footprint?
Science-backed carbon credit portfolios on the COGNITION Carbon Offsets Marketplace, powered by CNaught. The average US household can offset an entire year for about $140.
New to carbon offsets? Start with the COGNITION Carbon Offsets Marketplace.