It’s official: our flight calculator rocks

Adam Stein | May 13, 2008

Enter your airline, seat class, and number of stopovers for most detailed carbon footprint yet.

We pre-announced this a few weeks ago, but now you can see for yourself: the new TerraPass flight calculator gives you the most personalized carbon footprint information available, using data provided by TRX that takes into account not just your route, but also your airline and even your seat class.

Check it out.

It’s surprising some of the disparities you uncover when you have data like this at your fingertips:

Marvel at how Delta is 34% more efficient than US Airways on the JFK to SFO route.
Delight in the ability to indicate the number of stopovers for your flight.
Shudder at the outrageous carbon footprint associated with first class travel.*

The new calculator ~~is so detailed that it even takes into account the direction of travel. Factors such as prevailing winds means that the same route has a different impact depending on which way you’re going~~ takes into account a range of factors including plane type, route anomalies such as weather detours and holding patterns, cargo loads, seat pitch and width, etc. TRX engaged an outside expert to validate their emissions methodology. Here’s a quote from the validation statement:

In ICF’s opinion, the TRX calculator employs an appropriate methodology and the best publicly available industry data. The TRX Calculator adjusts for all significant factors that affect the calculation of a flight’s emissions and the appropriate allocation of those emissions to the individual passenger. Where specific information is not available, the TRX calculator employs appropriate assumptions and relevant industry averages which result in a reasonable calculation of the environmental impacts of a specific flight.

* Incidentally, people often wonder why there’s a difference in carbon impact between seat classes. It’s because first class travel takes up a greater amount of the available passenger space, and therefore lays claim to a greater proportion of the emissions. Basically, it’s sort of like buying two seats.

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Comments

1. By david on May 13, 2008 11:22 PM

I love this carbon calculator -- awesome work.

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2. By fred on May 14, 2008 1:45 AM

Check out this US Carbon Footprint Map, an interactive United States Carbon Footprint Map, illustrating Greenest States. This site has all sorts of stats on individual State energy consumptions, demographics and State energy offices.

http://www.eredux.com/states/

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3. By Shannon on May 14, 2008 5:44 AM

This is great! Any word yet on radiative forcing?

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4. By Adam Stein on May 14, 2008 6:19 AM

Not yet. There's a study due this summer, and we're also working with a cross-vendor group to figure out the most appropriate method for addressing this issue. We'll be sure to post an update when something happens.

As an aside, I think it's pretty awesome that people are so engaged on the RFI thing. It's a pretty obscure topic.

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5. By Shannon on May 14, 2008 6:37 AM

well I blog about global warming. That's a pretty obscure topic in general. The radiative forcing numbers are interesting for my purposes because they affect the footprint of the average citizen, which is the baseline of emissions for our Carbon Reduction Action Group.

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6. By Steve on May 14, 2008 9:05 AM

Can anyone come up with a carbon calculator that caters for the rest of the world? Sorry, but the US is NOT the centre of the universe...

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7. By Adam Stein on May 14, 2008 10:07 AM

Steve, almost every airport in the world is included in our carbon calculator. It is U.S.-centric in the sense that everything is measured in lbs and miles, but you can certainly generate a carbon footprint for non-U.S. flights. Not perfect, but hopefully it helps...

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8. By Scott H. on May 14, 2008 11:51 AM

What about a calculator that showed you the lowest carbon flight from your origin to the chosen destination?

Such a Carbon Flight Selector might start to drive airlines to reduce emissions to be selected. It certainly would create another input into the system if customers started using the relative carbon footprint of a flight as a determinant on what flight was selected.

You could even monetize it by allowing us to book the flights right through your website.

Sounds like a win-win-win. :-)

And what the hell, throw in train fares and comparisons to cars just to round things out.

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9. By Pete on May 14, 2008 11:58 AM

Scott -- that's an awesome idea. Not sure we'll quite get to travel booking anytime soon, but we should be able to show the lowest carbon option fairly easily. We'll try and incorporate this soon.

Pete.

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10. By Mike on May 14, 2008 1:07 PM

Since the fuel consumption correlates to the weight of the transported things/folks (i.e. airplane, fuel, passengers, other load [including those silly duty-free items on international flights that are transported from one country to the next]) am I doing the planet some good if a loose a few pounds prior to my travel or is my personal weight negligible?

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11. By Tom Arnold on May 14, 2008 2:32 PM

Mike:

In theory yes. Although if the south beach diet is not your thing, try just packing more lightly. Reducing your luggage by 15 lbs on a cross country trip is like replacing a bulb with a CFL.

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12. By Steven on May 14, 2008 9:49 PM

The calculator seems to have some strange behavior. For example:
It thinks American Airlines has a larger carbon footprint than Alaska Airlines on a direct flight between SAN (San Diego) and PDX (Portland).

Now, before everyone starts commenting on how Alaska is more efficient, please note that the American flight is a code share flight on the *same* airplane as the Alaska flight.

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13. By Adam Stein on May 15, 2008 6:54 AM

Hm. That is strange. We use data from a third party, so we're going to need to check into this to see if we can figure out what's going on. Hopefully we'll have an update soon.

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14. By Adam Stein on May 15, 2008 8:49 AM

OK, we checked into it. It turns out that even though the flights are a code share, the two airlines are reporting slightly different equipment for the same routes. So it is a data problem, but it traces all the way back to the airlines themselves.

Our working assumption is that this isn't a very common occurrence, but we're digging in a bit further to see if we can see how common it actually is.

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15. By ted on May 20, 2008 9:35 AM

I am impressed by this fine-grained calculator, and your efforts to make the calculation transparent. Still wondering why there is such variation among (well-regarded) air travel calculators out there. I recently calculated offsets for 4 travelers (family traveling together) for an upcoming journey, and generated results ranging from 11.9 MT CO2 (old TerraPass) to 40.3 MT CO2 (carboncounter.org). I was inclined to go with the 27.3 MT CO2 I calculated using Atmosfair, precisely because they take things like equipment and traveling class into account, until I tried the new TerraPass calculator and came up with total 7.27 MT CO2 for the same trip for ALL 4 PASSENGERS. Still puzzled why I should be prepared to trust this last figure. It's clearly the cheapest for me, but I am more concerned that it truly be most accurate. Any advice?

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16. By Adam Stein on May 20, 2008 11:02 AM

Hi Ed,

Good question. The major difference is that Atmosfair multiplies their calculation by three to account for effects of altitude. If you multiply the TerraPass number by three, it's pretty close to the Atmosfair number. So there is pretty good agreement between the two calcs. The remaining difference, presumably, is a function of the different underlying data sets.

TerraPass very likely will eventually apply a multiplier to our air travel results as well. There's an effort underway right now to come up with a consensus figure. In the meantime, feel free to use your own multiplier, or just use the straight CO2 value.

- Adam

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17. By ted on May 20, 2008 11:36 AM

Adam,

Thanks for the reply and clarification. Can you suggest a link or explanation of how the altitude effects factor in? That's a pretty big multiplier -- and as I said, I'm interested in the most accurate estimate of impact. Really appreciate your clarity on this.

Ted

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18. By Adam Stein on May 21, 2008 3:13 PM

Hi Ted,

There's a lot of stuff online, but it tends toward the technical. One suggestion would be to start with this page on the David Suzuki Foundation, and then explore the links at the bottom as your curiosity dictates:

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Climate_Change/What_You_Can_Do/air_travel.asp

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It’s official: our flight calculator rocks

Enter your airline, seat class, and number of stopovers for most detailed carbon footprint yet.

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