The Global Warming Calculator is designed to help you explore the economic effects and actual results of any of the various energy choices that you have or will be mandated to have. Adjust any of the pulldown menus to create your carbon scenario. The Global Warming Calculator will calculate your total carbon dioxide reduction, cost savings from reduced fuel consumption, along with your estimated costs of implementing those savings. Because we're all working together to save the earth (aka. under the socialist yoke), the Global Warming Calculator assumes everyone in the USA does what you do. It estimates the national carbon dioxide reduction and its effect on planetary temperature, national costs and nets, and finally, the amount of money sent overseas because of these policies
To use the Global Warming Calculator simply edit any of the pulldown values or input fields. The carbon calculator recalculates automatically with every change you make.
The Global Warming Calculator calculates a net dollars. To do this, we need to know what the prices of fossil fuels will be in the future. Since all fossil fuels are in efficient markets, we know that in the long haul, prices for everything that burns tends to move together. By asking you the price of gasoline in 25 years, we also apply that to the price of coal. We feel extreme prices are unrealistic, because at some point fuel synthesis will become cost competitive, but, we include them anyway for entertainment purposes. We use a baseline price of $2/gallon for gasoline and $70/ton for coal.
When we price, we back convert CO2 emissions tons into coal tons and gasoline gallons using 2.86 tons of CO2 per coal ton, and about 3 tons of CO2 per ton of gasoline. To convert tons to gallons of gasoline we assume each gallon of gasoline weighs 6 pounds. It can actually vary.
The Cost View lets you see results in either monthly, or 25 year total.
We use a baseline of 6 tons of carbon per year for transporation, and 18 tons of carbon per year for everything else. Transportation is assumed to be gasoline and everything is assumed to be coal. Weights of the various home uses such as home heating and water heating are given in order of use, from top to bottom, and are based on figures from Wikipedia. The page changes continuously so their numbers might track somewhat differently from ours.
As a rule, energy savings and efficiency is obstained by making products increasingly complex and complexity costs more. This complexity may not appear in the finished product but it will appear in the total process. For example, a titanium car might be a simple thing, but complex to make, and it will certainly cost more. Or, a personal computer CPU might be only a few hundred dollars, but good luck coming up with capital required to make one from scratch. It's a lot harder to get into the chip business today than it was twenty years ago. If you think efficiency will make things far more expensive, use a larger number. If you think things will be less expensive, use a smaller number.
Select a percentage from the pulldown. Selecting "eliminate" allows you to say that you are suspending use of that item altogether. This option costs 0 and gives you the full fuel savings. Unlike many lefties, we leave it to you to decide if you want to take the big green plunge and live without heat, light, or transporation.
The increased cost is the complexity inflated cost of the technology consuming that fuel. The cost increase is exponentially related to the increasing energy efficiency due to increasing complexity. Note that our model does not include inflation.
We do unfortunately share the lefty delusion you are infinitely wealthy solely because it was easier to program. If your increased cost is some titanic amount of money, we assume you have it and will continue to use that item at that cost. In the future, we will produce a more detailed environmental / economic simulation that allows policy makers to examine the effects of consumer switching or de-using a product as its costs rise. This would have some tailing effects as it would cause costs to rise for everyone else.
We feel that such a complexity switching model will inevitably show that the net effect of "going green" will be a reduction in lifestyle for a large portion of Americans - rather than increasing their costs, they will simply opt out, having catastrophic effects on cost of going green for everyone else. We see this exact thing happening already in health care, and it is going to happen to the energy sector as well. Mandated complexity drives up costs, causing people to drop out, and in turn, drives up per capita costs for those that remain in the system. It essentially goes to the idea that regulation is not wealth creating.
This simply calculates a total carbon reduction, in tons, from the baseline, based on your reduction percentage for that category.
Another way to reduce your carbon footprint is to change your source of electricity. Instead of burning fossil fuels for power, you could use nuclear or wind. We do not include solar because there are not enough megawatt scale rollouts to really price it.
As you increase your replacement percentage with the application, your baseline carbon is reduced by the amount that you select, but your costs increase to allow for your share of the capital costs.
The CO2 reduction is the total tons of CO2 that you did not use versus your baseline. It includes your energy reductions through both technology and switching fossil fuels to nuclear or wind.
This is the total cost of implementing your carbon dioxide changes. It includes both your home capital costs and the costs of any nuclear or wind you selected.
This is the total savings based on rising towards the fuel price you select.
This is your overall savings or loss, the costs less the fuel savings. If the number is negative, that means you lose.
This is the total CO2 reduction of the United States, in tons, based on your policy.
This is the reduction, in the increase, of parts per million by volume of CO2. To see the real world current CO2, visit our progress tracker. It gives the Mauna Loa CO2 ppm for each month. It is considered to be the most reputable source of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and has been repeatedly verified.
This is the net decrease in temperature, as a result of the PPM CO2. According to the IPCC, (the dreaded hockey stick), each 100 ppm should yield another degree in temperature. We grab RSS satellite temperature measurements, which are obviously more reliable than a network of ground stations. The satellite is consistent.
Amazingly, the President is currently doing a really good job with environment. Even though carbon dioxide is undisputably going up, the global temperature is actually declining somewhat. Some skeptics would argue that is caused by the sun. We safely ignore any short term decreases in actual temperature measurements in full faith that our javascript computer model is actually dead on.
Also note, that this temperature decrease would only be a real temperature decrease if the rest of the world dropped its current CO2 production to zero.
This is the total amount of money the United States will spend to implement your policy.
Because of free trade and the consequent death of manufacturing in the United States, a good portion of those environmental goodies that need to be made will actually be made overseas. We estimate the payments to Europe and China based on recent trade imbalances, as related to the overall manufacturing GDP of the United States. We are tracking the current trade imbalances in our progress tracker.
This is the overall cost in dollars, for each degree of planetary temperature lowered. Whether or not this amount buys an actual reduction in CO2 depends on worldwide behavior.