Make Your Carbon Wave
This isn't about your carbon footprint. Carbon pollution doesn't fall because individuals perfect their “lifestyles.” It falls when people create waves of change that transform our energy system away from dirty fossil fuels towards clean electricity and electrification.
A footprint is what one person leaves behind, and the tide erases it. A wave is what people make together. This calculator helps you start your wave and grow it — from your home, to your community, to the rules.
Idea adapted from the book, The Carbon Wave, by Leah C. Stokes.
First, where are you starting from?
Every wave starts somewhere. A few quick questions so we can meet you where you are.
Start your wave
Here are three places to start building your wave: it grows from your home, to your neighbors, to your community.
Your Carbon Wave
Now watch it grow
A wave is never one person. Slide to see what happens when people act together — in your town, your state, your country.
Every carbon wave begins with people acting together. These organizations are already building the wave you started — here's how to plug in today, not someday.
Keep your wave growing
Subscribe to Notes from the Electric Era, Leah Stokes's newsletter on the politics of clean energy and electrification — and keep learning what's working.
Idea adapted from the book, The Carbon Wave, by Leah C. Stokes.
These numbers are illustrative, not precise. Waves are less controllable than footprints — and their potential is orders of magnitude larger. The point is the comparison across bands, not precision within them.
How this calculator works
Background information on where the numbers come from — and what they're for.
What is this calculator trying to do?
The goal of the carbon wave calculator is to help people think about systems change. Fossil fuel companies popularized the “carbon footprint” idea with calculators measuring what one person's “lifestyle” does in terms of emissions. This one aims to debunk that limited perspective, showing how much pollution you could help eliminate if you helped change the systems around you — the grid, the machines, and the rules. The goal here isn't creating a precise estimate. It's to help people find a starting point for getting involved in changing the energy system, including helping them to wrap their heads around the relative importance of different structural change actions, and to enable people to more easily take the first step.
Are these numbers precise?
No — and they can't be. The goal here is illustrative, order-of-magnitude estimates. Direct changes to infrastructure, like a person installing a heat pump, are easier to estimate and are informed by government data and published research. But the true number would depend on a person's home, climate, and how clean their grid is. Still, for those estimates we can get closer. Other actions, like policy change, are inherently harder to measure — no one can say exactly how many tons a person's testimony at a hearing moved. What the estimates can show honestly is the comparison: actions that change the rules operate on a scale hundreds of times larger than actions inside one home. That comparison is the point. (And yes it's still quite important to replace your gas furnace with a heat pump because no one else is going to do that for you.)
What does "enabled" mean on some cards?
We built out two kinds of impacts. Direct reductions are emissions you can eliminate yourself — like if you replace your gas furnace with a heat pump or your gas car with an electric vehicle, you directly eliminate that pollution. Enabled reductions are emissions that fall because your actions catalyzed larger changes that helped that infrastructure move forward. Like if you went to a local hearing to support a clean energy project getting permitted and built, or got your city to adopt a code change, or worked to retire a coal plant. Enabled tons are shared: when a campaign wins, everyone who showed up helped, so these estimates are one person's hypothetical proportional share of a collective victory.
Why bands instead of a single score?
A single score would quietly reimport footprint logic — the idea that climate progress is about perfecting your personal number. Waves don't work that way. They're less controllable than footprints, and their potential is orders of magnitude larger. So instead of a score, you get a band — Ripple to Tidal Wave — that tells you what scale your actions operate on.
Where do the comparisons come from?
We did our best to gather current data, including from the US Environmental Protection Agency. For example, a typical gasoline car emits about 4.3 tons of CO₂ a year, one utility-scale wind turbine avoids about 3,350 tons a year, and an average US coal plant emits about 3.8 million tons a year. We also draw on other sources like data and research from the Department of Energy, Rewiring America, RMI, and peer-reviewed studies. Overall we are using US averages.
Why does policy get the biggest numbers?
Changing policy allows a group of individuals to have massive leverage over systems change. A person's furnace is one machine; a building code decides what goes into every new building in a city. A clean electricity standard reshapes an entire state's power sector. When people join together to change a rule, that can help enable thousands of machines to change.
I don't live in the US. Is this still for me?
Yes. We built this for the United States context, and the named programs and organizations are American, but the logic travels: every country has a grid to clean, machines to retire, and rules to change. Search for the equivalent groups where you live — they exist almost everywhere.
Who made this?
This calculator grew out of the book The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet by Leah C. Stokes. It's a story of how ordinary people made a wave big enough to change the rules. Leah built it with the help of colleagues and friends who helped shape the idea, and she used Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, for fact checking and building the site.