Energy & Carbon
To Scale
You can't see a kilowatt-hour. You can't see a kilogram of CO₂. So you guess — and almost everyone guesses wrong, sweating the straws while waving through the steaks and the flights. Here is every watt and every gram on one honest ruler, so you can finally tell the giants from the rounding errors.
One promise before we start: this is a ruler, not a sermon
First — roughly, what does your year look like?
Answer four quick things and the whole page reframes around your life: what your habits actually cost the planet, and how the stuff you were told to sweat compares to what really moves the needle.
The whole site in three ideas.
If you read nothing else, read this. Everything below is just the ruler proving these three.
1 · You can't see it, so you guess wrong.
Energy and carbon are invisible, so intuition fails. A plastic straw feels like the fight; one flight outweighs 400,000 of them.
2 · It's only as dirty as the source.
A kilowatt-hour is near-clean on hydro and filthy on coal. Same car, same action — your local grid changes the answer. Your ZIP will show you.
3 · The giants are few.
For almost everyone it's a short list: how you travel, how you heat, cool and power your home, how much you fly and eat beef. The rest is tidying.
- Aim at the giants: fly less, drive less or electric, clean up home energy, eat less beef. Everything else is small.
- The famous small stuff — straws, unplugging chargers, web searches — is real but climate-trivial. Do it for your wallet, not the planet.
- EVs and rooftop solar do pay off — net positive almost everywhere, and biggest where your grid is dirty.
- Some headlines are wrong on both sides: nuclear is wrongly feared, "eat local" is mostly a myth, and climate change itself is settled science.
- What to DO about the numbers is a values debate. This site only hands you the ruler.
Which one is bigger?
Six quick bets against your own intuition. No scores to be proud of — the point is to feel how badly the eye misjudges carbon before we hand you the ruler.
Everything you do, in carbon — honestly ranked.
One kilogram of CO₂ is invisible, so comparisons are the only way to feel it. Every bar is kg of CO₂e on a ×10 scale — each step right is ten times more — so the tiny things and the giants can share one picture. Tap any bar for its story.
From a phone charge to the Sun.
Carbon is just the exhaust. The thing itself is energy — and energy runs from the trivial to the unimaginable. Every step right is ten times more, measured in kilowatt-hours (a kWh runs a microwave for an hour). Tap any rung.
Roughly where do you land?
Four sliders, computed on your phone — nothing stored or sent. These are rough estimates from published averages, meant to place you on the ruler, not audit you.
What's actually in your wall socket?
Type your US ZIP code. You'll see the fuel mix and carbon of your state's grid, straight from the EPA's eGRID 2023 — a close stand-in for your utility, though your exact provider or a green-power plan can shift it. Nothing is sent anywhere; the whole map is baked into this page.
…or see the whole country at once.
Hover or tap a state · EPA eGRID 2023Each square is a state, placed roughly where it sits on the map and shaded by the carbon in one kilowatt-hour — green is clean (hydro, nuclear, wind), red is coal-heavy. The same electric car, plugged in, is nearly carbon-free in Vermont or Washington and barely better than gas in West Virginia or Kentucky.
"Electric" is only as clean as the plug.
A kilowatt-hour isn't clean or dirty by itself — it depends entirely on what made it. Here's the carbon in one kWh, by source. This is why the same electric car is a hero in one country and barely better in another.
So what actually works?
Not all "green" is equal. Here's every common action ranked by the carbon it truly moves in a year — giants at the top, feel-good rituals at the bottom. Tap any bar for the honest story. No agenda; just the ruler.
You asked — straight answers.
"Vampire" standby power is real — about 5–10% of your electricity, or $100–200 a year — so a smart power strip pays for itself. But it's only ~0.05 tonnes of CO₂e. Do it for the bill; the climate barely notices.
Heating and cooling are the single biggest slice of most home energy. Every degree you give back on the thermostat trims ~3–5% of that load, and fans, shade, and a smart schedule stack on top. Unlike unplugging, this moves actual carbon.
An EV starts life with a bigger footprint (mostly the battery), but pays that debt back in ~1.5–2 years, or 15,000–20,000 miles of driving. Over its life it emits roughly half a comparable gas car — and far less on a clean grid. Check "Your grid" above to see your own number.
A rooftop system earns back the energy used to build it in ~1–2 years, then makes clean power for 25–30. The dirtier your local grid, the more carbon every panel displaces. Estimate yours just below.
A workstation idling plus a couple of always-on speakers left running while you're out burns roughly 150–220 kWh a year — about $25–40 and ~0.06 tonnes of CO₂e. Worth a smart plug for the convenience; it won't change your footprint.
Should you put solar on your roof?
A rough cut for a typical rooftop system, localized to your state — enter your ZIP in "Your grid" above and this updates automatically. Panels earn back the energy used to build them in ~1–2 years, then run clean for decades.
Both sides get some of this wrong.
Every camp in the energy debate says things that are true, things that are exaggerated, and things that are flat wrong. Here's the ruler on the loudest claims — sorted by verdict, not by team. Notice it annoys everyone a little. That's the point.
What this ruler can and can't tell you.
Three honest things the numbers keep saying, no matter your politics — the giants are few, the ranking is rock-solid even when the digits aren't, and you are not the whole system.
Go deeper — the three, spelled out
1. The giants are few. For almost everyone, the whole footprint is a short list — how you get around, how you heat and power your home, how much beef and dairy you eat, and how much you fly. Everything else is a rounding error. Spend your effort on the giants; the straws were a distraction.
2. The math is fuzzy — the order is not. Every number here is an estimate with a real range (streaming and AI figures especially — they vary by source and keep dropping). But you don't need three significant figures to see that a flight dwarfs a straw by a factor of a hundred thousand. The ranking is rock-solid even when the digits aren't.
3. You are not the whole system. Most of your footprint is decided upstream — by the grid, the building code, the car that was for sale, the food on the shelf. Personal choices matter and they're the ones you control today; but the biggest lever is collective — cleaner grids, better transit, denser homes. The ruler measures both. It just refuses to pretend the straw was ever the point.