BT is encouraging people to calculate their carbon footprint and explore ways of reducing their personal impact on global warming through a new website at www.btplc.com/climatechange.
BT’s carbon calculator enables people to calculate their annual CO2 usage at any point in time, based on their fuel consumption at home and travel patterns including flights and yearly road and rail mileage. The calculator lets users change their profile over time, showing how their carbon footprint changes with each action they take.
Armed with the details of their carbon footprint, visitors can consider ways to reduce it, both at home and at work. The website boasts a wealth of bite-sized information, tips and web links detailing action that can be taken to make their homes, gardens and shopping decisions more carbon friendly, and how to reduce carbon emissions when travelling.
The actions that people can take are straightforward and realistic, ranging from easy steps such as signing up to renewable energy or collecting rain water in a garden water butt to travelling by train instead of flying.
Donna Young, BT’s Head of Climate Change, said: ¨BT doesn’t need to point out that climate change is one of the biggest challenges that we face, but people often don’t realise that individually it is possible to take real, meaningful action on it. We believe that governments, organisations and individuals can all take steps to reduce the size of their carbon footprint, and we strongly encourage people to visit our site and see for themselves the difference they can make.
For people who would like to learn more about the subject of climate change, the site contains a handy bluffers guide, explaining the science in a nutshell in addition to the link between CO2 and global warming and the likely consequences.
This is expanded further through inspiring and thought-provoking recommendations from some leading climate change experts. The choices range from further reading material, films and media clips to watch to photographs and interesting websites to visit. Contributors include Jonathon Porritt - Founder Director of Forum for the Future, Tom Delay – CEO of the Carbon Trust and Antony Turner – Managing Director of Carbon Sense.
The website also gives details of BT’s pledges to make a significant contribution to the process of reducing carbon emissions, including detailed and honest answers to questions. The measures BT is taking include the recent extension of the world’s biggest Green Energy contract, exploring the further potential of wind power, auditing the energy consumption of its data centres and engaging with suppliers and customers.
In addition, it explains how BT is harnessing the potential of both broadband in the home and networking technology in the workplace to cut down on unnecessary travel through home working and teleconferencing.