I spent the morning meeting with the creator of South Africa’s first Internet carbon-footprint calculator, which will premiere on Greener House in the near future. He is a brilliant young engineer who has just been named the best Certified Energy Manager in South Africa for the year, so you can trust that the calculator will be backed by solid data. Measuring the amount of greenhouse gases produced by a person is a tricky and inherently imprecise task. But he is committed to making the calculator as accurate and as useful as possible.

There are plenty of carbon calculators in the Internet, so why do we need another one? Because the others make assumptions that you live in America, the U.K., or somewhere else that has conditions different to South Africa’s. For instance, if you use a calculator from a country that uses a lot of nuclear power for electricity, the carbon contribution from your electricity consumption will be misleadingly low. And no other country produces significant quantities of petrol and diesel from coal; our calculator will take that into account as well.

We will be glad to consider refinements to the calculator once it is up on Greener House. But we don’t want to just throw up a rough draft, hence the long meeting today. Our aim is to have it up and running by the end of the year. It’s tough, I know, but try to be patient.