An important part of encouraging everyone to consider and reduce their carbon emissions is awareness.

That means both monitoring your own footprint and also your knowledge of what other people are doing. The Carbon Account site taps into this by letting you monitor your friends’ progress as well as your own. Do the people you know tread more lightly than you? How do you feel about them seeing the spike in your carbon tonnage following a transatlantic flight?

But it’s one thing to share your details within a group of people who are already engaged with the issue (because they’re already using the Carbon Account). To help spread the message further, we also have a Carbon Account application that runs on Facebook Platform, for those who use the social utility.

The Carbon Account Facebook app shares your footprint details with all of your Facebook contacts – not just the ones who are already using the Carbon Account. It does this by posting details of your updates to your Facebook news feed, as well as providing a page where users of the application can quickly check out their own and their friends’
footprints.

When friends who aren’t yet using the Carbon Account see how you’re doing, our hope is that they’ll be curious enough to try out the Carbon Account themselves. The app also lets you see which of your friends has the smallest and largest footprint. After all, a healthy spirit of competition is only a good thing when it comes to CO₂ reduction!

You can find the Carbon Account app for Facebook Platform at apps.facebook.com/thecarbonaccount, or hit the ‘Facebook’ button at the top of your Carbon Account profile page.

The Carbon Account Facebook application was kindly built by Steve Jalim of Some Fantastic. If you are a developer who’d like to contribute to the open source Carbon Account code, please visit our developer pages.

Yesterday we launched the Carbon Account, after a year’s development. It hasn’t always been easy but we’re pretty happy with the version that now appears, and we’re excited about our last minute decision to open source the whole thing. We feel that because climate change affects all of us, it is important to collaborate both when we reduce emissions, and as we build the tools to help us do so. It is in this spirit that we’ve made all the code available at code.thecarbonaccount.com.

Something else on our minds as we launch is the proliferation of new green sites like dothegreenthing.com, greenvoice.com and edenbee.com. These are all great initiatives that should help people come together and learn what it means to live sustainably, but what’s really required is swift political action, both nationally and internationally.

We first built the Carbon Account to try and demonstrate how personal carbon allowances might work. The idea is outlined in a book by Mayer Hillman called “How we can save the planet”. We think it is an elegant solution to the problem of how to reduce emissions and “reward carbon thrift” (in the words of David Milliband), and encourage everyone to really think about how society needs to change and adjust so that we can move forward in a low carbon world.

In the absence of this political change, one of the key things that we want to highlight with the Carbon Account is the damaging effect of flying. In the last ten years, cheap flights have become so abundant that they are now seen as a normal part of lots of people’s lives, not least the middle classes who are so vocal about climate change. We want people to realise that it’s only in very recent history that this has become ‘the norm’, and that the bare truth is no amount of recycling can undo a long-haul flight.

- Jamie Andrews