Carbon Calculator Resources

Quicklink to Carbon Calculator (click here)

 

Dear Friends,

At NEYM Sessions this year, Earthcare Ministry Committee (EMC) challenged individuals and their meetings to reduce their carbon footprint in the coming year by 10%. The Yearly Meeting accepted that challenge!  (NEYM Minute 2018-36)

Responding to this challenge requires both inward and outward transformative work.

The inward work is to examine our beliefs and assumptions about our relationship to our planet, and the collective impact of these beliefs and assumptions on others. This can be deep and difficult work.  EMC can offer resources for this transformative process. Please see the Commitment Toolkit and Resource List below for more information.

The outward work endorsed by the Yearly Meeting in sessions this August is to encourage individuals and meetings to measure their carbon footprint by December 2018 and to make specific plans to reduce this footprint by 10% by December 2019. This is an aspirational goal that we hope individuals and monthly meetings will be led by the Spirit to achieve.  To do this, a New England-centric and Quaker-centric carbon calculator has been developed by the Cape Cod Climate Change Collaborative:  http://climatecalculator.org/ClimateCalculator.html . The Quaker-created calculator gives an estimate of the impact your daily activities have on the looming climate crisis. It then offers you 475 actions to consider for reducing your carbon footprint.  This project is also called the Transforming Love Calculator Project of NEYM.

Many have already acted to reduce our contribution to climate change, but each can find more ways to reduce our impact. We can also encourage our neighbors, our friends and family to reduce their impact.

The climate calculator will not only allow individuals to reduce their climate impact through adopting the recommended actions, but will also support meetings in collectively reducing their impact.  Data from the calculator will allow meetings to commit to a shared goal to reduce their impact and to evaluate how well they met that goal.  And, a measurement of the meetinghouse’s carbon footprint can be calculated, too.

We’d like to make sure you succeed, so EMC is offering the following help:

  • Contact us to discuss how we can be most helpful to you and your meeting.  Call or email EMC members Steve Gates at 508-564-2761 or scgates1@sbcglobal.net(link sends e-mail)or Rebecca MacKenzie at 603-504-2851 or reb178@myfairpoint.net(link sends e-mail) .
  • Invite us to come to your meeting or ask us to set up a Zoom (electronic) meeting to help you or your meeting.   EMC is committed to helping every meeting in NEYM achieve its objectives.
  • Opt-in on the Climate Calculator for occasional mailings on new ideas for footprint-reduction, success stories, and news of interest on the topic of climate change.
  • Borrow one or more tablet computers that can be used in your meeting to run the Climate Calculator. These were purchased using a mini-grant from Quaker Earthcare Witness

And we’d like your help:

  • Use the Climate Calculator to record your choices automatically, so we can share with NEYM how we are doing in setting goals and achieving them. We will not share any individual results, only summary data on groups of 5 or more people to protect individual confidentiality. (To get started, use the Pre-calculator Worksheet below.)
  • Share with us your success stories, so we can share them throughout the Yearly Meeting.

Thank you for your efforts to reduce climate destabilization and share this ministry. Every effort counts.

Mary Bennett and Rebecca MacKenzie, co-clerks, Earthcare Ministry Committee of NEYM