Last week I was in London to spend time with the team from AMEE.  On the flight to London, I read an article that provided a potent reminder of the importance of measuring CO2 emissions.  The Independent had a big story on Methane gas being released from the Arctic sea floor off the coast of Siberia in far larger quantities than previously feared.  Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas (20x more potent than CO2) that was trapped beneath permafrost.  The release of this gas is a great example of the non-linearities involved in climate change.

Now of course by flying to London I was contributing a fair bit of CO2 to the atmosphere.  A couple of months ago, I was at a dinner having a discussion with someone about climate change with someone who quickly asked me: “Do you fly?” and when I answered “Yes,” he immediately retorted “Well, then you don’t care about climate change."  Now I had to explain that I try to buy offsets for all my flights but I also had to admit that I wasn’t very good a tracking that.

Thanks to AMEE and foursquare that problem has just gone away.  AMEE has just released ALF, which stands for AMEE Location Footprinter (not for ALF).  It works as follows: you go to http://alf.ameeapps.com and authorize access to your foursquare account.  ALF then knows where you have been – in my case that would include having been at too many different airports over the last 5 weeks.  ALF uses this data to calculate your CO2 transportation footprint and sends that to you as an email with a summary and detail on each movement (here is my summary from last week):  

Going forward, I will be using this to purchase offsets for my travels.  In fact, I am hoping that at some future point AMEE will let me add my credit card and automate the whole process.

So unless you happen to believe that all this man made CO2 is a good thing start measuring your footprint off foursquare now (yet another thing those foursquare checkins are useful for!).