About

Why this exists

This site attempts to reframe how we talk about carbon emissions and removal. I was motivated to make this after seeing carbon-removal misinformation on LinkedIn from a well-known clean-tech author. Many of the common objections to removal are misguided — see The Case for Removal for the full argument. The ratio at the heart of the calculator works for both halves of the problem: it gives people a way to make removal mainstream, and it clarifies the need and opportunities for reducing emissions.

About the author

I work on energy modeling and analytics software for a living, and I've had a long-standing interest in energy and environmental questions and policies. An earlier project in that vein is my duck curve analysis site, which looks at the daily mismatch between solar generation and grid demand, as applied to real energy data from my house. More writing and projects live at carlsorenson.me.

How it was built

This site is a Vue 3 single-page app built with Vite. State is local (Pinia), translations come through vue-i18n, and shareable links are stored on a small Cloudflare Worker. It was written using Claude Code, Cursor, and Visual Studio.

This was my first substantial project built with AI tools end-to-end. I took it on partly to learn the workflow — my own field is going to need to absorb these tools — and the honest takeaway is that I was vastly more productive than I would have been without them.

The point of all this is to be used. Try the calculator — see your own ratio, and keep raising it.