Good news: your personal carbon footprint is probably way smaller than those online calculators want you to believe.
SSRN · March 13, 2026 · 6320319
Why it matters
Most footprint models ignore 'market feedback,' where your decision to consume less carbon-intensive products actually lowers their prices, encouraging others to consume more. This 'leakage' means that individual household sacrifices often have a negligible impact on total global emissions compared to what current accounting suggests.
From the abstract
Household carbon footprints are increasingly used to motivate climate policy instruments aimed at end use behavior. Yet the magnitude and interpretation of household responsibility depend on the accounting framework. This paper formalizes household carbon attribution as an economic mapping from micro level actions to aggregate emissions and shows that standard consumption based accounting can systematically overstate the marginal emissions impact of household behavior when market feedback and su