Car­bon man­age­ment is of increas­ing inter­est to indi­vid­u­als, households,
and com­mu­ni­ties. In order to effec­tive­ly assess and man­age their cli­mate impacts,
indi­vid­u­als need infor­ma­tion on the finan­cial and green­house gas ben­e­fits of effective
mit­i­ga­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties. We use con­sump­tion-based life cycle account­ing techniques
to quan­ti­fy the car­bon foot­prints of typ­i­cal U.S. house­holds in 28 cities for 6 household
sizes and 12 income brack­ets. The mod­el includes emis­sions embod­ied in transportation,
ener­gy, water, waste, food, goods, and ser­vices. We fur­ther quan­ti­fy greenhouse
gas and finan­cial sav­ings from 13 poten­tial mit­i­ga­tion actions across all house­hold types.
The mod­el sug­gests that the size and com­po­si­tion of car­bon foot­prints vary
dra­mat­i­cal­ly between geo­graph­ic regions and with­in regions based on basic demographic
char­ac­ter­is­tics. Despite these dif­fer­ences, large cash-pos­i­tive car­bon footprint
reduc­tions are evi­dent across all house­hold types and loca­tions; how­ev­er, real­iz­ing this
poten­tial may require tai­lor­ing poli­cies and pro­grams to dif­fer­ent pop­u­la­tion segments
with very dif­fer­ent car­bon foot­print pro­files. The results of this mod­el have been
incor­po­rat­ed into an open access online car­bon foot­print man­age­ment tool designed to
enable behav­ior change at the house­hold lev­el through per­son­al­ized feedback.