ChatGPT Carbon Estimator

About

Bring environmental awareness to your AI conversations: stay informed and empowered when using the tools you love.

ChatGPT Carbon Estimator (CBE) helps you understand the environmental impact of each interaction with ChatGPT by providing real-time estimates of carbon emissions, water usage, and relatable real-world equivalents.

Whether you're casually chatting or deeply exploring ideas with ChatGPT, this lightweight extension makes it easy to stay mindful of your digital footprint. 

Generative AI models use large-scale compute resources and energy. By visualizing the impact of your queries, ChatGPT Carbon Estimator helps raise awareness around AI sustainability, without adding friction.

CBE is ideal for: 
🖖Curious users who want more sustainable tech habits
🖖Educators teaching digital responsibility
🖖Developers and researchers exploring AI’s real-world costs
🖖Anyone who uses ChatGPT regularly

What CBE does: 
🖖Automatically calculates carbon emissions for each ChatGPT response
🖖Shows real-time equivalents:
- Water consumed (in liters)
- Emails sent
- Car travel distance
- Flight time
- Google searches 
🖖Tracks total emissions per session — live in your browser
🖖 Displays a clean, light-blue badge right on the ChatGPT page

CBE is privacy-friendly and runs entirely in your browser.
🖖No tracking
🖖No data collection
🖖No API keys required
🖖No OpenAI account access

You see exactly what the model outputs and we use that alone to estimate the environmental cost.

Methodology and sources: 
Bring environmental awareness to your AI conversations: stay informed and empowered when using the tools you love.

ChatGPT Carbon Estimator (CBE) helps you understand the environmental impact of each interaction with ChatGPT by providing real-time estimates of carbon emissions, water usage, and relatable real-world equivalents.

Whether you're casually chatting or deeply exploring ideas with ChatGPT, this lightweight extension makes it easy to stay mindful of your digital footprint. 

Generative AI models use large-scale compute resources and energy. By visualizing the impact of your queries, ChatGPT Carbon Estimator helps raise awareness around AI sustainability, without adding friction.

CBE is ideal for: 
🖖Curious users who want more sustainable tech habits
🖖Educators teaching digital responsibility
🖖Developers and researchers exploring AI’s real-world costs
🖖Anyone who uses ChatGPT regularly

What CBE does: 
🖖Automatically calculates carbon emissions for each ChatGPT response
🖖Shows real-time equivalents:
- Water consumed (in liters)
- Emails sent
- Car travel distance
- Flight time
- Google searches 
🖖Tracks total emissions per session — live in your browser
🖖 Displays a clean, light-blue badge right on the ChatGPT page

CBE is privacy-friendly and runs entirely in your browser.
🖖No tracking
🖖No data collection
🖖No API keys required
🖖No OpenAI account access

You see exactly what the model outputs and we use that alone to estimate the environmental cost.

Methodology and sources
The assumptions are: 
🖖 1 token = 0.0003 kWh on average for the most common model used today, GPT4o. Noting that, while GPT4o-mini is a smaller model and should use less energy, studies showed that it uses an A100-chip model (compared to H200 for GPT4o), which is less efficient and might counterbalance the energy savings of the model itself. 
🖖 ChatGPT queries happen in Europe, which leads to a kg CO2 per kWh = 0.26 on average. This is an average across the whole region. In Australia, this variable would be 0.81. 
🖖 A study from 2023 showed that running GPT-3-sized models consumes approximately 500 ml of water per 1,000 tokens. This includes both direct water use to cool the servers in the data center and indirect water use: water used by power plants to generate the electricity powering those servers
🖖On average 1 token = 1.33 words 


💬 FAQ
Q: Does this access my ChatGPT account?
A: No. It only observes content rendered on the page.

Q: Are these estimates accurate?
A: They are approximate, based on the length of each response and published average energy metrics. The goal is not precision, but perspective.

Q: Is my data stored or sent anywhere?
A: No. Everything runs locally in your browser. No storage, no cloud.