Make America Green Again

What is the environmental cost of political campaigns?

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Inspiration

We started by questioning how much energy was spent on recent Presidential campaigns' Twitter activity and the resulting media coverage.

What it does

Creating awareness for politicians and people regarding the environmental costs of political campaigns with an interactive campaign carbon footprint calculator and mind-boggling statistics.

How we built it

We built it with sweat, tears, caffeine and a lot of googling. 'It' aka the website is built using javascript and HTML, the calculator is built using calconic tool and data analysis is done using SQL.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was data not being directly available for carbon footprint related to political campaigns. We had to breakdown the activities involved in a political campaign and approximately calculate the carbon footprint for each activity from independent sources. Additionally, one of our members kept getting distracted by a particular string of tweets and kept distracting the rest.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Bringing awareness to the detrimental effects of political campaigns and creating a website that is aesthetically pleasing and in a way that is super intuitive for people of all ages to use.

What we learned

Environmental damage arises not only from political campaigns but also from activities from daily life. Simple activities like putting up a photo or sending emails are not something we think of when we think about global warming, but we often make the mistake of ignoring the sheer scale on which these simple activities are done. The scary part is us being able to realize just how much we contributed to CO2 emissions while learning about web development for this hackathon.

What's next for Make America Green Again

The data and estimates we made are by no means exhaustive. Collecting more data regarding other activities involved in political campaigns like merchandise, lodging, banners etc. to accurately capture the overall effect on the environment would be the way to go. We would also like to do an analysis from an economic point of view and compare it with other major activities that need/needed funding like the USPS or COVID-19 research. The carbon emissions from tweets that we calculated is an extremely conservative approximate. It doesn't take into account the retweets and the re-retweets that are there. Additionally, adding the impact factor for each activity will make our calculator tool extremely valuable for political campaign teams in reaching out to voters in a sustainably effective way.

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