Developer builds tool to estimate CO2 emissions from Claude Code AI sessions
A software developer who uses Claude Code daily built an open-source tool called claude-carbon to estimate the carbon footprint of AI coding sessions, after finding no official emissions data from Anthropic. Drawing on a 2025 academic paper measuring AI energy consumption, the tool calculates emissions using token counts extracted from Claude Code's local session logs. Over six months and 893 sessions, the developer estimated their own usage produced roughly 970 kg of CO2 equivalent. The tool accounts for variables like model type, cached token reads, and regional grid carbon intensity, though the author acknowledges wide uncertainty bands in the estimates. The project is available as an open-source npm package, with all methodology and assumptions publicly documented on GitHub.
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