It’s that time of year again…I mean for all of us to make those dreaded new year’s resolutions. I’d be willing to bet that for most of you that includes things like losing weight, eating well, spending more time with your family, improving your finances, etc. All of which are great resolutions (and I won’t make any judgments about the likelihood you’ll keep them!).But what about being a little greener? Are you doing anything to reduce your impact on the environment? Or, thinking about the single biggest environmental issue, doing anything to reduce your carbon emissions? For most of us that’s probably not one of our resolutions (I’m adding it to mine).No, I’m not going to try to convince you that you should add this to your new year’s resolutions (though I will suggest that you consider it).What I will ask is if you’ve decided to make carbon emissions reduction a goal, and you’re going to try to do that in your personal and business life (it applies to both and you probably create more carbon emissions at work than at home): How do you know if you’re succeeding? By how much?These are stereotypically common business questions. If my goal is to create revenue, my management will always ask: how do you know you’ve succeeded and by how much? If my goal is to reduce costs, they’ll ask the very same questions.If my goal is to reduce my carbon emissions (which can easily be looked at as environmental cost), we need to be asking the same questions: How do you know? And by how much?Start here: In my last few posts, I’ve challenged you to replace one trip with a web meeting to save carbon emissions. But…you can see this coming…by how much? The answer is here at the WebEx carbon calculator. Just put in the trip you didn’t take, and it’ll tell you how many tons of carbon you avoided emitting.Why? I can hear the question now: Why do I care how much? I’ll offer two reasons of the many that come to mind:Carbon isn’t free. You might be in an industry or region where carbon emissions are regulated and penalized. You might be in an industry that’s suffering (or about to suffer) massive upheaval from the effects of carbon emissions (for an excellent discussion on this, see the October 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review)Your reputation is on the line. Companies are flocking to the green cause. Everyone wants to be green to enhance their brand reputation. But customers, both consumers and businesses) are getting more demanding. Just saying you’re doing something green isn’t good enough. You have to measure it. In other words customers are starting to ask: How do you know? By how much?So take a simple step. Make a resolution. Don’t travel to one meeting per month -- do it on the web. Then measure how much greener that made you.Then tell your marketing team and let them add it all up and put out a press release.Then you’ll know. And so will the rest of the world.