Is it the CO₂, C02, CO² or the CO₂ Performance Ladder?

The CO₂ Performance Ladder helps organisations map their CO² emissions and then reduce C02 emissions. Or wait, was it CO₂ after all? ‘Surely they should just know that over there at SKAO!’ we hear you think! ‘Or can’t they see the wood for the CO(2₂²?) absorbing trees?’

April fools! Of course we know that the correct spelling is CO₂! Yet the abbreviation – even by us – is occasionally misspelled. And since we ourselves are rather detail-oriented types and want to set a good example, we would like to show you how to type the abbreviation of carbon dioxide simply and correctly.

CO₂, C02, CO² or CO₂? The differences seem negligible, but the spelling does matter. After all, carbon monoxide squared is something very different from carbon dioxide. But as an organisation that has to writeCO₂ thousands of times a year, we understand better than anyone that a typo is easily made. Sometimes due to carelessness, but sometimes also out of laziness. A ‘plain’ 2 after CO is easier to type than the small number, also known as a subscript, over and over again.

Practical tips for writing CO₂

There are several ways to write subscript 2 in a document: 

• The subscript can be found on Word’s toolbar at ‘insert’ -> ‘symbol’ and at ‘start’ under the font size (X₂). To avoid having to perform the same operation very often, you can write CO₂ once and then copy and paste it into the rest of the text.
• Even more convenient is to add the subscript afterwards. Select CO₂ -> press Ctrl x (cut) -> press Ctrl h (search and replace). Then type in CO₂ at ‘Search for’. If you type ^c under ‘Replace with’ and then press ‘Replace all’, every CO₂ in the text will be replaced by CO₂ (see picture).

• If you want to write CO₂ on LinkedIn, there is a handy trick for this: the Unicode symbol. You can copy this code and then put it in place of a normal 2 in your posts or posts. Easy peasy!

Finally: always writing the formula error-free is unfortunately impossible. In file names and website urls, for example, it is unfortunately not possible to include a subscript. So in that case, it becomes CO₂.

But for the vast majority of texts, you now know how to write CO₂ correctly and (relatively) simply. Good luck!

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