Four High-Impact Actions for Individuals on Climate Change

How to make a real difference

Photo by Chris Hardy on Unsplash

The climate debate is often fraught with assumptions, projections, best wishes, and unclear thinking. This leaves many people concerned about the climate in a bind. “What can I do?” people ask. “How can I help?” Unfortunately, those fraught assumptions lead to low-impact actions precisely when we need to be doing all we can to reduce emissions. When I point this out to people, a common response is that no action is too small and we all need to be doing whatever we can. I agree that no action is too small. However, the overestimation of the value of one action often leads to passivity on the more significant actions. People can get rather self-righteous about their favorite action without realizing its true value. For me, this leads to a question: What is the true value of an action for mitigating climate change?

Before we get to those actions, however, we need to deal with two key issues. First, what will mitigate climate change? For this article, we will assume that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are the cause of climate change and the solution will be found by reducing atmospheric carbon and GHGs. Pre-industrial carbon was 280 ppm in the atmosphere. Current levels are at 420 ppm. The UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says we need to get back to 350 ppm. I’m going to believe the scientists that carbon and GHGs are the issue.

Second, how do you manage or reduce carbon and GHG emissions? Direct emissions are what one causes directly by one’s actions — driving a gasoline-burning vehicle, for example, or operating your natural gas-burning furnace. Indirect emissions, on the other hand, are those that result from an activity “upstream”, away from the actual usage or choices the consumer makes. The difference is that direct emissions can be managed by your own behavioral choices alone, whereas indirect emissions are affected by many factors, your choices of which are only a small part.

I believe that the most effective way to comport oneself to reduce individual contribution to climate change is to examine and reduce your own direct emissions. When you reduce your direct emissions, you reduce real emissions. Your actions will literally put less carbon into the air. By focusing on indirect emissions, we have only a theoretical reduction to work with, measurement is impossible, and there is no direct link between action and emissions. Whatever action you take on indirect emissions may or may not reduce emissions. You can argue that it will, but it may not, and neither of us can prove it.

Unfortunately, this is where the notion of “carbon footprint” often distracts people — we usually miss the greatest contributions we can make right at the center of our own lives by trying to affect the whole system through individual action. I have sensed for a long time that we are missing a great opportunity, but I haven’t been able to get to the source of it. Below, I will show you where our sources are direct, how to manage them, and why this kind of management will make a much bigger difference than focusing on indirect emissions.

Where do direct GHG emissions come from?

If we are going to look at where we can have the most impact, we need to understand where the emissions come from. According to the chart below from Our World in Data, you can see the biggest sources of GHG emissions — electricity and heat as a category are the largest by far. Transportation is second. Then manufacturing and construction, then agriculture and other smaller categories.

Graph from OurWorldInData.org

If we look at the chart for just the US, which is where I am from, the story remains that the top two categories are electricity/heat and transportation. Agriculture is roughly one-fifth of each of these, and aviation is even less.

Graph from OurWorldInData.org

From these charts, it is fairly obvious where the emphasis should be — electricity, heat, and transportation. That’s where most people generate emissions, and it is also where we are most integrated into an economy with choices that don’t feel like choices. When the weather is cold, we need heat. When we go to work, we need to drive. In the dark of winter, we need lights. When it is 100°F outside, we need the air conditioner. The needs are that simple, and the actions we need to take are that difficult. It is not easy to change individual behavior as we go against cultural and economic imperatives. But let’s look at what we can do in those top categories where most of us make our biggest direct GHG emissions.

#1 Impact: Where you source your electricity

Because electricity is such a large source of emissions and because everyone uses a lot of electricity in daily life, the source of your electricity matters. Unfortunately, the choices depend a lot on where you live. In the US there are usually three choices: 1) just take electricity as the local utility provides it, 2) subscribe to your electricity through a solar or wind subscription/garden, or 3) generate your own rooftop renewable energy with wind or solar. For most people, option 2 is the easiest and requires the lowest upfront investment. It also usually offers modest savings over grid energy, although sometimes you have to pay a premium of 10% or so to go renewable.

On the other hand, anyone who has an adequate roof can make an enormous contribution by installing rooftop solar or, perhaps, the new rooftop wind generators. Whatever the economics may be in your area — and they are almost always very positive — generating part or all of your electricity from your rooftop removes all direct emissions from your electricity usage immediately.

Re-sourcing your electricity is crucial because it offers the opportunity to remove fossil fuels from your life as a consumer altogether. All of our day-to-day consumer energy needs can be supplied by electricity, and if we have sourced that electricity from solar or wind, there is no longer any emission of GHG tied to those activities.

#2 Impact: How you heat your home

There is a lot of unclarity and debate about which consumer activity generates more GHG emissions — driving your car or heating and cooling your home. For my purposes here, the actual “winner” doesn’t matter much — both are significant contributors so we can address both. Let’s start with the home because it has a big GHG emissions number and can be effectively addressed at a reasonable cost.

For most people, the biggest single impact you can make to your direct emissions is changing how you heat your home. If your current source of heat is natural gas, oil, wood, or electric baseboard heating, you can remove emissions from your chimney by adding or converting to heat pumps. Heat pumps run on electricity, but they use less than half the electricity baseboard heating requires. The simplest and least expensive is an air-sourced heat pump, or what are also called mini-split heat pumps. In climates with milder winters, these little units can provide all the heat you need, whereas in harsher winter areas, they may be used best as your primary source until serious cold sets in, in which case the furnace may still be necessary. Nonetheless, the air-sourced heat pump can provide the needed heat for several months when you can eliminate your fossil fuel-burning furnace, thereby decreasing your emissions substantially.

In those areas where the temperature goes below freezing, another option is a geothermal heat pump. Geothermal source heat pumps will work at any temperature, but they are significantly more expensive to install.

Heat pumps have another advantage — they double as air conditioners. The same process that concentrates heat from outside and pushes it into the home for heat can collect the heat from inside and push it out to provide air conditioning. Air-sourced heat pumps are also far more efficient than air conditioners — as much as 175% to 300% more efficient.

On its own, using a heat pump is a good energy-conserving action, but when coupled with converting the source of your electricity to renewable, you can eliminate up to 100% of your heating and cooling-related direct emissions. Is there an investment needed? Yes. But this is where we all need to start putting our money where our mouth is.

Impact #3: Replace your gas-burning car with emissions-free transportation

As we have seen, transportation is the second biggest source of emissions both in the US and globally, so addressing this source in our private lives makes a huge difference. For those who live in densely populated areas, public transportation, walking, and bicycling can be good options for radically reducing or even eliminating direct emissions from transportation. Buses and trains, of course, produce emissions, but utilizing an effective public transportation infrastructure can also make a big contribution.

Nonetheless, most of the first world, and especially the US, has grown dependent on automobile transportation, so converting from a gas-burning car to an electric vehicle will reduce or eliminate emissions, depending upon the source of your electricity. Hence, we can see again why the source of electricity is listed as Impact #1 — it matters more than any other single thing we can do and provides a way to bridge all of our consumer-level fossil fuel burning over to non-emissions sources.

Impact #4: Convert your household appliances

Besides your car, heat source, and air conditioning, the next thing we can do as consumers is convert household appliances from gas to electric for all the same reasons. Electric appliances do not burn anything and as the source of electricity gets cleaner, household emissions disappear. This is not always easy. Pure electric appliances such as water heaters, clothes dryers, and kitchen ranges can be more expensive than gas, and installing them will require electrical circuitry if you do not already have it. Personally, I am working on this one appliance at a time until everything is complete.

Why electrification matters even if you can’t do solar or wind yourself

Some folks are stuck in a situation where, for one reason or another, they can’t build their own rooftop renewable energy systems and there is no solar garden to subscribe to. If this is you, you may ask, is it worth it to make all these changes? Will it contribute anything to emissions reductions?

The answer is clearly ‘yes’, and here’s why. Utility operators and electricity generators around the world understand the pressure climate change places on their industry, and they are slowly changing the mix of energy sources used to produce electricity. In nearly every corner of the world, the cost of building and operating a solar array is less than any other source of electricity — including in many cases, continuing to operate existing plants. The same is true for wind. Based on applicable operating conditions, utilities are converting to renewable sources. Most of them are not doing it out of a sense of public duty or altruism; they are doing it because it makes financial sense to do so.

For the consumer who has electrified everything but was unable to obtain a solar subscription or build a rooftop renewable system, every time the utility he buys his electricity from increases the mix of renewable energy, his emissions from energy use are reduced — but that is not so if he is still burning natural gas. The consumer who keeps burning natural gas participates in none of the gains the utility is making and indeed will remain a source of emissions in and of his own right. For people who care, this is an unacceptable outcome.

Other small contributions

We all need to make whatever contribution we can to solving climate change. If for some reason none of these four big impacts are available to you, smaller contributions are welcome. Some folks resist eating beef. Some turn to activism. Some boycott air travel. Still others choose to reduce their consumption and live more modestly. All of these are likely helpful, but none of them compare to the four impacts described above. Let’s all do what we can, but let’s also know that until we have individually dealt with the four opportunities listed above, we haven’t come anywhere near our personal potential emissions reduction.

Anthony Signorelli