Ten Easy Steps to Kicking Your Carbon Habit

Even if you are not reading this, you are a carbon addict, although you won’t be hearing it from me.

The truth is that we are all carbon addicts because we have been forced into that role since birth, as were our parents and grandparents before us. Everything we do depends on easy access to “cheap” energy, which since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution has been coal, petroleum, and natural gas. 

Together, these fuels are the organic remains of animals and plants contained in sedimentary rocks deposited over half a billion years. For the last 200 years, or about .00004% of the time it took to form these fossil fuels, we’ve succeeded in burning much of them, releasing all of that stored carbon into the atmosphere or dissolved into the ocean. The only reason that we thought they were cheap is that we didn’t count all the costs of burning them. 

Most people are familiar with the longstanding 12-step program offered by Alcoholics Anonymous. More recently, Emma Marris wrote an op-ed for the New York Times ( How to Stop Freaking Out and Tackle Climate Change, January 10, 2020 ) that presented five steps for dealing with climate change. The 10-step plan presented here incorporates bits from both. So, let’s start at the very beginning, which is the very best place to start.

It may be that you are already working at minimizing your own impact on the planet. You may be a climate scientist with an appreciation of the problem or a denier who refuses to accept it. For Step One, it really doesn’t matter where you are in the continuum. All of us should remember to keep an open mind because we need to able to talk with each other and work together. It is going to take all of us working together to win this war.

Global warming is an enemy for us today because we have already been adversely impacted by the one degree (Celsius) of warming that we have experienced since about 1950. One degree might not seem like much, but the current level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is the highest it has been in at least the last three million years. That one degree has led to changing rainfall patterns, multi-year droughts, massive wildfires, declining numbers of insects and other wildlife, and die-offs of some plant species. It will be a much bigger enemy of future generations if we do nothing about it

In 2012, the World Bank acknowledged in a report that we’re on track for a +4˚C warmer world (by century’s end) marked by extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise. To those can be added civil strife, famine, poverty, and warfare. According to Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, four degrees (Celsius) of warming is “incompatible with any reasonable characterization of an organized, equitable and civilized global community.” All this by the year 2100; you may have children who expect to be alive then.

There are several reasons why people have trouble accepting climate change, but the largest is that climate change is far outside the normal human experience. In addition, quite a few people have invested their lives and their self-esteem in making a living doing just what we should not. Others understand the problem but feel there is nothing they can do, while those who have limited resources can’t plan for the future because of their focus on immediate needs. 

Our understanding of what it means to be “natural” also influences how we deal with the climate challenge. An example of shifting baseline syndrome, the understanding of what it means to be “natural” has shifted with each new generation as we collectively have forgotten what the world used to look like. Over the course of several generations, our understanding of reality is so altered that what appears undisturbed to one generation bears no resemblance to the same locale just a few generations before.  

One way to gain appreciation for how things are changing where you live is to stay up to date on what is happening in other communities around the world. There are numerous sources of reliable data, and one is  SDGsToday: The Global Hub for Real-Time SDG Data  .

Marris points out that ditching the shame is key to the remaining steps. By this, she means that although you may feel guilty because you are part of the problem, which you are, you can’t let this feeling undermine the efforts you need to take to address the bigger problem. Your own contribution is a very small addition to the whole, but some amount of it is necessary until the structure of society is changed to allow us to all reduce our collective impacts. 

According to an NRDC blog post by Joshua Axelrod from February of 2019, a recently published report listed 100 energy companies that have been responsible for 71% of all industrial emissions since human-driven climate change was officially recognized, but it's not just the energy sector. According to self-reported numbers, the top 15 U.S. food and beverage companies generate nearly 630 million metric tons of greenhouse gases every year. That makes this group of only 15 companies a bigger emitter than Australia, the world’s 15th largest annual source of greenhouse gases. These companies are enabled when consumers like us buy their products, and presently we can do little about their actions unless we can impact their bottom lines. Changing buying habits is one approach. Pushing industry to meet higher standards is another, and one way of doing that is by having everyone account for all the costs (including all environmental costs) of doing business. The world would change overnight if we all did full-cost accounting.

The answer for your personal carbon footprint today is to do your best to reduce it but not at the expense of the longer-term goal. In addition, don’t judge others for their carbon footprints until infrastructure is in place to allow them to do better.

Many people wait until their latter decades to think about the legacy they will leave. We all leave traces of ourselves of one sort or another, some positive and some negative. That we have occupied a space and used resources is a legacy, too, of consumption and waste, some portion of which will be evident for many years. 

At the same time, most of us want better lives for our children and grandchildren than we have now and many of us want to stop the environmental degradation that is occurring around us. The best legacy that any of us can leave is the world better off than it was when we arrived. 

Emma Marris recommends we:

           “Imagine dense but livable cities veined with public transit and leafy parks, infrastructure humming away to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, fake meat that tastes better than the real thing, species recovering and rewilding the world, the rivers silver with fish, the skies musical with flocking birds….This is a future in which children don’t need to take to the streets in protest and alarm, because their parents and grandparents took action. Instead, they are climbing trees.”

If this is the kind of world you want for yourself today and your kids tomorrow, then challenge yourself to do what you can to make it happen.

There are plenty of national and international initiatives that deserve your support, but the real work of climate change falls to whoever is living closest to the soil. This means that of primary importance are the actions taken by local governments: cities, counties, and states or provinces.

It is almost certain that no matter where you live, there will be several existing organizations that are trying to do the work of restoring the environment and moving your community toward sustainable living. It is appropriate to become familiar with these local efforts and look at the larger picture of what is happening in your community (however you define it) before you decide on your own next steps. 

By now you may have discovered, if you didn’t know already, that individuals didn’t really cause this problem. Individuals acting together (especially corporations but also governments) and economic systems did. We cannot individually shoulder all the responsibility for reducing our footprint. It is when we band together to change systems that we make big impacts, and when we change systems we are also enabling individuals to do what they could not have done on their own. For that reason, your time is better spent pushing for larger-scale change rather than addressing smaller-scale problems. 

Individuals working alone can make remarkable progress at times (a good example is Greta Thunberg), but such opportunities are rare and difficult to maintain without others to keep us focused. To address climate change in a substantive manner, we must expand our individual influence, and we do that by leveraging our efforts through an organization or community that has formed for that purpose.

To be effective, we also must change literally everything we do now, because very little of what we do is fully sustainable. The very structure of human society will have to change. Small won’t just be beautiful, it will be inevitable, a strategy championed by a number of organizations but perhaps most famously by the Transition movement.  

The point is that there are a lot of people who have already built organizations to promote change and they need your help. There are many groups to choose from and it is easy to get overwhelmed. Try to stay focused. 

As soon as you become a little experienced with your favored initiatives and how to work with the community, you’ll see that there are a lot of places where similar work should be done but isn’t. This means that it’s time to take what you’ve learned and apply it on a wider scale. 

Look for other organizations that are working along similar lines and that might benefit from a wider collaboration or look for organizations that could benefit from your specific input to improve or expand their program. For example, one foundation might be very good at working to control malaria in an impoverished area but then fail to address other issues such as the local potential for renewable energy. It is partly for this reason that your most successful projects may be those that you can scale up and share with others. If something is a good idea in your hometown, it will also be a good idea in other places.

There are two things that you should always try to accomplish no matter where you are working and no matter what you are doing. First, always measure environmental costs against perceived benefits using full-cost accounting. We got into this fix by ignoring the costs of dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and we’ll only get out of it when we end that practice. Second, every chance you get, push to restore natural habitats and forests. Restoration is a simple way to mitigate losses elsewhere, and reforestation is a form of carbon banking. Even in urban areas, you can plant trees. 

It will take the concerted efforts of many people over several generations to heal the planet, and it’s for that reason that you cannot abandon your chosen path. We must be able to pass the baton to future generations.

Take a rest, regroup, work smarter, or revise your approach, but do not give up. Imagine the world you are building for your children, one brick at a time. Then think of their children being able to enjoy fireflies, Monarch butterflies, and polar bears, all because of you. 

They will thank you for it.

To contact the author and for more information:

Email Gregory R. Wessel at gwessel@publicgeology.org or contact him through the website at  www.publicgeology.org 

Also check out the Global Network for Geoscience and Society at:  https://www.publicgeology.org/projects/global-network-for-geoscience-and-society/ .

Recommended Reading

Anderson, Kevin, 2012, Climate Change Going Beyond Dangerous – Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope; Development Dialogue, no. 61, September 2012.

MacKinnon, J. B., 2013, The Once and Future World; Toronto, Random House Canada.

Marris, Emma, 2011, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World; New York, Bloomsbury USA.

Mullainathan, S., and Shafir, E., 2013, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much; New York, Times Books.

Pauly, Daniel, 1995, Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries; Trends in Ecology and Evolution, vol. 10, no. 10 (October 10, 1995).

Schellnhuber, H. J., et al., 2012, Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must Be Avoided; A report for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics, November 2012.

Welzer, Harald, 2017, Climate Wars: Why People will be Killed in the 21st Century; Cambridge, UK, Polity Press. 

Zhang, Yi Ge; et al. (28 October 2013). "A 40-million-year history of atmospheric CO2". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. 371 (2001): 20130096. doi:10.1098/rsta.2013.0096. PMID 24043869.