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| Well-meaning individuals often make poor choices when it comes to reducing their carbon footprint. (Shutterstock) |
Author
Seth Wynes is a PhD Candidate, Geography, University of British Columbia |
Much as we don’t want people to believe that the solution to the obesity pandemic is more orange juice, we also don’t want them to believe that the best way to fight climate change is to recycle more.
While recycling and turning off the lights are good steps towards a more sustainable society, they are not nearly as important for the climate on an individual basis as reducing meat consumption, air travel and driving. Well-meaning individuals often make poor choices when it comes to reducing their carbon footprint.
Air travel vs. recycling
My colleagues and I surveyed students at the University of British Columbia and a sample of North Americans recruited from the online platform Mturk, to determine if they could correctly identify actions that would curb their individual greenhouse gas emissions.
Our participants were more educated and more liberal than the general population but since we want to understand the perceptions of people who are at least a little motivated to engage in pro-climate actions, this is actually the right group of people to survey.
In the study, we first asked participants to describe the single most effective action they could take to reduce the emissions that cause climate change. Many referred to driving less, which is indeed a high-impact action, and recycling, which is not.
Perceptions of most effective climate action
Number of participants perceiving an action to be the most effective
they can take in fighting climate change
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| |
Common misconceptions
Next, we provided participants with 15 actions and asked them to categorize the actions as low-, medium- or high-impact (with low being less than one per cent of a person’s carbon footprint, and high being greater than five per cent).
Actions involving personal vehicles were correctly perceived as quite important for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But only 32 per cent of the sample correctly identified switching from plastic to canvas bags (the equivalent of orange juice for dieting) as a low-impact action. Reducing air travel and meat consumption were incorrectly ranked in the bottom half of the suggested actions.
In line with past research on the “availability heuristic,” (a mental shortcut where people give extra importance to examples that spring to mind easily) people might have been focusing on choices where the harms are highly visible or on actions that are symbolic of environmentalism but not related to climate. For example, littering creates no emissions, but we found it was perceived similarly to a high-pollution flight across the Pacific Ocean.
Focusing on what matters
Finally, we asked participants to make trade-offs between sets of different actions, like comparing how long you would need to purchase food without any packaging in order to save the same amount of emissions as one year not eating meat. Around half of participants said one to two years. The real answer is at least a decade.
We found that even people who were very concerned about climate change were unable to make accurate trade-offs. This is relevant for people who engage in moral licensing, “I recycle, so I can fly for vacation,” or people trying their best to optimize their carbon budget, “I drove out of my way to buy second-hand clothing because it has a smaller carbon footprint.”
These misunderstandings matter. People who understand that meat has a large climate impact are more willing to eat less of it. In a study of Swedes who had given up or reduced their air travel, many cited the realization that flying occupied a large part of their “carbon budget” as a motivator for their choice.
We want people to focus on meaningful actions so they don’t spend effort and money on distractions. But we also want people to adopt low-carbon lifestyles because people who do tend to support the policies that oblige everyone else to pollute less.
Ezra Klein describes the value in changing the culture of more meat and bigger SUVs at the same time as we try to change policies: “We are not going to, as a society … vote for things that make us feel like bad people.”
Lifestyle changes and more
The term “carbon footprint” has come under criticism, because the oil industry used it in the past to redirect responsibility from itself onto consumers. But following the belief that climate hawks should oppose any tactic from a major polluter does not require abandoning every effort to change lifestyles.
Some large corporations are worried that these lifestyle changes could cut deep into their bottom lines. Before the pandemic jeopardized the entire industry, airlines were taking careful steps to manage the lost business caused by a growing guilt (“flight shame”) among people for the carbon footprint of air travel.
| Climate impact of lifestyle changes Bars indicate tonnes of CO2 equivalents  |
| Chart: Seth Wynes Source: Wynes and Nicholas 2017, Environmental Research Letters Get the data |
So what do we do? We can test ways to incentivize lifestyle change while increasing policy support, ideally with resources that don’t take away from political action. That could include projects on university campuses, in corporate offices and in grade schools (twelve-year-olds can’t vote, but they can learn what constitutes a sustainable meal and how to cook it).
In one study, for example, participants were given feedback on their food purchases in terms of “lightbulb minutes”: how much greenhouse gases are produced by one minute of lightbulb use. This led to a positive shift in their consumption choices. Similarly, people booking their flights could be told the fraction of their annual carbon budget that will be used up by a single trip.
These approaches are helpful because they bring attention to climate change but don’t rely on individuals mastering the difficult subject of carbon footprints on their own.
Climate activists, especially youth, tend to care about individual action. We might as well use that as an opportunity to encourage lifestyle changes that actually matter, and to increase support for tough climate policies that are already overdue.
Links
- 5 ways families can help tackle climate change
- Flight shaming: how to spread the campaign that made Swedes give up flying for good
- How well do people understand the climate impact of individual actions?
- Here’s how you can actually help stop climate change
- Help the climate, change your diet: A cross-sectional study on how to involve consumers in a transition to a low-carbon society
- Grounded – Beyond Flygskam (Flight Shame)
- Does ‘flight shame’ affect social norms? Changing perspectives on the desirability of air travel in Germany
- Consumers underestimate the emissions associated with food but are aided by labels
