What can you do to Make the Biggest Impact on Global Warming? It’s not What you Think
Believe it or not, when we make green purchases, drive a hybrid car, and fly less it makes very little difference in reducing the massive amount of carbon going into the air.
Sure, it changes habits and might resolve some personal guilt. But in order to significantly decarbonize the atmosphere we need to look at the biggest producers of greenhouse gases. And as psychologist and climate expert Per Espen Stoknes says, “Individual solutions are insufficient or even counterproductive unless they contribute to structural changes too.”
What are the large-scale policy changes that reach globally and need to happen that we need to insist on? The specific answers to that question can be found in the book, Drawdown:The Most Comprehensive Plan to Reverse Global Warming, which is edited by Paul Hawken. Drawdown was produced by researchers who offer realistic solutions and suggests 100 techniques and practices that will draw down and reduce carbon in the atmosphere and potentially stabilize the warming over the next 30 years. It includes energy, conservation, social and economic solutions that are ranked according to effectiveness.
Drawdown shows calculations of how many gigatons of CO2 will be reduced from adopting each solution, the net cost, and net savings for each solution. In most cases, the savings outweigh the costs manyfold. The top five solutions by rank, that each contribute 60–90 gigatons of carbon per year are:
Refrigerant management- Hydrofluorocarbons (HFC’s), which hold up to 9,000 times the ability to warm the atmosphere than CO2. Even with the Montreal Protocol and Kigali Accord, the use of these chemicals will grow substantially before all countries halt their use. Because 90 percent of refrigerant emissions happen at end of life, effective disposal of those currently in circulation is essential. After being carefully removed and stored, refrigerants can be purified for reuse or transformed into other chemicals that do not cause warming.
Onshore Wind Turbines -Ongoing cost reduction will soon make wind energy the least expensive source of electricity, perhaps within a decade. A 1.3 trillion dollar implementation cost will 7.4 trillion dollars in operational savings and 84 gigatons of carbon reduction by 2050.
Reduced Food Waste- A third of the food raised or prepared never makes it to people’s mouths, wasting seeds, water, energy, land, fertilizer, hours of labor, financial capital , transportation, and generates greenhouse gases at every stage, including methane when organic matter lands in the global rubbish bin. The food we waste is responsible for roughly 8 percent of global emissions. A 50% reduction of food waste would reduce 26 gigatons of CO2 by 2015.
Plant-Rich Diets- 20% of global carbon emissions come from raising, processing, and shipping meat, most of it in centralized industrial livestock production. Cutting back on meat consumption and still eating healthy diets could reduce carbon by 26 gigatons by 2050. If we avoid deforestation in the process, another 39 gigatons of carbon could be saved.
Tropical Forests- If restoration to continuous intact forests was allowed on 435 million acres worldwide, 60 gigatons of carbon could be sequestered naturally by the forests by 2050, according to Project Drawdown.
These are only the top five solutions by rank. There are 95 more, waiting to be tackled. Many of these solutions are part of the Montreal Protocol, Kigali Accord, Paris Agreement, and other climate change agreements.
But international global agreements offer little help if countries like the U.S. have leaders who won’t support them, or worse yet, renege on the agreements altogether.
Currently, the Trump Administration has pulled out of the Paris Accord, rolling back environmental regulations and vehemently denying anthropogenic global warming. Our leaders will only support these and other carbon reversal agreements if each one of us makes them aware that this one issue is a make or break priority for our votes. It’s time to act for large scale structural change on climate change.
How can you act in a way that will have the most impact?
— Join 350.org or Citizens Climate Lobby.— — Take an active role in organizations to reverse carbon, talk to your friends, family, colleagues and community about the need for action. This is difficult, since it is a serious topic and some people believe things that aren’t true. For suggestions on talking with these people, check out this post on Why Some of us Hold Beliefs That are not Based in Reality and What to do About it.
— make green purchases, drive a hybrid car, eat less meat, use less water, and fly less. These small lifestyle changes make a difference, and can make a much bigger difference, especially if your actions convince others to do the same.
— Contact your senators and demand action on climate agreements and climate-friendly policies. Your vote counts. Vote for the climate. The time is now. Future earthlings depend on you and will thank you.
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Stoknes, Per Espen. What We Think about When We Try Not to Think about Global Warming, Chelsea Green, 2015.
