Choices that matter for climate

Posted on Jul 11, 2026 in Climate, Culture

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” – East of Eden, John Steinbeck

The earlier posts in my series addressed what I think about climate change and my role in it, concluding with the belief that individual choices do matter. This is a credible position: more than 40% of US energy emissions come from consumer behavior and technology choices. The key is understanding which choices have the biggest impact.

High-impact individual actions can be bucketed into two categories: one-time consumer upgrades and anytime lifestyle changes. Each category is easy in some ways and hard in others; the key is not making things harder than they need to be.

One-time consumer upgrades

If you own a home and/or car, commit to phasing out anything that doesn’t already run on electricity. These things are hard in the sense that they’re situational (you have to own them to swap them, you might pay more upfront than you would for the gas-powered equivalent, etc.) but easy in the sense that they require basically no behavior change. You can keep on driving your car, wearing a t-shirt in winter, and enjoying that long, hot shower—it’s just cleaner than the fossil fuel equivalent.

Here are the three most important swapouts in their typical order of carbon impact (measured in tonnes of CO2 avoided each year):

  • Home heating: fossil heat to heat pump (~3.5 t)
  • Private transportation: gas-powered car to electric car (~2.4 t)
  • Water heating: gas water heater to heat pump water heater (~1.2 t)

Don’t worry about swapping ahead of schedule; just plan for it at the normal upgrade cycle. Recognize that if you wait until your furnace/boiler fails in the middle of the winter, you probably won’t switch to electric; you’ll probably just stick with whatever you have. Seek out friends/family/neighbors who’ve made the switch, find experts through people you trust, and make sure your home is wired for these things before you need them. Make it easy to do the right thing at the right time; dig the well before you get thirsty.

Anytime lifestyle changes

Lifestyle changes are easy in the sense that basically anyone can do them at any time. The key is knowing which behaviors to focus on and not letting perfection get in the way of progress. Here are the “big three” behaviors that matter for climate, in approximate order of impact:

Reduce car dependence

Transportation is the largest share of US GHG, and passenger vehicles make up the largest share of transportation emissions. A typical passenger vehicle emits around 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, roughly equivalent to the entire carbon footprint of the average person on Earth.

If you own a car, here are some things you can do to reduce your impact:

  • Combine errands
  • Carpool
  • Walk, bike, take public transit if those options are available (if they’re not, push for better options in your community)

Fly less

Air travel is only 2.5% of global emissions, but that’s because only 11% of the global population flies anywhere in a typical year.

I take about four round-trip domestic flights each year, which is roughly equivalent to the annual emissions from a typical passenger car. If you too are a frequent flier, here are some ways to reduce your impact:

  • Combine work travel with leisure travel
  • Fly direct (takeoff and landing account for a disproportionate share of emissions)
  • Avoid red-eyes (4x greater climate warming effect than daytime flights)
  • Take flight-free vacations
  • Mode switch from air to rail, where practical

Eat more plants

Even if fossil fuel emissions were immediately eliminated, emissions from agriculture would make it hard to stay within the 2°C warming target. Meat and dairy make up most of agriculture emissions.

Switching from the typical American diet to a mostly-plant-based diet is roughly equivalent to one less domestic flight per year. If eating more plants seems hard, start by buying only what you’ll eat and eating what you buy. In the US, food waste is estimated at 30–40% of the food supply.

Be the change you want to see

The throughline across both categories is as follows: focus on what’s important, have the patience and determination to voluntarily drive change, and don’t make progress harder than it needs to be.

Of course, it’s easier to just go with the flow—continuing to buy gas-powered things and ignoring the externalities of our consumer decisions. But if you’re reading this post, you’re probably more climate-concerned and better equipped to drive change than most people.

Lastly, these choices aren’t about sacrifice; they’re about leading the charge toward better ways of living. This is what I’ve been circling around throughout my climate series: the challenge of the global rich—the vanguard of how humanity lives on a shared planet—is to live amidst unprecedented material access and strive for a different type of abundance, one more aligned with healthy bodies, homes, communities, and ecosystems. This requires seeing the consumer machine for the mixed blessing that it is and choosing to be neither a cog nor an ascetic, striving to not just maintain our humanity but make the machine more human.