You Can Take Effective Climate Action Just by Changing How You Eat
You Can Take Effective Climate Action Just by Changing How You Eat
And wait — there's even more you can do!
Continuing with my less-frequent but top-of-mind Flower Child topic of climate action, this week I’m focusing on things we can all do to help fight climate change. Rent your home and/or don’t have extra cash for solar panels and heat pumps? You still have the power (no pun intended) to make a difference. In these dark times, that’s worth knowing.
Word on the street is that you can help fight climate change just by eating a bit differently.
“Why should I do that?” I hear you say. “Shouldn’t the 90 companies responsible for nearly two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions be the ones taking action? What about the governments around the world that are subsidizing fossil fuels to the tune of $11 million per minute?”
“You have a good point,” I hear myself reply. “A very good point. Yes, they should. We should all vote, with our ballots and our dollars, to pressure our governments and corporations to change their ways. But systemic change and individual actions aren’t mutually exclusive.”
If you’ve been reading Flower Child, you know that I’m constantly pondering the tension between individuals and the systems we live in. While I believe that our systems must fundamentally change to ones that are less extractive and consumption-oriented — and must include a “systemic change in social norms,” as
puts it — our systems are also made up of all of us. Individuals. And we do have some power, maybe more than we think.When we all take action, those actions add up — sometimes in surprising ways. What’s also surprising, when it comes to climate actions, is which ones have the most bang for the buck. Some of them will even save you big bucks.
Drawdown’s Top 20 individual climate actions
How do we know which actions make a difference? Drawdown Solutions, the research arm of Project Drawdown, has been studying them for years. Their team of scholars around the world has identified “available technologies and practices that have a direct impact on greenhouse gasses, are scientifically validated, and are economically viable.”
Recently, Drawdown published a list of their top 20 actions that individuals and households can take.
The top two
Topping the list are two actions that are accessible to most of us (if we don’t live in food deserts), even people who rent their home:
Reduce food waste and eat more plants.
Drawdown’s top 20 list keeps it simple, but various studies have also broken down which animal products are the biggest climate culprits. Beef, it turns out, accounts for a full 25% of emissions from raising and growing food. Here’s a chart from the Environmental Working Group that shows emissions per gram of protein:
Cutting down on meat consumption has an even bigger impact than you might think at first glance. Take beef: because a chunk of the emissions from beef production are in the form of methane, and methane doesn’t remain in the atmosphere for nearly as long as carbon dioxide, eating less beef would help speed up emissions reductions.
It would also save water. Producing a pound of beef requires much more water than other agricultural products. In many places, more water is being used to grow feed for animals that will later be eaten by humans than to grow food that we’ll eat directly, contributing to severe shortages.
Look, I’m not saying you must become a vegan. I’m not even saying you must eat less meat, though one option is to become a “reducetarian.” What you eat is up to you. But having this information will allow you to make more informed choices.
Full disclosure: I’m not a vegan and have no plans to be. But I only rarely eat red meat, and I generally try to minimize meat portions and focus more on vegetables. When I do eat meat, charts like the one above help me pick less carbon-intensive ones.
Your diet will look different from mine. The point is that you now have more knowledge that you can use to inform your dietary decisions. We don’t yet have climate labels on food, but that’s one idea now being tossed around.
As for reducing food waste, I won’t insult your intelligence by giving you top tips for doing that. Use your imagination; make soups and stews with leftover food scraps; figure it out.
Non-food-related climate actions
Here are some other top Drawdown actions you can take that don’t cost much, may even save you money, and are accessible to renters and condo dwellers:
Switch to LED lights. Though the upfront cost is higher, they’re more efficient, so they’ll lower your energy costs — and they last much longer than incandescent bulbs.
Carpool, bike, walk, or take public transit.
Fly less. That definitely saves money upfront!
Reduce, recycle, compost. I was a bit surprised to see recycling on the list, given its recent bad press, but what you recycle matters. Plastics are a good idea to avoid altogether when you can, and of course, reusing is always better than recycling.
A few higher-ticket items that will save you money over time but aren’t accessible to all:
Power your home with clean energy: Either have solar installed on your roof or sign up for clean energy through a community choice aggregator (CCA) or community solar, if those are available in your area.
Switch to an electric or hybrid car.
Insulate your house.
Switch to a heat pump heater and water heater.
Checking off the list
You can see Drawdown’s full Top 20 list with writing big enough to read here. Below is my version, with check marks by the actions Rafael and I have taken. I didn’t check Plant-Rich Diets because I feel like we’re only partway there, and I didn’t check Public Transit because we don’t commute anymore. But it’s good to see we’re making some impact, in our own small way.
Don’t stop voting and pressuring corporations
We all have the power to help fight climate change. In fact, Drawdown says that about 25–30% of the total emissions reductions we need could come from individual and household actions. That’s big. I’m not sure how it squares with 90 companies accounting for two-thirds of emissions, but I’m not going to worry about the math. Whatever the exact numbers, the fact remains that we can each take action to contribute to big emissions reductions.
Let’s also remember that we need to go beyond these individual actions.
Drawdown doesn’t list voting or pressuring corporations in its top 20, but make no mistake, those are super-powerful actions we should all take. And that will be necessary to avoid further dangerous climate change.
In the meantime, it’s good to know that we can all help by reducing food waste and eating more plants — with the added benefit of saving money, and maybe even feeling better.