What You Can Do

No one person can solve climate change alone, but you can start small:

• Calculate your own carbon footprint with tools like the EPA’s Carbon Footprint Calculator.
• Walk more and drive less if you can.
• Adjust your thermostat to keep your home a little warmer in the summer and a little cooler in the winter.
• Think about your food: are you eating food that was grown locally or food that was shipped in on a truck from a couple states away?
• Eat more plants and less meat.
• Don’t buy bottled water – tap water is just as good and the bottles are terrible for the environment.
• Do research into where you buy – make sure the companies you buy from use sustainable practices and support politicians who do as well. And make sure you aren’t supporting “greenwashing,” where a company claims to be “green” but only uses it as a marketing ploy.
• Don’t buy “fast fashion” – it’s made to be disposable and 85% of it eventually ends up in a landfill.
• Don’t shop from Amazon once per week – save up your orders and place them once per month. In fact, don’t buy as much stuff period.
• Unless your old car is a fuel hog, focus on regular maintenance and only buy a new car when it isn’t usable. You’ll save yourself money, too – as technology improves, EVs will get less expensive and the batteries will last longer, so it’s worth it to wait. And when you buy, do not buy a Tesla – Elon Musk’s other project, SpaceX, releases a huge amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every time they stage a launch.

There are also bigger-picture things you can do to help reduce the risks of climate change:

• Help create community gardens in food deserts.
• Learn more about green building materials, green roofs, and other things that can reduce the carbon footprint of a building.
• Talk to your congressperson. If your congressperson doesn’t support green energy, vote them out of office.
• Donate to politicians who actually support green policies, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.
• Help campaign for candidates who want renewable energy, and encourage them to support renewable energy initiatives that can replace fossil fuels and provide jobs for people who used to work in the fossil fuel industry.
• Encourage initiatives like Universal Basic Income and subsidies for lower income people so that they can afford to make more sustainable choices.
• If you have family who are climate change deniers, don’t cut them off! Instead, have an honest conversation with them, and see if you can get them to change their minds even slightly. People’s minds can be changed. People can grow. Assume good intent, because yelling at someone isn’t going to change their mind. They might be wrong but they can grow.

Most important: maintain hope. Things can still get better. We fixed a hole in the ozone layer! And we did it because people all agreed that this was important to do. If we can do that, we can get everyone to band together to fix climate change.