Recycling may not even have that degree of impact. When I asked my local authority where the waste they (i.e. their private, profit-making contractor) collect ends up, they didn't know! How's that for professional curiosity and environmental auditing? 😩

"Avoiding a long distance flight" comes in at #3 for best ways to reduce your carbon footprint.

Imagine if just HALF of all domestic air travel were replaced by high speed rail? #ThinkOutsideTheBox #MagLev #Trains #GND #ClimateChange

@breadandcircuses. These comparisons help my family. Thank you.

Every time Elon Musk flies his private plane from the Bay Area to Texas or back, he more than negates the CO2 emissions you saved for an entire year, and that's the BEST thing you can do.

We can do ALL of these things, and thousands of millionaires and billionaires more than negate our lifetime of work every month or so. I'm guessing a significant number of corporations negate our lifetime of work hourly.

The second one (“buying renewable energy”) is half-truth because #nuclear is one of the most low-carbon sources of electricity, on par with renewables. This should be worded either as “buying renewables and nuclear energy” or at least “buying low-carbon energy” if they wanted to avoid mentioning nuclear at any cost. By the way, this misconception - people being unaware that nuclear power is one of the most low-carbon sources - could be listed as a separate category too.

I think the stats on the left shows that people rank the impact of actions more or less by convenience. Giving up cars and meat is inconvenient, so it must be low-impact.

#capitalism promotes the thing that makes money for them, and discourages anything that might cause people to think.
Blocking advertisements and corporate messaging is the best way to free up mental space; the rest becomes glaringly obvious once you live like that for just a little bit.

Well, I was looking at obtaining an EV, thinking I was helping he environment? The list covers many of the things I practice, now a disappointment. One thing I recall was how peaceful it was when planes where grounded right after 911,

in the defense of recycling: it would be more useful (if well done) for other ecological crises. Sadly, we don't just have one crisis to tackle but multiple at the same time.

Needs a “feeding all the billionaires into wood-chippers” axis.

We need one of these for policies that we can advocate for at the local and national levels.

We are not going to solve this by making better individual consumer decisions.

recyling would be better. If you do it every time and everything was recyleable. Most modern smart devices (from smartphone to toaster) etc. cant be recycled properly. So you cant even do it.

As for giving up your car. Its easy to say you will do but in practice, it has to be done by government making better zoning laws, walk/bike friendly streets and robust public transportation.

on emissions saved, is that per person? annually? lifetime? wish the chart defined things better

@kingkaufman clearly the solution is to use billionaires as a protein source while transitioning to a vegetarian diet

@patrislav in all fairness, it's not only inconvenient, it's also simply not possible for a lot of people. I'd love to not need a car, but there are 4 buses a day out here, with the nearest bus stop being 30min walk away. Sometimes we have to make the best choices we can make. I'm a child free vegetarian, I figure that'll have to make up for it.

Climate is intertwined with water & soil, ex. micro plastics in clouds become condensation nuclei, which alters climate.
4Rs - repair, reuse, repurpose, reconsider (purchases). Everything you buy, & throw away has to be transported. Longer lasting things like LEDs require less transport & reduce waste stream, which requires transport. Consider packaging, compost organics, share/trade things, make something you want/need. Little ways to pull the plug on capitalism. Don't give up

Yeah I think people confuse their carbon footprint with environmental impact overall. Like recycling does a great deal at saving biodiversity but very little for climate change. :/

there is a major issue here. Biking everywhere is only 0.2 while not owning a car is 2.4. is the bicycle number assuming I still own a car? Or is manufacturing of bycicles that CO2 intensive? Or the excess food consumption?

This is what I get for reading this on my phone. And getting old.

Thanks.

Yeah, recycling is weak in terms of impact.

I'm 39 and I've never owned a car.

Eating one billionaire tomorrow would have a far greater positive effect on Anthropogenic Global Climate Change than going your whole life vegan, car free, child free, pet free...

That the general population can have ANY positive effect is nothing more than propaganda, bought, paid for, and broadcast by, primarily The Oil & Gas Industry, The Auto Industry....

I would guess that recycling on a system level would have much more effect. That also is true for everything - CO_2 Footprint was invented to give the impression of individual fault, when it actually is a systemic failure. Therefore we have to pressure politics and change our society

How replacing your fossile car by electric car (electricity powered by fossile energy) would be so much more efficient I wonder.

@kingkaufman

Energy: The physical means to heat our homes and power mechanical devices to produce goods and services.

Power: The strength with which human agents determine the kind and amount of energy available for use by whom.

Energy policy depends on political power.

An individual of average means acting alone is almost powerless in terms of influencing energy policy.

I try to do all of those, but this a short list of what one can actually do-and one of the big ones is: do not have children. People don't understand the complexity of the climate change and more humans on the planet.

The real problem is getting everyone to accept short-term pain for long-term prosperity.

Society isn't willing to vote for it, apparently.

I will pay for that along with everyone else, whether they voted for head-in-the-sand or not.

I think it would be wrong to draw the inference "don't bother recycling" from this chart.

It's just that the point of recycling isn't primarily about reducing CO2 emissions.

I'd also like to see "not having kids" on that list!

@Mulderc Go vegan… on foot!

if not having a car saves so much emissions, why do electric cars have such a big difference?

Supposing that the construction process for electric cars has also been fully migrated to electric in the future

while this chart is useful, I believe it still falls in line with the dominant neoliberal narrative that sees climate change as an individual fault and not as a systemic problem.

The Guardian recently ran a series of articles about the global carbon divide and the numbers are staggering: "while the wealthiest 1% tend to live climate-insulated, air-conditioned lives, their emissions – 5.9bn tonnes of CO2 in 2019 – are responsible for immense suffering"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/20/first-thing-richest-1-account-for-more-carbon-emissions-than-poorest-66

@kingkaufman Also, having the 99% going in the right direction builds political power to force the 1% to stop going the opposite direction.
This is already happening at a very small magnitude and very slowly.
It all depends on how quickly we want to get there.

Heating is a big one, at least in the UK (saving of nearly 1 tonne each for my family of 4 getting a heat pump). Takes serious capital though, even with government subsidy. But then so does getting an electric car.

I wonder if this is included in the "buying renewable energy" box or is that just electricity?

These things vary from one place to another, e.g. we don't need AC. At least we hope we don't.

But ... as you'll see from Bread and Circuses, system change matters more. We won't be saved by lifestyle choices, until everyone makes them, which means changing the government and the economy.

great, have not flown far for years. Dont own a car.

Love to use my dryer. Buying green energy.

In #SanFrancisco you can buy renewable electricity at https://www.cleanpowersf.org/supergreen

I worry that the recycling message may confuse people about the multiple benefits of recycling. As a climate issue, yes smaller. But from a resource (both materials and energy) efficiency standpoint, and from a waste minimization stand point, absolutely essential.

And reducing consumption as a whole is key to addressing climate change and ecosystem health as a whole.

We need a much better sound bite/elevator pitch than "degrowth", which scares many who hear it as a "back to the caves" message.

Same data, emphasis on the (presumably) desired learning (which is not "see what you're doing wrong").

I live in a small mountain town where it is a survival issue between having/not having a car. I can't afford an EV.

My best choice was to buy a smaller one and not drive often. (I work from home so I don't need to).

the thing that pisses me off is that on a structural level, achieving less car journeys has a ton of existing tech with ready to go solutions

CO₂ footprint is bullshit though, it is far from being the only pollution agent.

Right, for example traffic regardless of the means of transport needs a *lot* of infrastructure, for an extreme example you can't just choose to bicycle on a stroad (or well you won't do that for long), taking public transit also means actually having it.