Actions Around the Home
The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024
In the first `100 days of 2024 we will explore 100 climate solutions that may “empower you to evaluate, engage, and act” to address on-going climate change as an individual on your terms.
Calculate your carbon footprint. Or better yet. Don’t. Heidi’s book is predicated on the idea that we should resist the forces conspiring to shift the “responsibility and blame to solve the climate crisis” to you and me as individuals. As Heidi points out, mitigating the worst of the changing climate requires massive systemic changes that we cannot implement as individuals such as:
- revising building codes and design standards
- adopting utility-scale renewable energy, storage, and grid modernization
- reducing the supply chain (Scope 3) emissions of corporations
“… throughout this book, individual actions are supplemented by clear calls for collective action”
Heidi Roop
By all means, calculate your personal or household carbon footprint. It is a useful exercise that may help you discover easy actions to take to reduce emissions. The EPA’s Carbon Footprint Calculator is available for your use. It focuses on home energy, transportation and waste, and provides a rough estimate of your carbon footprint based on US averages. Be sure to check the assumptions that form the basis for the calculation.
For a committed individual, a carbon footprint calculation cannot begin to capture the totality of your actions. Take the sterile spreadsheet equation of how you use energy and add to it your influence among your friends and family and the impact you make in your community. Figure in your efforts to reach your colleagues at work, the creativity you tap into being a voice for change, and the leadership you show in connecting with your elected officials. And then add the unseen secondary impact as those you reach make their voices heard.
“The world needs each and every one of us to bring our strengths, creativity, and ideas to this work”
Heidi Roop
All of this constitutes your “full and balanced portfolio of climate work”. And if you choose to amplify any part of that portfolio, the biggest impact is “advocating for and supporting the systems-based change we know is required to move us toward a better, brighter future”.
Ways to take action on the bigger issues from the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Next Up: Climate Action in 2024 – Day 64: Understand the Prospects of Carbon Renewal
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