When it comes to personal contributions to climate change, most Americans seem to have no clue how damaging some of their individual actions can be.
Folks who happily recycle and switch to more energy-efficient appliances, per a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus journal, likely have a far larger carbon footprint than they realize.
When it comes to personal behavioral changes to mitigate climate change, not all interventions are created equal. As the Associated Press notes in a story about the study, taking fewer flights, using renewable electricity, and forgoing ownership of a protein-hungry dog are considered the most effective individual actions people can do to reduce their carbon footprints. Easier stuff, like recycling, buying energy-efficient appliances and lightbulbs, and using less energy on clothes-washing, are some of the least effective.
Led by psychological and communications researchers from New York University, Yale, Stanford, and the Copenhagen Business School, the survey-based study recruited nearly 4,000 people online to ask them about individual behaviors that can harm the climate.
As paper co-author and Stanford environmental social scientist Madalina Vlasceanu told the AP, the survey participants tended to "over-assign impact to actually pretty low-impact actions such as recycling, and underestimate the actual carbon impact of behaviors much more carbon intensive, like flying or eating meat."
Jiaying Zhao, an associate professor of psychology and sustainability at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the study, suggested this gap in knowledge isn't that surprising given our different relationships to these different interventions.
"Recycling is an almost daily action, whereas flying is less frequent. It’s less discussed," Zhao told the AP. "As a result, people give a higher psychological weight to recycling."
Ultimately, it boils down to what is visible and what is not.
"You can see the bottle being recycled. That’s visible," she continued. "Whereas carbon emissions, that’s invisible to the human eye. So that’s why we don’t associate emissions with flying."
With flying and eating meat — and, by extension, owning a dog that eats meat-based food — among the top culprits adding to your individual carbon footprint, folks who fly a lot or have dogs may be unaware of just how much they're polluting.
In a landmark 2017 study out of the University of California at Los Angeles, researchers found that in the United States alone, feeding dogs — and cats, for good measure — meat-based foods accounts for some 64 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, which is the equivalent of emissions from 13.6 million cars on the road per year.
Still, there hasn't been much public messaging about how pets can contribute to climate change — and as Vlasceanu put it in a statement about the study, "nobody understands" carbon emissions anyway.
"It’s so abstract," she said, "you’ll forget it immediately."
More on climate change: Scientists Just Found Who's Causing Global Warming