How to fight climate change at home – 12 ways you can save the world

Doing something about it is, therefore, within all our grasps. It’s also not all about self-sacrifice, denial, gloom and loss. Some of it might even feel good. The real doom and gloom is what will happen if we don’t do it.

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Mike Berners-Lee, author of There Is No Planet B, a handbook that crunches the numbers around carbon footprints, believes that one of the first things we need to do in order to understand our place in the solution is to “stand right back and take a look at what’s really going on in the world”. Then, he says, the obvious question is: "If I wanted to create the conditions under which we could deal with all these global challenges, what could I do?”

Berners-Lee believes that what we can do falls into two areas. One is the question of how you live your life and what your personal impacts are. The second is the ways in which you can have influence on key decision-makers – including how you vote, protesting and calling power to account. This article includes some ideas for both – but there are many more.

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We don’t, however – as Dr Rachel Howell an expert in sustainability at the University of Edinburgh, points out – all have to do all of them. What we need is for a very high proportion of people to start shifting their behaviour. “Also," she says, "the change that you can contribute to is not just the change of reducing emissions. It’s changing social norms in society.”

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1. Begin the conversation

Break the ice. Don’t avoid those conversations about climate change because they seem awkward. Talk with your friends, your family, your work colleagues, your boss. Talking can feel good. Call up, or email, people you know in other countries and share thoughts. Don’t let it be the elephant in the room while we all furiously debate Brexit or independence.

Mike Berners-Lee sees this conversation as one of the key changes we need to make. “People have got choices about what they let go and challenge. There are already things in today’s society that we do challenge. Racist comments these days would be much less likely to be allowed to pass. We need to get like that on all these global issues. We need to shift that social norm.”

2. Celebrate the staycation

We live in a jaw-droppingly gorgeous country, declared the “most beautiful” in the world by the Rough Guide in 2017. Yet many of us get our couple of weeks off and hop on a plane to somewhere else. Flights are one of the biggest ways in which we crank up our carbon footprint. As Rachel Howell puts it: “A return flight from London to New York will release something like two tonnes of greenhouse gases, and the problem with flying is not just the CO2 – it’s also the particulates and water vapour that are emitted at high altitude”.

When Howell did a research project looking at the methods that worked for people who wanted to reduce their carbon footprint, she found that, frequently, after they did their calculations, the first thing they chose to do away with was flying. “One piece of advice,” she says, “would be to go for longer, less often, and actually spend more time when you’re visiting family abroad. For holidays, deciding to travel somewhere nearer home generally usually saves you money, and there’s such a wealth of stuff to discover here in Britain.”

3. Enjoy getting places under your own steam

Leave your car, if you own one, where it’s parked for journeys of less than a mile – and either cycle or walk.

4. Discover the joys of the veggie meal

One of the biggest messages from the climate-change experts is that we need to make a shift towards a more plant-based diet – but that doesn’t have to mean going the full vegan. It can start with a Meat Free Monday or experimenting with a few veggie or vegan recipes. And, since many of these meals are delicious and healthy, what’s not to like?

We need, particularly, to reduce our consumption of beef, lamb and dairy, because it’s been shown that these ruminants burp methane, a gas with a greenhouse effect far more powerful than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. Other sources of methane include rice paddy fields and the leakage of natural gas from fracking sites – which is one of the reasons climate activists so object to fracking.

Berners-Lee observes: “A quarter of the average UK person’s carbon footprint is their food and the simple message is that we need to eat less meat and dairy, especially less beef and lamb. It doesn’t have to be zero though. We don’t actually have to go totally extreme on any of these actions – so long as we really do make changes on them all. So if you can’t imagine that a meal could ever taste nice without a wodge of steak, just change yourself by degrees over the next five years.”

Rachel Howell also notes that cutting down on overall personal meat consumption and replacing it with cheaper proteins could mean “being able to afford to eat meat, a couple of times a week, that is really good quality and probably more ethical and tasty and enjoy it as a real treat”.

5. Challenge power

We are not going to get anywhere close to net-zero on the basis of personal lifestyle choices alone. The role of politicians and government in creating the necessary legislation and regulation – as well as a cooperative international deal – is key. So we need to put pressure on them. “It’s important for people to get more involved in political action,” says Rachel Howell, “on whatever level they feel comfortable with. That might be something as simple as signing a petition. It might be about writing to your MP or MSP. It might be joining a march or demonstration – all the way up to the recent stuff that we’ve seen with Extinction Rebellion.”

Mike Berners-Lee believes we also need to get better at calling out our politicians on whether their approach to climate is coherent. “It’s fashionable now for politicians to call for a climate emergency. Well that’s lovely, but we need to ask them, ‘What do you mean by it?’ We need to create the situation where a politician knows they will be challenged if their policies around climate change are incoherent, if they talk about a climate emergency but they’ve forgotten that when they’re having a conversation about the airport expansion.”

6. Get mean on food waste

About 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions that come from the food system could be reduced if we stop wasting food. “Eating what we buy,” says Mike Berners-Lee, “is a simple change – and it saves you money.”

There are two problems with food waste. First, there are the carbon emissions made in the food’s production, wasted the moment it lands in the bin. The second is what happens to it after it hits that bin. If it ends up in landfill there’s a strong chance it will decompose and release methane, and is 30 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. Hence, putting it in a compost bin, where it might go off to an anaerobic digester, at which its methane is converted to electricity, or be used as compost in farming, is a key carbon-saving act.

7. Say no to flying vegetables

You don’t have to stop eating everything that comes from another country. There is a difference between bananas shipped over from and a packet of asparagus or salad leaf flown over from South America – and it’s all in the flying.

Mike Berners-Lee advises: “To tell whether something has been on an aeroplane, check the country of origin and ask yourself whether it has the longevity to survive the journey by ship, train or lorry. Bananas, apples and oranges usually can survive, whereas strawberries, grapes and asparagus generally can’t. If something is locally grown, but out of season, it will have to have been hot-housed which can be just as bad as flying. A UK example would be Scottish strawberries in January.”

8. Embrace electric transport

Electric transport is a key part of the solution – particularly when it runs on energy produced by renewables. Scotland, and the rest of the UK, has been slow to embrace the electric car – and transport is one of the big areas we need to shift from fossil fuels to renewables. In November 2018 around 10,000 electric or hybrid cars were registered in Scotland, and there are currently just over 1000 charge points across the country. Ministers have pledged to phase out new petrol and diesel cars and vans across Scotland by 2032.

Many drivers are put off by concerns over battery capacity, fears over availability of charging points, and the overall expense. However, given loans and other incentives, the cars are becoming increasingly accessible, and earlier this year the International Council for Clean Transportation published a report which said electric cars were already cheaper to run than petrol and diesel alternatives in the countries they analysed, UK included.

For many, however, the electric car will still seem unaffordable. But there are low-carbon alternatives that look increasingly workable. Try an electric bike, join a car club, or liftshare to work.

9. Find a bank and a pension-provider that’s about the green love

Where you put your money is key. The International Energy Agency reported that in 2018 fossil fuels increased their share of the global energy supply investment for the first time since 2014. If your money is a pension scheme, or even a bank, that invests in fossil fuels, you’re in your small way aiding that.

“We invest in the future we want,” says Mike Berners-Lee. “We are so used to only thinking about the return on investments financially. We need to change that.”

10. Join the home energy revolution

A key challenge ahead of us is going to be to decarbonise the heating of our buildings – and that involves weaning ourselves off natural gas. Gas boilers need either to be replaced by electrically powered heat pumps or, perhaps, hydrogen powered boilers which use hydrogen created through renewables. But the problem is none of these changes is currently cheap – and the latter is not yet available.

Those many of us who are living in rented accommodation, or with little savings, might balk at the costs, or be excluded practically from these changes – as well as other key alterations like double glazing and insulation. “This is an area,” says Rachel Howell, “where the barriers for some people are practical and financial and this is where it becomes so obvious that we need societal level change and we need regulation and legislation and government schemes to help and incentivise landlords.”

11. Treat shopping as a thinking challenge, not a leisure activity

Most of us already know there are far more pleasurable pursuits than touring your local mall or going on an online spending spree. “We should stop thinking,” says Mike Berners-Lee, “of shopping as an enjoyable leisure activity and do it only when we need it.”

But also, when we do shop, we need to think more about each thing that we buy. Rachel Howell says: “Ask yourself, do I really need it? Can I buy second-hand? And if you’re buying new, as far as your finances permit it, ensure that you’re buying good stuff that will last.” The circular economy is growing, as is the culture of repair. There are more businesses that refurbish computers, organisations that fix things, and tool libraries. Support your local versions of these.

Each time we spend our money, says Mike Berners-Lee “we are voting for one future or another”. He suggests we always ask ourselves what the wider story and carbon implications are of the product we are considering buying. “What took place for this product to exist? Then the question of do I need it at all, will I be able to repair it, will it last? When I no longer want to use it will I be able to sell it on or make it part of the circular economy.”

12. Go slow

What many of us need to do is slow down, plan better, and engage properly in the experiences they have. Mike Berners-Lee sees this slower kind of approach to life, an appreciation of the “small, simple and local”, as one of the key new ways of thinking we need to foster. “There is no point,” he writes, “having more, buying more, doing more and flying further, if we don’t really notice any of it properly.”

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Myth-buster: Plastic is a different battle

There are many good reasons to fight plastic pollution and cut down on your use of plastics, but fighting climate change is not one of them. Rachel Howell observes: “Plastics are a really big problem, but it doesn’t have very much to do with climate change. Some people are spending quite a lot of effort really trying to cut plastics out of their lives and I think that’s a bit of a distraction.

"To reduce food waste a certain level of packaging can be helpful, and you don’t want to create food waste because food waste actually generates a lot of greenhouse gas emissions – methane particularly when it goes into landfill.”