If 2020 teaches us anything, it’s that the next crisis we could have prevented is probably right around the corner, and it will be painful. A pandemic that scientists warned was very likely to occur arrived and has already killed well over 250,000 people in the US. Dozens of predicted, large wildfires — the latest evidence of the climate emergency — recentlu torched the American West, their smoke more damaging to health than almost any fire season on record.  

But it’s not too late to intervene and limit climate chaos.

A June paper in Nature Communications clarifies whose actions in this moment are “central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions.” Yes, government and industry leaders are on the hook to decarbonize operations and infrastructure. But it’s also the affluent who use far more resources than the poor — more energy and more material goods per capita than the planet can sustain.

“Highly affluent consumers drive biophysical resource use (a) directly through high consumption, (b) as members of powerful factions of the capitalist class and (c) through driving consumption norms across the population,” the authors write. 

The rich or merely affluent, it turns out, are actually the ones blowing through the world’s carbon budget — the maximum amount of cumulative emissions that can be added to the atmosphere to hit the Paris agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming goal.

According to a September report from Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, the richest 10 percent of the world’s population — those who earned $38,000 per year or more as of 2015 — were responsible for 52 percent of cumulative carbon emissions and ate up 31 percent of the world’s carbon budget from 1990 to 2015.

Meanwhile, the richest 1 percent of people — who made $109,000 or more per year in 2015 — alone were responsible for 15 percent of cumulative emissions, and used 9 percent of the carbon budget.

The rapidly accelerating growth in total emissions worldwide isn’t mainly about an improvement in quality of life for the poorer half of the world’s population, either. Instead, the report finds, “nearly half the growth has merely allowed the already wealthy top 10 percent to augment their consumption and enlarge their carbon footprints.” Another recent study found that affluent frequent fliers who make up just 1 percent of the global population are responsible for 50 percent of carbon dioxide emissions from commercial aviation.

In sum, as Tim Gore, head of climate policy at Oxfam, said in a statement, “The over-consumption of a wealthy minority is fueling the climate crisis yet it is poor communities and young people who are paying the price.”

Somehow, in all the campaigns to inspire climate action, the onus on well-off people to take the lead on sustainable consumption has been lost. But the Covid-19 pandemic may turn out to be the best opportunity — especially for the affluent among us — to shift consumption habits.

Here’s why: When we cut back on energy-intensive travel and shopping in the spring, it was easier to see the mindlessness, and even lack of satisfaction, in these patterns. For some people, “the Covid-19 crisis has shown that maybe we can do things differently, that a simpler life can be more fulfilling and provide more happiness,” says Tommy Wiedmann, a professor of sustainability research at UNSW Sydney and a co-author of the Nature Communications paper.

Permanently reducing air travel, driving, home energy use, food waste, and shopping to protect our kids and grandkids from climate chaos need not lead to any reduction in quality of life. In fact, it may even go a long way toward improving it (for ourselves and others). As Vox’s Sigal Samuel reported in June, the top change readers she surveyed said they wanted to maintain after quarantine was “reducing consumerism.” “A long period of being shut in and not spending as much has led to the realization that so much of our consumer behavior is about instant gratification, not lasting happiness,” she writes.

We can also use lessons from our new Covid-constrained life for further economic reforms tailored to the climate emergency reality we find ourselves in. As Pope Francis put it in a Saturday speech on climate change, “The current economic system is unsustainable. We are faced with a moral imperative … to rethink many things,” including means of production, consumerism, waste, indifference to the poor, and harmful energy sources, according to Reuters.

In particular, degrowth is a promising framework for meeting basic needs and improving well-being while staying within the carbon budget and planetary boundaries.

While individual contributions to climate change may be dwarfed by the contributions of fossil fuel companies and heavy industry, individual changes can also spread by “behavioral contagion,” social tipping points, and positive feedback loops.

Here we’ll lay out some of the key opportunities for fellow fortunates who have the economic freedom to choose how and what they consume. Individual, grassroots changes are essential to a bigger systemic change; personal growth and flourishing can happen through resource degrowth.

Yes, individual choices matter, especially if you’re affluent

From a global perspective, middle-class Americans are in the top 10 percent income-wise. “A $59,000 income in the United States has enough buying power to put you in the 91st percentile globally for per-person income,” according to the Washington Post. And beyond that, our fellow fortunates all have “optional consumption” that we engage in, often unreflectively.

Given that leverage, every energy reduction we can make is a gift to future humans, and all life on Earth. And we should be on guard for excuses to avoid changing individual consumption behaviors; they’re often based on logical, arithmetic, and moral errors.

For instance, affluent people sometimes argue that their consumption choices don’t matter because they’re just one person on a planet of more than 7 billion. But consider the physics of tipping points using an analogy from a 2019 piece we wrote, “12 excuses for climate inaction and how to refute,” which helps explain why our decisions today are so much more critical than they were a decade ago — or even this time last year. 

A useful image here is a pile of sand on one side of a weighing scale; at or near the tipping point, it’s easy to see that every tiny grain of sand contributes to when that side of the scale ultimately falls. Your seemingly tiny contribution — the optional flight, the round-the-clock air conditioning, the thrice-weekly portion of beef — can, arithmetically, add up to make a critical difference. And “the bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your moral duty,” Greta Thunberg said in her widely cited 2019 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Where the weighing scale image fails is that there isn’t just one tipping point or one single outcome, but rather a spectrum. The fewer greenhouse gases we emit, the nearer to the safer end of the spectrum we can stay, and the less climate chaos we will create. 

We usually have options where we can choose to have more or less climate impact. Every time we choose more and not less, we’re imposing compounding burdens on others and on our descendants. Our choices will determine whether the future is “merely grim, rather than apocalyptic,” as New York’s David Wallace-Wells writes in his book The Uninhabitable Earth.

Restrained consumption is also a way to prevent the deepening of racial and economic injustice and inequality — low-income people and people of color are among the first to lose the most in climate disasters. Working toward justice means being a resource-responsible consumer. 

“I think it is important for people to say that they will not do certain types of consumption anymore,” Julia Steinberger, a professor of ecological economics at the University of Leeds and a co-author of the Nature Communications paper, tells Vox. “It’s about making this way of life more visibly unacceptable. The rich could show their status and prestige with other things than lots of cars and huge houses and lots of material wealth.”

With all this in mind, here are five potential resource-responsible actions to commit to, in no particular order:

1. Drive and fly less, since the top 10 percent uses around 45 percent of land transport energy and 75 percent of air transport energy, per a 2020 paper by Steinberger in Nature Energy.
2. Retrofit your house and purchase clean energy, since roughly 20 percent of US energy-related greenhouse gas emissions come from heating, cooling, and powering households.
3. Buy food mindfully (less meat and dairy, don’t waste what you buy), since meat and dairy account for around 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization.
4. Shop less, since the fashion industry generates at least 5 percent of global emissions.
5. Ditch status-signaling SUVs, since SUVs were the second-largest source of the global rise in emissions over the past decade, eclipsing all shipping, aviation, heavy industry, and even trucks.

The pleasures of much of our consumption are fast forgotten, but the costs are slow and will be felt by generations for centuries to come

Despite what consumption enthusiasts and their enablers (marketers, economists, etc.) preach, the benefits and pleasures of much of our consumption are fleeting. Many of us have an inkling of this from our own experience, but we’re trapped on the treadmill of unthinking hedonic habits. 

That enduring lack of true satisfaction is confirmed by much ancient wisdom: Enlightenment, or Nirvana, is the “ the absence of greed, absence of dislike, and absence of egoism,” as the Buddhist writer and scholar Stephen Batchelor notes in an interview with On Being’s Krista Tippett. And one of the most robust findings in social science, according to economist Robert Frank at Cornell, is the research on how emotional well-being doesn’t improve above an annual (individual) income of $75,000.

Some of our least effective consumption occurs in the form of self-soothing habits. When we’re feeling bad, or anxious, or bored, we often seek relief in impulsive shopping, a.k.a. retail therapy. 

What longer-lasting reliefs beat fleeting fun? You may have experienced part of the answer in these Covid-constrained conditions. For many, an activity as simple as a walk has been their day’s treat. 

That’s especially true if you find beauty or curiosity on your walk, where you notice things interesting enough to achieve what Iris Murdoch called “unselfing” — taking you out of your self-centered anxieties, even if only temporarily. (Here’s some background on this idea from Maria Popova.)  

These spirit-supporting pleasures typically take more effort than reaching for “junk” treats (like a quick online purchase). But, in addition to being more satisfying, they often lack negative knock-on effects, like putting more carbon into the atmosphere. This carbon cost isn’t just about you — it is our collective legacy to our children and all future humans. 

Hopefully, Covid-19 can teach us to pay attention to planetary boundaries and other collective threats we’ve long ignored. On climate, we should wake up to the intergenerational zero-sum game we are playing, where the carbon-generating and resource-depleting consumption we indulge in now compromises the safety of future humans.

Every physical resource is limited, or is renewable within certain limits. And this logic means there is no “green growth” solution here unless we reduce consumption: the approach known as “degrowth.”

Degrowth, explained

Even before Covid-19, a fundamental restructuring of the economy was very clearly needed to right the gaping inequities, the shockingly lopsided accumulation — nay, hoarding — of wealth. The factors that led to that are only being exacerbated by Covid-19. But as we recover from the pandemic, richer countries and citizens have a tremendous opportunity to remold under another paradigm. 

Degrowth, as the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel puts it, is about rich countries “actively scaling down resource use and energy use.”

On a recent episode of the Freakonomics podcast, he clarified: “When people hear ‘degrowth,’ they think that sounds like a recession. But here’s the thing … a recession is what happens when a growth-oriented economy stops growing. It’s a disaster. People lose their jobs. They lose their houses. Poverty rates rise, etc. ‘Degrowth’ is calling for a shift to a fundamentally different kind of economy altogether.”

As Wiedmann, Steinberger, and their co-authors describe it, degrowth is a “downscaled steady-state economic system that is socially just and in balance with ecological limits.”

Taking advantage of this opportunity also requires going beyond a focus on carbon emissions. Clean energy, for example, won’t deliver a sustainable economy by itself. It’s about our resource use more broadly. (Even preexisting sweeping proposals like the Green New Deal often don’t address material limits.)

As Hickel wrote in June in Foreign Policy:

Ecologists say that the planet can handle maximum annual resource use of about 50 billion metric tons per year. We crossed that planetary boundary in the late 1990s, and today we’re overshooting it by more than 90 percent. This is what’s driving ecological breakdown: Every additional ton of material extraction has an impact on the planet’s ecosystems. 

The outer limit works out to be about 6 metric tons per human per year. The current US average is 35 metric tons, with those toward the top of the income scale consuming vastly more. This means there is no avoiding the urgent need for deep cuts in energy and material use in rich nations, especially among those countries’ richest citizens. 

Since we may not be able to remove much of the carbon that has already been emitted, or return the materials that have already been extracted, it’s best now to adopt a forward-looking redemption stance. What matters most is reducing impacts from here on out, rather than prosecuting past “sins,” often committed unwittingly, or by rich-mimicking rather than explicit choice. And that means choosing not to mindlessly add more grains of sand to the scale.

There are green shoots visible of the vast changes needed. China committed Tuesday to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 and peak its emissions by 2030. Night trains are coming back in Europe partially in response to people demanding low-carbon alternatives to flying. A group of European central bankers wrote in the Guardian in June that “the pandemic offers a unique chance to green the global economy” and is mobilizing businesses, investors, banks, and governments “to ensure climate risks are effectively managed in the financial system.” 

You, too, can bank on bettering your personal economy by creating a new normal of mindful consumption and making it visible to others in the affluent class, as Steinberger advises. You’ll be a better, and probably happier, person. And other humans, including your kids, will thank you. 

There’s a reason why the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has successfully goaded powerful politicians into long-overdue climate action in the last year.

Thunberg, who is on the autism spectrum, has become a moral authority. Again and again, she’s clearly articulated how adults have shamefully abdicated their basic duties to protect today’s children and future generations from compounding climate catastrophe. “This ongoing irresponsible behavior will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind,” she told the British Parliament.

“You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake. You are not mature enough to tell it like is. Even that burden you leave to us children,” she declared at the United Nations in December.

Her ability to sway politicians and the public, in speeches and through her Friday school strikes, is now evident: European leaders have called for aggressive new carbon emissions reductions, citing her movement. Millions of young people and adults are expected turn out again today and on September 27 in strikes in more than 150 countries. And she will address the UN again on Monday as part of the UN Climate Action Summit.

Fortunately, Thunberg is just one of many great minds helping us summon moral clarity to address the tricky problem of framing the climate crisis. That includes the writers David Wallace-Wells, George Monbiot, and Anand Giridharadas; the historian Jill Lepore; and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), among many others.

As we dump more carbon into the atmosphere and the planet cooks, their arguments about what we’re up against — and why we must act now — are essential to cutting through the ties that keep us quiescent.

These thinkers have inspired us to overcome our own psychological roadblocks in facing the climate crisis. The words of writer James Baldwin are helpful here too: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Drawing from these and other wells of wisdom, we’ve put together 12 short answers to some of the most stymying questions to help you work through climate despair, cynicism, defeatism, and paralysis. We can’t delay any more; it’s past time for productive panic.

1) Isn’t it alarmist to talk about the potential extinction of the human species?

It’s true that we don’t precisely know how this will all play out, but the evidence is overwhelming that the climate is already dangerously unstable, and extreme weather will be increasingly deadly to us and other species. “Our house is on fire,” as Thunberg put it, “I don’t want your hope. … I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.”

We’ve already emitted enough greenhouse gases to cause 1.1 degrees Celsius of heating, most of it in a single generation, as David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, points out. All decisions from here on out are the differences between, say, 1.5, 1.51, 1.52 degrees Celsius of warming and up to 4 degrees.

Any of those scenarios will lead to an escalating burden of suffering for billions of humans yet unborn. And it’s not only our distant descendants: Today’s young people will grow up in a climate altered by your choices right now.

2) Isn’t it already too late to prevent catastrophe?

Irreversible changes to the biosphere are already well underway. But every fraction of a degree of additional heating matters. And that means every iota of greenhouse gas we choose to put into the atmosphere adds to the legacy of burdens we choose to impose on future humans and other species.

So it’s not too late to stop avoidable climate cooking.

3) How do I deal with the fact that this is so depressing?

It is daunting, yes, but it can also be exciting, and inspiring.

Humans living today have the opportunity and responsibility to play a role in saving civilization. This is the largest clear and present danger we’ve ever been called on to face.

To use Ocasio-Cortez’s framing, this is like mobilizing for World War II, and everybody can play a role, from frontline heroics to the home front.

The difference is that this frontline is everywhere. And in this war, inaction is a choice to aid and abet the enemy and to continue accelerating toward the climate-catastrophe cliff. Imagine if “the greatest generation” had shirked on the war effort because WWII seemed depressing?

As writer and activist Bill McKibben has said, the “moral arc” of the climate crisis is not long. We don’t have time to wait, and every delay adds to the future suffering and compounding costs of mitigation.

4) Won’t it be impossible to get off fossil fuels? Emissions keep going up, and oil companies are too powerful.

This seems to be less impossible in other nations. Germany recently had a record week where 65 percent of its electricity came from renewables. Costa Rica has run on renewables for 300 days. More than 50 percent of the UK’s energy now comes from clean power.

It is true that coal and oil companies — the oilygarchy — wield tremendous power. But big business interests have been beaten by moral concerns in the past.

Historian Jill Lepore reminds us in her book These Truths that in the 1830s, 1 percent of Americans were slaveholders, and we then fought a Civil War in which morality beat that 1 percent. She also notes that you need a “moral revolution” to overcome “moral blindness,” and that’s precisely the phase we need to enter now.

For the plutocrats who have made money by boiling the biosphere, the question is: Is it in anyone’s real “interest” to wreck the future of your descendants?

And for the rest of us, it’s time to insist that every fossil fuel company must adjust to the new moral and material reality. (Exxon started building oil rigs to withstand sea-level rise decades ago; they know this is real.)

5) But I’m just one person. Do my choices even matter in a world of 7 billion people?

This is misunderstanding the way the math works.

A useful image here is a pile of sand on one side of a weighing scale, at or near the tipping point it’s easy to see that every tiny grain of sand contributes, and the same is true before that point also. Your tiny contribution — the optional flight, the round-the-clock air conditioning, the daily portion of meat — can, arithmetically, add up to make a critical difference.

Where the weighing scale image fails is that there isn’t just one tipping point, there’s a spectrum, and the less GHGs we emit the nearer the safer end of the spectrum we’ll be. Don’t mindlessly commit sins of emission.

We usually have options where we can choose to have more or less climate impact. Every time we choose more and not less, we’re imposing compounding burdens on others and on our descendants. Our choices will determine whether the future is “merely grim, rather than apocalyptic,” as Wallace-Wells writes.

6) Why should I deprive myself of meat and air travel? It’s human nature to pursue short-term pleasure.

This is repeatedly asserted, but it is historically ignorant, and easily refuted by the behavior of many of your recent ancestors. Most of our parents and grandparents incurred short-term costs and deprivations to help us. They scrimped to give us a shot at a better life, to put us through school, or they lined up to fight wars.

And many cultures have lived with an eye to the future, and have held nature (the “all-mothering Earth” to use an ancient Greek phrase) sacred. Abstractions like “growth,” and “global economy” distract from the fact that we’re committing a form of collective suicide and ecocide.

7) Isn’t it mainly a rich and powerful people’s problem? I’m not rich.

Yes, the rich impose disproportionately much higher climate costs, and they will need to make larger adjustments (no second yachts).

But almost everybody reading this is from a global and historical point of view “rich.” Our standard of living is better than 99 percent of all humans who’ve ever lived.

Choosing less consumption doesn’t mean living a miserable life. On the contrary, it can mean a more meaningful and moral life and one that doesn’t destroy the opportunity for future humans to have decent lives.  

That said, many of us do have an extra duty. As Genevieve Guenther, founder of EndClimateSilence, recently tweeted, “People with power should not let themselves off the hook because they’re mere ‘individuals.’ They help produce and shift politics with their behavior: journalists, celebrities, professors, politicians, investors, influencers of all sorts have a unique responsibility.”

The responsibility of the powerful, the privileged, and the fortunate, is to adjust how we live in the way that we all need to live to stop baking the biosphere.  

8) What is the one easy thing I can do?  

That is a tempting, and seemingly smart, question. But that kind of thinking is part of what got us into this mess.

Reducing our personal and political carbon budget can’t just be one thing you do that you feel let’s you get back to business as usual. And it won’t all be easy.

Instead, think of it as a lifetime practice of choosing the lowest carbon options, voting in climate-serious leaders, and pressuring the larger institutions (private and political) to hit zero emissions. This doesn’t mean taking on everything at once. But you can influence the institutions you’re connected to — your workplace, schools, and hospitals — that aren’t doing enough.

9) It’s obvious the US needs to pass serious federal climate legislation, but isn’t our political system broken? Leaders have short-term attention spans. And many are beholden to fossil fuel interests.

This is all true. But as Vox’s David Roberts has said, “We change politics, or we face catastrophe.” That’s the choice you make by abstaining from the effort to change politics.

The way to change politics, as Roberts argues, is with people power:

You develop a vision of politics that puts ordinary people at the center and gives them a tangible stake in the country’s future, a share in its enormous wealth, and a role to play in its greater purpose. Then organize people around that vision and demand it from elected representatives. If elected representatives don’t push for it, make sure they get primaried or defeated. If you want bipartisanship, get it because politicians in purple districts and states are scared to cross you, not because you led them to the sweet light of reason.

That’s the only prospect I know of for climate action on a sufficient scale.

10) But won’t decarbonization cost too much? Won’t it hurt the global economy?

The underlying “logic” of economists who claim the clean energy transition will be too expensive is basically an abstracted version of “we can’t afford to not burn our house.”

Or it’s as if President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in weighing World War II, “it’s cheaper, and will do less damage to the economy, to let the Nazis win.”

Is there any benefit now that can outweigh the risk of your descendants suffering or not surviving? The only long-lasting cultures are those that don’t eat their seed corn or choose to always put the present above what they know they’ll need to survive in the future.

Don’t forget, the numbers that economists use are all inaccurate (that’s a large part of how we’ve ended up in this mess, no price or value in any real market accounts for full pollution cleanup). And they’re essentially even more meaningless in a climate-crashed world. Your stock certificates won’t help when it’s Mad Max: Fury Road out there.

Note that 34 central bankers (the most conservative of finance folks) recently warned of precisely that point, saying the financial sector must support the transition to a low-carbon economy and act to avoid “a sudden collapse in asset prices.”

11) Aren’t you making what economists call “zero sum” mistakes (my consumption doesn’t limit yours, we can both gain in “win-win” trade)?

This is a widely used but little understood invisible-hand-waving argument. The Earth is literally limited. Although economists like to use abstractions like “utility” and “growth” in their models, every real resource is limited (as is the ability of the Earth’s biosphere to adjust to our “unlimited” pollution).

That means there are real trade-offs: Our use of corn to fatten cattle in rich countries means less corn can be used to feed people elsewhere.  And at every point in time resource allocation is precisely zero-sum, by definition. (The future pie can change, and might very well shrink, but today’s pie is a fixed size, and its slices are zero-sum. If you get more, others get less of it).

And there is a zero-sum problem that hasn’t been faced up to. Our excess consumption reduces the availability of resources, like water and soil, in the future. Guardian columnist George Monbiot reports that soil degradation rates mean we have only 60 years of harvests left under current practices.

As Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All, has explained, “win-win” growth often hides a very dark logic. In practice, it means that poverty can only be reduced if the rich also make money from it. In a world that recognizes the realities of resource limits, we have to make more moral trade-offs that don’t favor the interests of today’s rich and powerful.

12) Surely the techies will invent something that saves us?

Just because something is needed doesn’t mean it will be invented. How long have we been working on a cure for the common cold? Many technical problems aren’t like microchips (with consistent Moore’s Law progress).

Tech like solar panels, batteries, and direct-air capture are critical to the clean energy transition, but we also must limit our consumption. To do this the other way around is a foolish global Russian roulette gamble on our survival.

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