The biggest climate actions you can take
On climate anxiety and pulling yourself out of it.
There’s no gentle way to say it – sometimes, the world as we know it feels f*cked.
A paradoxical world
We are richer than ever before, but we can't afford housing. We are under-exercised and overstretched. We have the capability, opportunity, and solutions to fight the climate crisis. Instead, we panic while our billionaires and their phallic rockets jettison into space, and our governments umm and ahh over commitments to change. We stomp carbon footprints and we walk on eggshells. We are safer than ever and constantly terrified.
We want more. We waste more. We have more rights, and we’re depressed by the remaining injustices. A house with three cars in the driveway has a sign on its fence urging us to ‘take climate action now’.
Our teenagers are incredibly smart, but paralysed by the state of the world and how much they care. Apathy and TikTok is easier than dealing with the mess we’re in. Zoomers are pitted savagely against Boomers. Political parties are terser with one another each year. Everyone is triggered by race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, health conditions, parental status, marital status, and Netflix shows. It’s easier to say nothing in case you’re misunderstood.
We value our front line workers. We couldn't have survived the pandemic without them. But governments and health care companies don’t increase their wages to the equivalent of corporate workers. Our gratitude is payment enough, right?
When you’re spiralling like a climate-caused tornado
Some days, the world spins so fast that you must be as high and untethered as the helium balloons you're not supposed to buy. You are one of the neglected plastic bags tumble-weeding across space and viewed with disgust and a certain wistfulness. What stings most is the arbitrary nature of the shackles we have built for ourselves. As adults, we have the power to effect change, but we’ve lost the willpower to try. Easier to check our emails, order the groceries, and eat what's left of yesterday's ice-cream.
I know I’m not alone in my climate anxiety. I’m not the only one who reads an article about another target missed, another few degrees locked in, and feels like they’ve been sucker punched in the solar plexus. I’m not alone in feeling hopeless because the majority of the world’s emissions come from countries, companies, and ‘greedy guts’.
I understand that feeling of nihilism, rising like the tide around your shoulders and shoving you savagely under a huge wave you didn’t see coming. I’ve wondered if it’s selfish to have kids, will civilisation collapse in my lifetime, should I move to the country, am I over-reacting, I mean everyone in history thinks the world is coming to an end… how will I make it through hot summers with my half-Dutch constitution, if only it was as simple as planting a tree like in Wall-E and the Lorax, when will the experts step in and fix everything?
A message for the climate anxious
This is for the climate anxious me and for all the people who spiral because they care so much about the fate of our world: it is not on you to fix the climate crisis. It’s unreasonable to put the responsibility of saving the world on any one person’s shoulders, no matter how broad, and no matter how many ‘chosen one’ novels may try to convince you otherwise. This is not a get out of jail free card, either. Every human on this planet is responsible; jointly, together. You hold one in eight billion shares that make up earth’s value as defined by humans.
It might feel like some shareholders should carry more of the responsibility than others. Because they’re richer, because they’re more powerful, because they’ve done more damage, because they started it. That’s undoubtedly true, and we can’t forget that. But not at the cost of distracting us from action. I like to imagine earth as a primary school teacher who’s found all her pupils throwing sand, shouting, blowing snot bubbles, poking ribs, pulling hair, and generally causing chaos. ‘I don’t care who started it. It needs to stop, and you all need to behave and be nice!’
That’s really all any of us can do at the end of the day. We take responsibility for our own individual actions. We act in a way that would make our favourite person proud. We act the way we’d like to think our ancestors who faced wars, injustices, and impossibilities did. We stop. We say sorry. We behave and be nice.
There are many brilliant resources on climate change already. They address the science, what the world will look like in the future, how we got to where we are, and what governments need to do to get us on the right path. I’ve read all that, but it wasn’t always what I was looking for. What I wanted was a bullet list. A little collection of climate actions that I could turn to when the climate anxiety threatened to overwhelm me. To remind me to focus on what’s within my control.
TL;DR: The eight individual climate actions
So, after copious books and articles read, podcasts listened to, and data absorbed, here are the eight key individual climate actions that seem the most impactful and that climate scientists seem most in agreement on.
Grow your family mindfully. The typical advice is to have one fewer child. (Personally, I feel this applies more if you’re planning to have multiple children. If you’re planning to have one, no one will come banging down your door. Similarly, if you’re already committed to being child free, you do not need to take out a child hitman-style.) When it comes to our animal friends, adopt from a rescue rather than buying from a breeder.
Travel locally, and avoid flying.
Live car-free. Aim to use active and public transport instead.
Stuff; have less of it.
Energy; use less of it.
Eat a plant-based diet.
Don’t buy stuff (see point four). But when you do, get it secondhand or locally made and resourced.
Make your time, vote, and money count. Get involved in local environmental initiatives, make sure you're not funding the big bad climate emitters, and voice the need for change.
None of us is perfect, and we won’t get everything right. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying, and these eight goals are a great place to focus our try. All we can do is break them down into manageable chunks, take a deep breath, and start.