Eating organic and switching to low-energy light bulbs feels like the green thing to do, but are people missing the bigger opportunities right in front of them?
Outside my flat there used to be a path that ran alongside the local reservoir. The narrow footway was a good place to spot herons and it was surrounded with brambles so thick that two people could barely walk side-by-side. After heavy rain the path would fill with mud and I’d have to delicately pick my way between vast puddles on my way to the shops. It was a little slice of nature right in Inner London.
A couple of months ago, workers in high-vis jackets arrived, tore down the brambles, leveled the muddy path, and replaced it with a tarmac dual-use path for pedestrians and cyclists. On my local Facebook group people lamented the loss of another pocket of urban nature. “Let’s pave over the whole entire world then shall we? Where next do you reckon? Mount Fuji?” bewailed one resident. Others pointed out that the new path made the reservoir much more accessible to people on foot or bike—sure the new path might feel less natural, they said, but if it gave people more options for walking and cycling then the whole area would benefit.
Local Facebook groups are rarely a source of profound ecological insights, but this minor furor over a local footpath gets at something crucial in the fight against climate change. If we go by vibes alone, we are not always good judges at what is best for the environment. That’s true for local footpaths, but it holds for bigger things too: nuclear energy, fake meat, and dense cities. All of these things feel a bit unnatural, but are much better for the environment than their alternatives. Is it time we left vibes-based environmentalism for something a little more robust?
In 2021 the polling firm Ipsos asked 21,000 people in 30 countries to choose from a list of nine actions which ones they thought would most reduce greenhouse gas emissions for individuals living in a richer country. Most people picked recycling, followed by buying renewable energy, switching to an electric/hybrid car, and opting for low-energy light bulbs. When these actions were ranked by their actual impact on emissions, recycling was third-from-bottom and low-energy light bulbs were last. None of the top-three options selected by people appeared in the “real” top three when ranked by greenhouse gas reductions, which were having one fewer child, not having a car, and avoiding one long-distance flight.
This point isn’t that people are dumb; it’s that the most impactful options don’t always intuitively feel that way to us. The survey also asked people what they thought about the climate impact of different kinds of diets. Respondents were asked which diet had lower greenhouse gas emissions: a vegetarian diet with some imported products, or a locally produced diet that includes meat and dairy. Some 57 percent of people thought the locally produced diet had the lowest impact, with just 20 percent choosing the vegetarian diet and 23 percent opting for “I don’t know.”
As with the other options, the vibes here were way off. It might feel environmentally friendly to walk to your local farmer’s market and pick up a cut of grass-fed beef and a bottle of locally sourced milk, but beef and dairy have two of the highest carbon footprints of any food. What you eat is generally much, much more important than where you source it from.
The data scientist and author Hannah Ritchie expands on these examples in her upcoming book, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Future. Everything comes with a greenhouse gas footprint: watching Netflix, charging our phones, having a cup of tea. It’s no wonder that we stress out about all the decisions we have to make. “Tackling climate change feels like a massive sacrifice that has taken over our lives. That would be okay if all of these actions were really making a difference, but they’re not. It’s misplaced effort and stress, sometimes even at the cost of the few actions that really will matter,” Ritchie writes.
The problem is compounded when the most impactful things you can do don’t feel all that “natural.” Buying a plastic-wrapped plant-based burger designed by some scientist in San Francisco doesn’t feel like a more environmentally friendly option than eating a cow raised around the corner, but it really is, on all kinds of metrics.
The same is true when it comes to living in cities. Dense urban environments crammed with glass and concrete don’t feel like green places to live, but people in cities have smaller carbon footprints—largely because of more efficient public transport and heating. There are big challenges when it comes to urbanization, like cutting emissions from concrete production and ensuring everyone has good living conditions, but cities themselves do not need to be seen as symbols of humankind’s destruction of nature. Done well, they can be symbols of the opposite.
Organic farming is something else that feels green, but the picture becomes much more complicated when you dig into the details. “It’s not obvious that organic farming is better for the environment than ‘conventional’ farming,” Ritchie writes. Organic farms tend to be better for local biodiversity, but because they produce less food per acre they’re bad for land use. The EU has set itself the target of making 25 percent of its farmland organic by 2030, but this could reduce its production by between 7 and 12 percent, forcing more land to be converted to agriculture elsewhere in the world.
It’s not that eating local or organic food is bad, but we should be more honest about the values and trade-offs involved in making these decisions. If supporting local farmers is a priority for you, then it might make sense for you to choose locally sourced beef. If emissions are your top concern, then you’re better off switching to chicken. If animal welfare is a priority, then you should opt for something plant-based, and that’ll have the added benefit of being lower carbon than meat, too.
Part of the problem is that the way we talk about climate action tends to emphasize nature and the nonhuman world. We think of organic produce as the “green” option and cotton tote bags as more “natural” than plastic alternatives—but when we really look at the numbers the benefits are much less clear. A hulking, high-tech nuclear power plant hardly conjures up images of bucolic hills, but nuclear energy is one of the safest and cleanest ways of producing electricity. Jumping on a crowded, dirty underground train might not bring you any closer to nature, but mass transit is one of the greenest ways to travel.
Maybe it’s time to drop the vibes-based approach to environmentalism for something a little more robust. As Ritchie writes, there’s nothing wrong with doing things that have a small impact on the environment or help out in ways that are personally important to us, but we shouldn’t overlook the bigger changes we can make just because they don’t feel obvious to us.