Step Three

Make a major change in your Carbon Emissions. A consistent but minor effort over the rest of your life.

Obviously we are not going to reduce our emissions by the needed factor of 10 though these minor changes. The main changes will have to come from conserving and greening Electricity and Transport, changes to the Food we eat and how it is grown, and importantly how we make and recycle stuff. In a similar way to successful dieting, making small incremental changes to your lifestyle is much more effective than going all in. I would definitely not recommend offsetting your emissions as many of the schemes are ineffective. Better to put your own house in order and push for governmental change. Below are a few of the sorts of things you could consider.

1. Research and plan any significant purchase. The differences between efficient and inefficient appliances are quite surprising. If you don’t see what you want in the stores, harass the retailer to stock better units and ask about standby power use etc (again this changes attitudes over time). If you have solar hot water see if your washing machine and dishwasher can use hot as well as cold water rather than heating cold water as needed.
2. Installing a solar hot water system can now be very financially sensible, given the federal and state government subsidies, assuming your roof is suitable.
3. If you have an old fridge or freezer you may have noticed that they use twice as much electricity as the new ones. A friend found that they could save over $50 per quarter by replacing their small but ancient freezer.
4. Check your homes insulation, as many Australian houses are badly insulated and rebates are available.
5. Get a free home audit from the government’s green loans program. More details here.
6. Read one or a few of the “How to go green” type of book, and cherry-pick the ideas that suit you. I have read a ton of books on reducing your footprint, and they are useful as a checklist. I found Greeniology by Tanya Ha to be the best of them.
7. Petrol prices are down from the peak, but you can be sure that they will go back up as soon as the world economy recovers. Over the next 5 years a hoard of efficient cars will come on the market, so plan your next purchase carefully. Some of them are even seriously fun to drive.
8. Think about the time and energy you spend commuting. You could move home closer to work, or vice versa, or at least harass your company to look at some flexible work options.
9. Review the food you buy, and how much you throw out. Our current industrial agriculture uses a huge amount of energy to grow and transport food over long distances, often in perverse ways, and organic food takes much less energy to grow. Increasingly we are being warned that this often highly processed food is causing many of our modern health problems. Michael Pollan has written a number of interesting books on the subject, including In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto in which he lays out some commonsense rules for healthy eating. He starts with the simple rule “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” (he defines Food as something your great grandmother would recognise as food) and then goes into a lot more detail. Coincidently focusing on this sort of a diet will significantly reduce your emissions as well as being healthier.
10. Look critically at the rubbish you throw out, and see how you could reduce it either by recycling more, or by buying differently. Again we tend to be creatures of habit, and examining the output will often lead to selecting goods with less packaging or in more convenient sizes. We found that our supermarket often supplies meat in packs that are often too big for a meal, so you can end up eating too much or throwing out food.

1. Lastly (though this is not an inclusive list) look critically at what you buy. We are subjected to constant advertising designed to get us to buy “stuff” that have no real need for and often later regret. Our houses are often full of things we never use, and throw out or give away when we move. Buying less but better quality stuff is like turning off the lights when you leave a room; it takes a bit of willpower at first but soon becomes a habit.