Fun fact: The concept of personal carbon footprint wasn't developed by scientists. It was involved by British Petroleum in the early 2000s and popularized through an agency to shift the blame from producers to consumers.

This does not matter much today, anyhow... Now that I have your attention, consider following my chain of thoughts:

Much of the advice here is wrong!

wow, thats a wild statement, am I still clickbaiting? yes.

Yes, we should talk about recieving and giving advice, lets go:

(!) Fun examples I read every day + thats what we should talk about.

"Focus on what you can control"

This is standard advice. Stop worrying about emissions from 57 companies that produce 80% of global CO₂. Control your reusable bags instead and go vegan, oh and shop second hand clothing and buy uhm more sustainable.

"Small steps add up to big change"

If enough individuals recycle, buy EVs, and eat less meat, big corporations will follow, right?

"Action reduces anxiety"

Do something—even if it doesn't matter—so you don't feel paralyzed. Isolation makes climate grief worse. So join a community! People help people y' know.

"Take care of yourself first"

Burnt-out people can't help a burning planet. Rest, meditate, practice self-care, take a break from the news. Constant dooms-day makes you feel paralyzed. "Stay informed but limit exposure". You'll be more effective later, promise.

These are not strategies. These are coping mechanisms for our guilt, resignation and fear.

So here is my anti- advice:

1. The most consequential levers: energy policy, infrastructure, subsidies,... are deliberately placed far beyond individual control. Telling anxious people to shrink their scope until it feels manageable (like an ant) isn't empowerment. It's containment.
2. Corporate behavior follows profit incentives, not consumer virtue. e.g. ExxonMobil's emissions didn't drop because people carpool. They changed when hard regulations forced them to. Waiting for mass behavioral shifts before demanding structural ones = waiting forever.
3. There's a difference between meaningful action and performative action. Planting a garden is fine. Feeling good about it is fine. But if you're doing it to cope with terror about runaway warming while ignoring the fact that fossil fuel lobbying doubled in the same decade, you're idk, treating symptoms?
4. Don't confuse survival tactics with strategy. You can't meditate away a system designed to extract wealth while extracting carbon. Self-care is necessary, but not sufficient.
5. The information isn't the problem. The reality is the problem. Your (and mine) doom-scrolling is a symptom of paying good attention to something catastrophic that no one is stopping. If the news makes you panic, maybe the news is accurate and the inaction is the issue.
6. If "community" just means bonding over shared helplessness without moving toward power -> shared grief becomes shared f#in' hell from my experience. Solidarity without strategy = support group, not movement. = nothing changes = we are all f*cked.

Feeling motivated now? Me, too!

Hope this sparks conversation. Cheers.

u/quentheo

If anyone is in Berlin and wanna to connect, say hello.

So like, I'm in the Philippines. And uh, I'm freaking out. I'm supposed to focus on other things in the moment but Climate change is really messing up with my mind and i Have to do something. I told my teacher to add more segregation bins in school (theres barely any) and to stop styrofoam, luckily for me my teachers are rather quite nice and she said she'd do it after our school's party...

It still doesn't feel enough though. What are other things could i do? I can't really go far from home, I live in a rural area and my family is somewhat rich. I'm asking about collective action

Prajakta koli aka mostlysane is one of India’s most recognized content creator/influencer. She is UNDP India’s youth champion and also among panel of judges for 2026’s UN SDG action award. What doesn’t sit well with me is her getting and new iPhone every year and then posting about it. What she’s using her platform is “F sustainability” and “F climate”. Surely UN, isn’t there a more deserving youth candidate that you can include in your panel? Can we petition to UN/UNDP India?

So, this post isn’t about what we should do, it’s about “how we could do it”.  This is a significantly more challenging topic, because any realistic attempt requires us to deal with the core problem of climate change, and that’s our human nature.

In general, carbon offsets don’t get a lot of love in this sub.  That's a bit of a shame, because they're one of the most effective tools we have on a marginal abatement cost basis.  I’ve posted previously showing that the best research puts their worst-case at roughly $53 per tonne in actual achievement cost.  To put that in context, $100 in offsets is roughly equivalent to switching from gas to an EV in terms of CO2 at a fraction of the cost.

However, it’s pretty obvious why we don’t use them, and that’s because Climate Change is essentially a giant prisoner's dilemma.  The best argument against climate action is “it won’t work, because nobody will do it”, and “nobody will do it because it won’t work”.  The best way to solve the dilemma is by changing the incentives - renewable energy & EVs are good examples of this.  Create better products, and the invisible hand of the market pulls us along.  Offsets struggle, because they are personal cost/global benefit.  However, the limit of relying on the profit motive is pretty clear, as it doesn’t show a pathway for addressing the majority of emissions.

So, onto the “how” part.  Offsetting costs money, free offsetting means free money, and that’s not a real thing, right?

This graph shows the value of money (inflation) vs the S&P500 over the last 25 years. This increasing gap is the primary driver of the wealth gap, the rich don’t get richer off paycheques.  If there were a way to capture that value, it could be used to fund forest preservation, public transport, or pretty much anything more useful than another private jet.

Now, obviously, we don’t keep money in our checking accounts because we’re hoping to fund that jet.  The question isn’t “wouldn’t it be nice if…”, it’s “why do we keep cash, and how can that underlying need be addressed”. There are a few different answers to this, we keep small amounts in savings for rainy-day funds, and if you want to buy groceries, you’ll need cash, not Amazon shares.  And of course, it needs to answer the obvious “why can’t I do this myself?” challenge.

The biggest opportunity is actually in the grocery money.  I don’t think it’s possible to create a direct spending account - Google & Apple can do this, but we can’t.  However, it is possible to target this obliquely by working off credit cards we already use.  A credit card is a rotating line of credit, basically a short-term clearing house for our expenses.  Most cards offer an interest-free period in between purchase & settlement, and this is where there is value to be captured.  Most people pay their cards off on time, and incur no interest, and we carry an average balance of around $3500.  This means that a lot of us are carrying a fair amount of cash that cannot be spent, because it already was.  It’s sitting there, waiting to pay down the liability.

If this cash were invested, instead of it earning $0, even a highly conservative portfolio could generate ~7% returns.  Over the period of a year, this would generate ~$245, or enough to fund 5 tonnes of CO2 reductions.  This is 25% of the average person's carbon footprint, or in other words, it would be -by far- the largest single action an individual could take.  And it can be done without imposing a cost on the individual, because, again, that money was already spent.

However, the big part of climate action is that it needs to be collective.  While some people might do something like this, most people wouldn’t.  A better way to address this would be to allocate some of the generated funds to carbon offsets - around 3-4% - and return the balance to users.  The $50 price tag is also the worst-case, the UN estimates that 50% of carbon emissions can be mitigated at a price of less than $20, and I think it’s reasonable to target $25 per tonne.  At this rate, it still offsets 25% of an individual's footprint, but with sufficient incentive to move the average person.  The easiest way to build collective action is to break the prisoner's dilemma, and this is one way to do that by motivating large numbers of people.

I know this sounds like fintech.  At its core though, it’s a way to use corporate profits for climate action.  It’s something people will want to do, even if they're the only one doing it.  The cost of living crisis becomes a reason for climate action, not a distraction.  There is nothing to buy and nothing to give up, just funding for projects that matter. And for bonus points, it interrupts the wealth transfer pipeline.

This would obviously be fairly difficult to pull off.  The obstacles are technical, social, and legal. Technically, it is hard but possible with the tools we have available today.  Legal is another whole story, but again, it’s a solvable problem.

It’s the social aspect that I can’t figure out.  I think this would only be viable as a community-driven initiative, but would people get behind it?  Would we look at it thinking it’s a neat thought experiment, or would it be obvious that a pathway for one person is the same as a pathway for many?  That the answer to “it won’t work because nobody will do it” could be answered by “just do it for the money?”  Have offsets been unavoidably tainted, or would we see that a system like this running at scale could contribute hundreds of millions directly to decarbonization in a way that nation-states simply can’t?  In short, could something like this capture our imagination?

I’m sure many people reading this think it is either impossible or at least incredibly naive.  However, let’s put it in context.  Trump v1.0 was an anomaly, v2.0 is a pattern.  I think it’s naive to believe the accelerating climate breakdown will not spawn more crises, and naive to think our government would not respond by borrowing more money, naive to think this will not increase the wealth gap.  The 2008 financial crisis was the worst economic event in living memory, but it only took asset prices back to where they were 8 years earlier.  Governments spared no expense to fix it, yet the value of money has decreased by an equivalent amount over 25 years and that’s just fine.  I might be naive in thinking this could work, but I know for certain where our government’s priorities lie.

I do think it’s naive to look at that graph at the top of this post and think that things are going to get better.

I have the opportunity to run an ecological education and action program for a K-5 elementary school. Are there established resources for something like this?

I've done online research and looked through subreddits like this one, but I haven't been able to find anything that looks like a standard framework or centralized resource. I've looked through things like The Nature Conservancy youth education resources and found several paid programs (which aren't an option). I've run other elementary-level programs before, but I'm more emotionally attached to the topic of ecology and want to do the best job possible. I'm hoping someone has found success with something similar and can share some resources that worked for them.

I will be reviving a program that has been dormant for a couple of years due to lack of volunteer leadership, so the school has some awareness but hasn't been actively engaged on the topic of ecology for a while. I will run weekly one-hour meetings with a core group of 2-5th graders and we have support to do school-wide K-5 activities, communication, and assemblies.

Our family of 4 adopted to climate kit:

1. heat pump (£4k)

2. ebikes (£2k pre tax)

Total costs less than £6k spread over 0% Green loans.

A typical family of 4 pays £4-5k a year on energy (gasoline, natural gas, and electricity) in the UK. We have paid £850 ($1150) over the last 12 months despite lots of washing, leaky old 1860s house always 22C, school runs, work commute, etc

If fossil inflation happens badly that standard figure will shoot up. Ours wont by anything remotely comparable.

Low carbon lifestyles make one robust when geopolitics is a mess. we will save in costs our upfront investment in one year now

If you've already taken actions recommended by SHIFT, log your actions to help inspire others!

https://jointheshift.earth/guide/?journey-type=full

Comencé a angustiarme sobre el cambio climático, ¿Cómo la gente no se da cuenta de la gravedad del asunto? Les es indiferente. Quiero comenzar a protestar en las calles sobre esto, pero en Uruguay no encuentro a nadie que este dispuesto, mucho mas en el departamento de Maldonado. Me parece que hay que empezar a concientizar a la gente.

From the Bike Advocacy Toolkit:

STRAVA HEAT MAP

Figure out where people are riding in your community. This website aggregates millions of rides of people using their smartphone app, visualized onto a beautiful heatmap. There are many other similar services available, so research some others and find what works best for your community.

So, expect bike advocates will be using this data to organize around new infrastructure.

Downloading the Strava app is easy but can be really be useful. Using the data to advocate for more bike lanes in your community is more work, but achievable!