Friday, December 16, 2022

Opinion Today: How can you best curb climate change? Take our quiz.

Recycling may not make the dent you think it does, but there are other tactics that can help.

By Gus Wezerek

Graphics Editor, Opinion

Like most of my friends, I've settled on a small list of sacrifices that I'm willing to make to try to stop climate change. I'm a vegan. I unplug the microwave when I go on vacation. And I drive a 2009 Toyota Camry hybrid. That's pretty good, right?

Well yes, no and kind of. That's what I was surprised to learn while working with Sander van der Linden on his guest essay and quiz about the most and least effective ways to shrink your carbon footprint.

Van der Linden, a professor of psychology at the University of Cambridge, has been studying how people think about climate change for more than a decade. During that time, he's seen people's awareness of climate change increase. But, he writes, their "practical knowledge about what we can do to counter it is lacking."

To gauge Americans' emissions "numeracy," as van der Linden put it, he and I worked with the survey company Ipsos to test about 1,000 Americans on whether 12 different actions would have a small, moderate or large effect on reducing greenhouse gases. We asked people about common recommendations, like recycling and using renewable electricity, and quizzed them on more arcane strategies, like installing heat pumps.

The results that Ipsos sent back were dispiriting. Only one question was answered correctly by a majority of Americans. Respondents tended to overestimate the importance of easier behaviors like lowering the room temperature and recycling, which scientists largely agree have little effect on curbing carbon emissions. And people vastly underestimated the effectiveness of high-impact actions, such as …

Well, I'm not going to spoil the entire quiz! Read the essay and take the quiz yourself to see which actions are the most effective at shrinking your carbon footprint and how you stack up against the average American.

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