We get a lot of email here at Team Climate, and one of the most common questions is “What can I do?” That’s why, last fall, we added a One Thing You Can Do section to our newsletter. Since then, we’ve looked at everything from Valentine’s Day flowers to boiling water. This week, we wanted to take a closer look at the “one thing” approach. “There are two sides to the coin,” said Carina Barnett-Loro, a senior program manager at the Climate Advocacy Lab, an organization that aims to encourage climate action. On one side, she said, taking small actions can help foster or reinforce a person’s identity as an environmentalist and lead to deeper engagement. Maybe, she said, “they start by changing a light bulb and they end up putting solar panels on their house.” But Ms. Barnett-Loro said there were dangers, too. One is “single-action bias.” That’s when the sense of satisfaction from a good deed — say, installing that energy-efficient light bulb — diminishes or eliminates the sense of urgency around the greater problem. To help counteract that, she suggested a guide from Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. Among the tips: Make a climate action checklist, or organize potential actions in tiers so they can be tackled incrementally. To view the full article visit the New York Times.
