Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Decarbonize Your Life

The Methodology Behind Decarbonize Your Life

How we got here.

The Methodology Behind Decarbonize Your Life
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

There is no dearth of advice on the internet about how to lower your personal carbon emissions, but if we had found any of it completely satisfying, we wouldn’t have embarked on this project in the first place.

Our goal with Decarbonize Your Life is to draw your attention to two things — the relative emissions benefits of different actions, as well as the relative structural benefits. (You’ll find everything you need to know about the project here.) For the first, we needed some help. So we shared our vision with WattTime, a nonprofit that builds data-driven tools to help people, companies, and policymakers figure out how to reduce emissions, and lucky for us, they were excited to support the project.

“So many people out there feel helpless when it comes to addressing the climate crisis, but we believe that anyone, anywhere should have the tools and information they need to make a difference,” Henry Richardson, a senior analyst at WattTime, told me as we were wrapping up this project. “So we love the idea of helping average consumers understand which actions actually available to them can meaningfully contribute to reducing climate pollution. We want to help people prioritize those higher-impact activities that can mitigate climate change faster.”

WattTime’s claim to fame is building an API that calculates the emissions impact of using the grid at a given time and place. Users can then shift their energy consumption to times when the grid is cleaner or to build renewables in places where they will reduce emissions the most.

In an ideal world, we would have taken a similar time- and place-based approach in calculating the emissions savings of each energy-related action on our list. Switching to an EV if you live somewhere with very clean power will reduce emissions more than if you live somewhere with lots of coal plants, and likewise, getting rooftop solar if you live somewhere with coal-fired electricity is more effective than in areas with a cleaner grid. But when we started to game it out, we realized that level of exactitude would be, if not exactly impossible, certainly insanity-inducing.

Instead, WattTime helped us calculate the effect of each action if it was undertaken by an “average American household” — that is, one that consumes an average amount of electricity per year, drives an average number of miles in an average car per year, uses an average amount of energy for space heating, et cetera. WattTime also pulled data from publicly available sources like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Energy Information Administration, to estimate the baseline emissions and savings of a given action. We ultimately made two calculations for each action to account for two different ways of estimating the emissions from using the electric grid:

  • One that shows the emissions impact of using the electric grid today, based on WattTime’s data.
  • One that shows the emissions impact of using the grid over the next several decades as it grows cleaner, based on Cambium, a dataset developed by the National Renewable Energy Lab.

While the first method gives us a picture of how much good each action can do in an immediate sense, the second gives us a picture of how much good it can do over time. For example, using the first method, buying clean power came out on top, with rooftop solar offering the potential to cut CO2 by about 5.7 metric tons per year, while switching to an electric vehicle would cut about 3 metric tons per year. But using the second method, car-related actions won out, showing EVs cutting CO2 by 4.6 metric tons per year, and rooftop solar cutting 1.4 metric tons per year. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

To calculate the emissions savings from dietary changes and food waste management, we turned to two more partners: HowGood, a data platform for food system lifecycle analysis, and ReFED, which collects similar data for food waste. As with energy, we used federal data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to estimate the average American diet and ReFED’s estimates for the average American food waste mix (though note that those are for an individual, not for a household). From there, WattTime helped us determine that, for instance, just by replacing the beef in your diet with chicken, you could save nearly 2.5 metric tons of emissions each year — almost as much as you could save by going vegan.

Because we used averages and sought to simplify our list with actions like “electrify your space heating system,” rather than estimating the impact of every permutation like “switch from a propane furnace in Colorado with X efficiency to a cold climate heat pump with Y efficiency,” our estimates of emissions reductions are rough approximations and not reflective of real-world scenarios.

You’ll see that while these calculations certainly informed our ranking, they were not the sole metric we used to arrange this list. A quantitative analysis alone could not answer our question about the most “high-leverage” actions, so we used our reporting and expertise as climate journalists to fill in that last, crucial gap. Car-related actions and rooftop solar were neck-and-neck by the numbers, but we are confident that getting an EV (if you need to have a car) is more unambiguously necessary for the energy transition than getting rooftop solar. Similarly, while eating less meat can hugely reduce the carbon tied to an individual’s diet, the ripple effect it has on agricultural carbon emissions is less direct and harder to parse than the effect you can have by electrifying all your appliances and shutting down your natural gas account.

HEATMAP’S NUMBERS:

1. If you need a car, get an EV

Getting an EV:

WattTime — 2.9 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 4.5 mtCO2/yr

Structural benefits: Destroying demand for oil; increasing demand for charging stations; improving local air quality and chipping away at the social license for operating an internal combustion engine.

2. Go zero-carbon power at home

Getting rooftop solar:

WattTime — 5.7 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 1.4 mtCO2/yr

Structural benefits: Get clean energy on the grid faster than utility-scale projects; influence neighbors; reduce electric demand in your neighborhood; reduce strain on grid if paired with a battery and part of a “virtual power plant”

3. Give your home an energy efficient renovation

Air-sealing and insulation:

WattTime — 1.2 mtCO2/yr

Structural benefits: Reduce strain on grid and need for grid investment; level out electricity demand to avoid the need to activate dirty “peaker” gas plants; prepare your home for cheaper, more even, and efficient heating and cooling

4. Electrify your appliances

Switching to a heat pump for space heating:

WattTime — 1.4 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 1.6 mtCO2/yr

Switching from a gas stove to an induction stove:

WattTime — Roughly even
Cambium — 0.1 mtCO/yr

Switching to a heat pump for water heating:

WattTime — 0.8 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 1.6 mtCO2/yr

Switching from a natural gas-powered dryer to a heat pump dryer:

WattTime — Roughly even
Cambium — 0.1 mtCO/yr

Structural benefits: Increase demand for and reduce price of electric and efficient appliances; build a case for policies that wind down fossil fuel use; if fully electrifying, sends signal to downsize gas system.

5. Drive less, bike (or walk or scoot) more

Getting rid of your car:

WattTime — 5.17 mtCO/yr

Structural benefits: Supporting public transit and bike lanes, enabling others to use their cars less, too.

6. Eat less meat and reduce food waste

Switching from an omnivorous to a vegetarian diet:

WattTime and HowGood — 2.8 mtCO2/yr

Switching from an omnivorous to a vegan diet:

WattTime and HowGood — 2.9 mtCO2/yr

Replacing the beef in an omnivorous diet with chicken:

WattTime and HowGood — 2.5 mtCO2/yr

Structural benefits: Reduce demand for high-emitting food products, which has the double-pump benefit of reducing the amount of land required to cultivate high-emitting products; if replacing beef with chicken, increase demand for more carbon-efficient proteins; add to the business case for developing efficient plant-based proteins.

Cutting food waste in half:

WattTime and ReFED — more than 0.1 mtCO2/yr

Structural benefits: Reduce demand across the food system; send less food waste to landfill, which helps reduce methane emissions.

Composting all food waste:

WattTime and ReFED — 0.03 mtCO2/yr

Structural benefits: Encourages the build-out of municipal composting programs; encourages responsible farming practices by lowering the cost of compost; reduces demand for nitrogen-based fertilizer.

Blue

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Climate

AM Briefing: Trump’s Great Climate Revision

On GM eating the tariffs, California’s utility bills, and open-sourcing climate models

The Trump Administration Is Rewriting Published Climate Reports
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: U.S. government forecasters are projecting hurricane season to ramp up in the coming weeks, with as many as nine tropical storms forming in the Caribbean by November • Southern Arizona is facing temperatures of up to 114 degrees Fahrenheit • Northeast India is experiencing extremely heavy rainfall of more than 8 inches in 24 hours.

THE TOP FIVE

1. The Energy Department is preparing to alter published federal climate reports

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said his agency is preparing to rewrite previously published National Climate Assessments, which have already been removed from government websites. In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Wright said the analyses “weren’t fair in broad-based assessments of climate change.” He added: “We’re reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those reports.”

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Politics

The Only Path to Permitting Reform Runs Through Trump

Congressional Democrats will have to trust the administration to allow renewables projects through. That may be too big an ask.

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

How do you do a bipartisan permitting deal if the Republicans running the government don’t want to permit anything Democrats like?

The typical model for a run at permitting reform is that a handful of Republicans and Democrats come together and draw up a plan that would benefit renewable developers, transmission developers, and the fossil fuel industry by placing some kind of limit on the scope and extent of federally-mandated environmental reviews. Last year’s Energy Permitting Reform Act, for instance, co-sponsored by Republican John Barrasso and Independent Joe Manchin, included time limits on environmental reviews, mandatory oil and gas lease sales, siting authority for interstate transmission, and legal clarity for mining projects. That passed through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee but got no further.

Keep reading...Show less
Hotspots

Trump Administration to ‘Reconsider’ Approval for MarWin

And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Sussex County, Delaware – The Trump administration has confirmed it will revisit permitting decisions for the MarWin offshore wind project off the coast of Maryland, potentially putting the proposal in jeopardy unless blue states and the courts intervene.

  • Justice Department officials admitted the plans in a paragraph tucked inside a filing submitted to a federal court in Delaware this week in litigation brought by a beach house owner opposed to the offshore wind project.
  • DOJ stated in the filing that more time was “necessary as Interior intends to reconsider its [construction and operations plan] approval” for MarWin, and that it plans to “move” for “voluntary remand of that agency action” in a separate case filed by Ocean City, Maryland against the project.
  • “The outcome of Interior’s reconsideration has the potential to affect the Plaintiff’s claims in this case,” the filing stated. “Continuing to litigate this case before any decision is made in the [Ocean City case] would potentially waste considerable time and resources for both the parties and the Court.” As of today, no new filings have been made in the Ocean City case.

2. Northwest Iowa – Locals fighting a wind project spanning multiple counties in northern Iowa are opposing legislation that purports to make renewable development easier in the state.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow