To address the climate crisis, I’m not suggesting we change our behavior to an extreme, running around half-naked and foraging for berries. (To clarify, I’m not opposed to berries!) Rather, I suggest balance.

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To strike this balance, I’ve suggest six methods for cutting your emissions. There are many more — this is just to get the (biodegradable) ball rolling.

1. Electronics: If you wait four rather than two years to upgrade your phone, you’ll decrease the corresponding environmental impact by up to 40 percent. And to counteract planned obsolescence, where the phone is deliberately not designed for longevity, you could seek to repair rather than renew your phone when it gets spoilt. This hurts the environment—and your wallet—less.

2. Cars: Do you need your car? Getting rid of it is optimal to reduce your emissions, but if you can’t, driving the right kind of car can help. The most environmentally friendly vehicle is electric. If electric vehicles seem costly, your next best bet is a smaller, fuel-efficient car.

3. Homes: However big or small your home, you can still significantly lower its carbon footprint. The simplest way is to not use your thermostat—adapting to a slightly colder house in the winter, or a slightly warmer one in the summer—which could reduce your domestic energy consumption by up to half. You can also optimize consumption by installing smart devices in your home—smart devices were found to save 11.3 percent of air-conditioning-related energy demand each day in California.

4. Flights: Flights have increased in the past decade primarily due to business. But if businesses made teleconferencing the norm, which happened during COVID-19, CO2 emissions from business meetings could decrease by nearly 70 times. Traveling by train is also more energy-efficient. I’m not saying we should never sit in an airplane again; just that we should be more thoughtful about how often we do so.

5. Meals: We can lower our carbon footprint if we consume less meat, and less food generally. Each year, 40 percent of food supply goes to waste from oversized portions and over-purchasing goods. Americans consume four pounds of meat and poultry per week; even half of that—which could free up 150 million tons of grain being used to feed livestock, helping equalize the world’s grain supply and increasing it by around fifteen percent—is more than most other countries.

6. “Buying Green” vs. Buying Thoughtfully: Don’t buy something to feel something; consuming things anyways doesn’t make us happy. And if you do buy something, “buy green,” where the item is charged at a premium but comes from a less carbon-intensive supply chain. To further paint your consumption habits green, you could donate items you no longer use, such as toward the Buy Nothing movement. Or to Goodwill — I serve on the board of Goodwill of San Francisco Bay, and it is one of my most rewarding engagements.

Not all these solutions will apply to you, but your sustainable actions can inspire others. If you can be the behavioral model for your peer group, the mimetic theory of desire—where we model our behaviors based on the culture around us—suggest that you can change how they think about their consumption too.

Who should change their behavior? Conventional math would lead us to think that China, India, Brazil, and other developing countries are among the biggest CO2 emitters.

This isn’t the full picture. Developing countries emit CO2 to produce goods consumed by developed countries: this trade pattern has existed for centuries. So after looking at where emissions are consumed rather than where they are produced, the US had the highest per capita emissions at 17.6 tons/capita in 2019, while China had 10.5. Remember “per capita.” Always, always remember capita before throwing stones.

In the end, it comes down to the global affluent. Their wasteful consumption habits drive the climate change problem. For the past three decades, the world’s richest 10 percent have contributed to more than half of the global cumulative carbon emissions. During the same time, the top 1 percent has caused fifteen percent of emissions, which is more than half of what the poorest 50 percent contribute.

Billionaires are culprits. I do not complain here — at all — about their billions. I complain about how those billions get used. To match their CO2 emissions, the average American would need 550 lifetimes. The cause of environmental harm is not affluence in itself, but what people choose to do with their money.

There are great examples of alternative behavior. Chuck Feeney, who founded Duty-Free Shoppers, not only donated billions of his money for philanthropy but also lives modestly in San Francisco in an apartment “that has the austerity of a freshman dorm room.” No yachts. No private jets. No multiple large houses. No huge wardrobe. No battalion of luxury cars.

As for me: I have made significant changes to my own behavior and will continue to do so. There is a long way to go. But I am trying.

In my book, I give three examples, each on different time scales, demonstrating the impact of behavior change. For this post, I’ll focus on the most recent one.

It’s the Covid-19 pandemic. CO2 emissions plummeted by 10 to 17 percent because the pandemic forcibly reduced energy demand. The largest decline in emissions was in ground transport (by 18.6 percent) and aviation (35.8 to 52.4 percent).

These statistics show that our personal choices can drive significant results. And these results come from old ideas: we’ve all been told to drive less, take fewer airplane journeys, and even work remotely. We avoided these sustainable suggestions—which we now know have dramatic impacts on emissions—until we were forced to follow them.

As the pandemic concluded, we have partially maintained these sustainable substitutions. Many employees continue to work at home, and the number is growing, as remote work is here to stay. And many governments are following a green recovery plan that continues the progress made during the pandemic.

The point here is not that we need a global plague to change. The point is that our behavior changes can have a massive impact when done at scale. They can also shape policy, rather than all of us relying on fraught policy agreements to shape our behavior.

This paradigm shift happens when enough of us adopt sustainable behaviors that others begin following. Among other things, this is an example of mimetic desire, where people modify their behaviors to match those they like, respect, or idolize.

If we are each “a node for social, political, and moral contagion,” then our human tendencies toward mimetic desire can drive positive behavioral change.

As technology has advanced, we get more “bang” for the resources we use, such as energy from natural gas. In other words, less natural gas is needed to produce every unit of energy, so the cost of energy should decrease and intuitively, we should be using less natural gas.

But this intuition, in practice, ends up to be wrong. Whenever technology enables more efficient resource use, we demand more of that resource. This is known as Jevons’ Paradox. If energy is cheaper, using cars becomes cheaper, we drive more, and fuel consumption increases.

Jevons’ Paradox extends beyond energy use. For example, more efficient irrigation systems in agriculture ultimately increase the demand for water. And, on average, the demand across all sectors increases by 31.5 percent because of the “saved” resources from efficiency.

Because of Jevons’ Paradox, we can’t rely on efficiency to build us a green economy. Efficiency gains, born from technological advancements, could, in fact, increase our energy consumption.

Technological advancements have also brought us cheap renewables, but they’re not a silver bullet either. Renewables like solar and wind are not 100 percent green, relying on rare earth metals or non-renewable minerals whose extraction damages the environment.

And wind and solar farms also require more space than their fossil fuel counterparts. Where a 200-megawatt natural gas power plant could fit on a single city block, a wind farm spans over 13 square miles. The increased need for space threatens biodiversity conservation areas, which play an important role in the overall health of our planet.

My point is that renewable energy—however cost-effective, inexhaustible, and clean—along with technological advancements cannot, by themselves, beat the climate crisis.

What our planet needs is for us to to consume less to begin with, and this must come from behavior change.

While technology has changed the lives of billions for the better, it has ALSO been our handmaiden on the road to planetary depletion. How so? It enables our desire to consume.

Our voracious desire to consume is met by the streamlined supply chains enabled by big data and technology. This desire has been further fueled by social media, the farthest-reaching medium for advertising and mass sharing with 3.6 billion users. The most widely followed social media accounts belong to those with lavish lifestyles. And we want to follow them.

According to the mimetic theory of desire, we want what others want. If we’re always looking to the wealthy as role models, the “vertical emulation process” suggests that we aspire to consume like them. And the affluent are the worst offenders when it comes to planetary damage.

But just as we have used technology to harm the environment, so can we can also use technology to enable behavioral solutions. Rather than traveling for work meetings, companies could use Zoom; rather than physically attending a community college for a course on accounting, you could take it on Coursera; rather than physically sending your child to a video editing or fiction novel class, you could enroll them in Skillshare.

These may seem obvious and almost trivial, but using technology to change norms can significantly reduce carbon emissions. When physically attending a meeting that requires air travel, for instance, you contribute around 100 times more carbon emissions than if you had the meeting online.

Physically attending meetings or classes has been the norm, but norms are not fixed in stone — they are, well, just norms! Norms can be changed for the better (of the planet); and technology can now help us move more towards behaviors that are planet-friendly.

The climate crisis is an example of the collective action problem. So your individual decisions—whether taking that extra flight, eating beef every meal, or leaving the lights on after leaving the room—seem inconsequential. But when your and everybody else’s decisions accrue, and when entire neighborhoods, towns, cities, and countries make similar decisions, then the climate crisis becomes a group problem realized by individuals.

We can see the problem’s consequences. Climate change took the homes of one-third of the nearly 70 million refugees who lost or fled their residences in 2017; climate change has decreased crop yield by 30 percent, leading to food and water insecurity and thus spurring conflict over resources. And natural disasters, such as hurricanes and forest fires, become more intense every year, costing the US economy $1.9 trillion annually; natural disasters, and the global-warming-caused increase in tropical and water-borne diseases, will kill at least 250,000 more people each year between 2030 and 2050.

I also see the problem as urgent. If you live in Miami, you might have noticed that the ocean has visited downtown during tidal floodings; if you live in New York, you might often see a smoggy skyline from your office window; and if you live in California or Texas, you might remember your friends and family across the state saying they’ve had to ration water.

Even if you’re fortunate enough to have not experienced these first-hand, such issues affect some groups of people more than others. Since global warming degrades agricultural productivity and labor earnings, the wages of the low-income class—who mostly work in agriculture globally—could decrease, and the price of food staples from the deteriorated supply could increase, making it more difficult for the poor to afford basic necessities like their meals.

Ironically yet predictably, the poor suffer the most from a problem created by the rich, the users of technology.

We and future generations will daily feel the effects of the climate crisis. Before that has the chance to happen, it is our responsibility to make our individual behaviors more sustainable. To accomplish this, we should look at how we’re using technology.