This point is not that people are stupid; it’s that the most impactful options don’t always feel that way intuitively to us. The survey also asked people what they thought about the climate impact of different types of diets. Respondents were asked which diet had lower greenhouse gas emissions: a vegetarian diet with some imported products, or a locally produced diet that included meat and dairy. About 57 percent of people thought the locally sourced diet had the lowest impact, with only 20 percent choosing the vegetarian diet and 23 percent choosing ‘I don’t know’.
As with the other options, the atmosphere here was far away. It may feel environmentally friendly to walk to the local farmer’s market and pick up a slab of grass-fed beef and a bottle of locally produced milk, but beef and dairy have two of the most important benefits. highest carbon footprint of any food. What you eat is generally much more important than where you get it from.
Data scientist and author Hannah Ritchie elaborates on these examples in her upcoming book: Not the end of the world: how we can be the first generation to build a sustainable future. Everything has a greenhouse gas footprint: Watch Netflix, charge our phones, drink a cup of tea. It’s no wonder we worry about all the decisions we have to make. “Tackling climate change feels like a huge sacrifice that has taken over our lives. That would be okay if all these actions actually made a difference, but that’s not the case. It is misplaced effort and stress, sometimes even at the expense of the few actions it actually costs shall matters,” Ritchie writes.
The problem is compounded when the most impactful things you can do don’t feel so “natural.” Buying a plastic-wrapped plant-based burger designed by a scientist in San Francisco doesn’t feel like a more environmentally friendly option than eating a cow raised around the corner, but it is, in all kinds of ways.
The same goes when it comes to living in cities. Dense urban environments full of glass and concrete don’t feel like green places to live, but people in cities are smaller carbon footprints—largely thanks to more efficient public transport and heating. There are major challenges when it comes to urbanization, such as reducing emissions from concrete production and ensuring that everyone has good living conditions, but cities themselves do not have to be seen as symbols of humanity’s destruction of nature. If you do it right, they can be symbols of the opposite.