Not Leading Or Following—But Still Responsible
Not a sustainability leader? Circumstances prevent you from following sustainability practices yourself? How can you responsibly get out of the way, then?
Yesterday, I was baited by a headline from The Associated Press: “How to make climate-friendly and sustainable choices when shopping online.”
Had AP reporter Caleigh Wells come across some new information that would actually help people do that?
No.
As regular readers of SustainLab would suspect, Wells put it this way: “There is no single seal of approval across e-commerce platforms that verifies whether something is climate-friendly, partly because there are multiple ways to define sustainability.”
To be fair to Wells, she probably didn’t write the headline herself. Those who write AP’s headlines try to get attention because AP’s current business model includes showing readers advertisements. So the more people who view those advertisements, the more sustainable(!) AP’s current business model is.
In other words, the best a person can do in making climate-friendly and sustainable choices when shopping online is to try. As Wells reports it:
Know how sustainability is measured
Check whether it’s verified by a third party
Look for quantifiable and transparent climate goals
But even before trying to know, check, or look online, consider whether there’s a physical store nearby. Electricity, packaging, and transportation can all make your online purchase far more costly to the planet than what you might save yourself in terms of money or convenience.
As an aside, in writing this post, I debated whether to link to the AP story. I decided to do so because an internet search uses a lot of energy (even without the extra energy costs of an A.I. summary — often automatic these days for some search engines and browsers). So if linking to the AP story keeps you from searching for it, that might be enough to offset the energy costs of delivering all those advertisements to AP’s website if you, like me, were baited by the headline and clicked on it. But I do not know for sure. I’m just trying to say what I think is optimal based on what I learned as a digital managing editor about the costs of ad delivery and read a lot about regarding the costs of modern searches.
That said, we humans are fallible and scientists have recently studied just how much we Americans “hold substantial misperceptions about the relative efficacy of different behavioral changes, such as comprehensively recycling or avoiding long flights, and these misperceptions may lead to the suboptimal allocation of resources” (PNAS Nexus, June 9, 2025). But — positive side of the research — that “results suggest that evidence-based communication about the climate impact of individual actions can shift perceptions and commitments toward more impactful behaviors.”
So here’s some more evidence-based communication for you about the climate impact of individual actions. Ordered by least effective (1) to most effective (21), the impactful behaviors the researchers studied were:
Use more efficient appliances (e.g. change your lightbulbs)
Comprehensively recycle for at least 1 year
Use less energy related to clothing (e.g. hang dry clothing and wash clothes in cold water) for at least 1 year
Eat 30% more vegetarian food (e.g. be vegetarian for one additional meal per day) for at least 1 year
Produce renewable electricity (e.g. install small-scale residential solar photovoltaic)
Car-pool/share (e.g. become a member of a car-club, reduce the number of cars in your household, or ride-share with at least two persons in a car) for at least 1 year
Install smart metering (i.e. measure how much gas and electricity you’re using via a remote connection to your energy supplier)
Reduce avoidable food waste for at least 1 year
Eat 60% more vegetarian food (e.g. be vegetarian for two additional meals per day) for at least 1 year
Take less transport by air (e.g. avoid medium flights, or shift from airplane to renewable train) for at least 1 year
Increase energy efficiency (e.g. buy a more efficient car)
Shift from fossil fuel public transport to renewable public transport (e.g. shift from fossil fuel bus/train to renewable train)
Adopt a vegan diet for at least 1 year
Adopt a vegetarian diet (e.g. go from omnivore to vegetarian) for at least 1 year
Shift from fuel-powered car to a renewable electric car for at least 1 year
Shift to lower-carbon meats (e.g. shift one-third of the beef calories to either pork or poultry) for at least 1 year
Shift from fossil fuel car to renewable public transport (e.g. shift from fossil car to renewable train)
Shift to active transport (e.g. bike and ebike instead of taking the car) for at least 1 year
Use renewable electricity (e.g. buy green energy) for at least 1 year
Take one less transatlantic flight for at least 1 year
Not purchase/adopt a dog
Yes, a lot of people were surprised by how much a dog contributes to climate change. But among the caveats from the researchers, reporters (including AP’s Caleigh Wells) also learned that the reason dogs were so high on the list is because of the researchers’ assumption that the dogs are eating beef. So pooches eating a less carbon-intensive protein source — such as fish or fowl — are far more climate-friendly.
But suppose for a moment:
you’re not a sustainability leader, say, writing about how your organization is Universalizing Climate Action to Bend the Curve of Climate Change for Global Sustainability, or in the news for getting grants for your community to address climate change and better manage natural resources, or slowly moving your industry — whether energy production or chip manufacturing — toward more climate-friendly and sustainable processes, or meaningfully warning the European Parliament against going too far in their plans to trim corporate sustainability reporting requirements (note: all the links above are to stories within the past week);
or your circumstances prevent you from following sustainability practices yourself because — at one extreme — your basic needs of food, clothing, shelter are not being met.
In other words, suppose you can’t lead others or follow sustainability practices yourself. Then how can you — responsibly — get out of the way?
I think (my opinion here) it’s by continuing to discuss climate-friendly and sustainable actions, even if you can’t lead others in doing them, even if you can’t do them yourself.
Those kinds of discussions are a pretext to action — as I argued in SustainLab’s first post, “Framing Sustainability”:
Discussing sustainability requires the presupposition that it is important to discuss sustainability. That presupposition, in turn, may be used to derive “oughts,” such as we ought to clarify actionable approaches to sustainability and even we ought to act on those approaches.
And this week I have been particularly proud of my fellow Americans for engaging in that discussion through thoughtful, emotive, and informed testimony at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency public hearings about the proposed recision of the 2009 Endangerment Finding, which could profoundly affect the amount of future greenhouse gas emissions from the United States (find out more about it all in my most recent post on SustainLab).
“By overhauling massive rules on the endangerment finding, the social cost of carbon and similar issues, we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.” — EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, writing in The Wall Street Journal, March 12, 2025
In sum, the amount of accessible information about ways of being climate-friendly and sustainable can be paralyzing. Trying to figure out what information is correct, what decisions are optimal, or even simply trying to evaluate climate-friendly or sustainable choices when shopping online is difficult. Professionals may be inaccurate, too, such as the scientists in their assumptions when ordering their list of 21 impactful individual actions (my rescue dog’s protein source is fish and fowl, not beef).
But, by continuing to discuss climate-friendly and sustainable actions with others, you’re helping normalize such discussions in your communities. That normalizing process is something scientists have long argued have “a substantial impact on human action” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1990). And some norms — called descriptive norms, meaning how common a behavior is — even predict a person’s “willingness to support and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience to defend the climate” (Nature, 2025), which just so happens to be the second of the five collective actions listed and studied in the aforementioned PNAS Nexus (2025) research:
Vote for proclimate candidates
Attend a climate march/demonstration
Change your financial institution (if it invests in fossil fuels)
Donate to an environmental nonprofit
Promote climate action at work
Which of the researchers’ 21 individual or 5 collective actions have you done in your habitat, if any? Do you think it would be easier to engage in those actions if you saw others in your community doing them?