Author: CleanMetrics 2.0

If we are going to bend the emissions curve, then a majority of businesses need to get involved and emissions accounting must become as commonplace as financial accounting.

By Kumar Venkat and Susan Cholette

Imagine a world where many businesses — large and small — quantify their greenhouse gas emissions annually and develop plans for cutting emissions. Imagine also that emissions accounting and planning are no more complicated or expensive than financial accounting and planning.

This imaginary world is not just nice to have, but will be essential if we are going to have any chance of holding the warming to 1.5 degrees or even 2 degrees. The window for 1.5 degrees pretty much closes in 2030. By that year we will need to have cut emissions 45% from 2010 levels to have a shot at 1.5 degrees, or 20% for a more devastating 2 degree temperature rise.

To achieve emission reductions of these magnitudes, we will need to turn the first half of this coming decade into a transition period where we begin bending the emissions curve even as we wait for coherent national and international climate strategies. Businesses can switch to clean energy, improve energy efficiency, move to materials with lower life-cycle emissions, adopt or even invest in carbon capture technologies, and as a last resort find high-quality carbon offsets to neutralize the remaining emissions in their operations.

If these voluntary actions actually take place at a sufficient scale in the next several years, they will have an outsized impact on our future temperature trajectory. But we can’t cut emissions without knowing where we stand. Before businesses can take action, they will need to quantify their emissions at least annually similar to an annual financial review. Ideally, a review like this will show not just a year-to-year trend but also real opportunities for emissions reduction. There have been two long-standing obstacles to doing this on a large scale across the economy.

The first and biggest obstacle is cost. A typical corporate greenhouse gas inventory or a product carbon footprint can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. For companies with many different products and complex operations, the cost can quickly become prohibitive. Not many companies have the budget to undertake a one-time footprinting exercise, let alone do it on an annual basis. Given the millions of businesses and the tens of millions of products in the US alone, there isn’t enough money in the world to footprint everything at these price points.

The second obstacle is time. We only have this coming decade to turn the emissions trajectory around and begin an era of annually decreasing emissions. Conventional carbon footprinting exercises can take anywhere from a few weeks to many months. We just don’t have the time (or the army of consultants) to footprint everything at this pace.

It is not enough for just the largest or the most socially responsible companies to quantify their emissions. If we are going to bend the emissions curve, then a majority of businesses need to get involved, and emissions accounting must become as commonplace as financial accounting. This can only be achieved with highly streamlined and standardized life-cycle assessments and greenhouse gas inventories that can be performed on a mass scale at a small fraction of the cost and time they have required in the past.

We have a few suggestions on how to get there. The first and most important step is automation. We should leverage modern cloud computing and databases to compute, store and report results rapidly. Spreadsheet-based analysis should become a thing of the past.

Once we have an automated framework for carbon modeling, we should decide on the level of accuracy needed. For the vast majority of business applications, secondary life-cycle inventory data for upstream purchases and downstream activities should provide more than enough accuracy for identifying the significant emission sources and considering options to reduce those emissions. Moreover, this can be supplemented with economic input-output data in order to limit any inaccuracy that may occur due to cutoffs. This type of simplification is common in many engineering disciplines and is essential for high-volume carbon modeling.

Accounting standards already exist for corporate and product carbon footprints, but allow a fair amount of leeway in how specific scenarios are modeled. In the interests of saving time and effort, we should adopt a standardized methodology for modeling common issues that many businesses will encounter (such as recycling and waste disposal) as well as less common ones (such as time-dependent storage and release of carbon in soils, vegetation, and built structures).

With automation, simplification, and standardization, we have a real opportunity to make emissions accounting accessible to businesses of all sizes. If done right, this could be step one in the fight to hold the line at 1.5 degrees.

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Kumar Venkat is president of CleanMetrics 2.0. Susan Cholette is vice president of consulting services at CleanMetrics 2.0 and a professor of decision sciences at San Francisco State University.

Working from home could be a starting point for tackling the climate crisis

Kumar Venkat and Susan Cholette

As most of us stay hunkered down at home, we can already see a clearing of the air. There are reports of dramatically lower air pollution and smog around the world. Los Angeles saw a 29% drop in air pollution in March, and the nitrogen dioxide in the air from Boston to Washington is at the lowest level since 2005. The International Energy Agency is projecting an 8% drop in global carbon dioxide emissions this year.

This situation is unlikely to last unless we act. The 2008 financial crisis showed that the rebound in emissions as the economy recovers can far exceed the original decline. Moreover, economic recovery funds could end up reinforcing the old economy rather than promoting green technologies. Against these headwinds, the key to emerging from this pandemic with a climate plan may well be the changes in behavior and awareness that are taking root.

Perhaps the biggest change we have seen during this pandemic is how business is conducted. Anyone dealing with data or information, writing code or designing products, processing loans or advising clients, is now working remotely from home. We have had the technology to support telework for about 20 years now, but even tech companies have been slow to adopt a culture of remote work. Yahoo’s CEO famously sent out a no-work-from-home memo to employees in 2013, and other large corporations reduced or eliminated telecommuting in the past decade.

All this changed in March as many companies switched to remote work, led by tech companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook. Some companies have already told their employees that they can work from home till end of the year. While we have known that employees are more efficient and happier when they have this flexibility, there is another important benefit: remote work can be a key piece of the climate puzzle that we need to solve this decade in order to bend the emissions curve and get on a clear downward trajectory.

Greenhouse gas emissions from passenger cars and air travel add up to more than 15% of net US national emissions. We could put a significant dent in passenger transport emissions if many white collar employees continue to work from home all or part of the time and if businesses replace a large part of air travel with video conferences. For example, if we can reduce the passenger miles driven by 25% and miles flown by 50%, we can cut national emissions by nearly 5%. In an era of steadily increasing emissions, any such reduction would be a big initial step toward taking charge of the climate.

A post-pandemic national project to cut transport emissions voluntarily can be a win-win proposition. Employees would enjoy the flexibility to work from home at least part of the time, while saving money spent on gasoline. Employers would benefit from productivity increases as well as cost savings from eliminating business travel and downsizing office spaces. Communities would see reduced rush-hour traffic and pollution while spending less on road maintenance.

In addition, employers would be able to take credit for all of the avoided emissions from employee commuting and travel. These are part the so-called scope 3 emissions which most companies have found difficult to reduce, so these savings could come in handy as businesses move to more rigorous and widespread carbon accounting this decade.

Individuals, fresh from sheltering at home and appreciating the value of mobility, can take this even further by being thoughtful about where and how they travel. Perhaps a future vacation to Europe could be replaced with a road trip closer to home, resulting in savings of a few tons of carbon emissions per family. We may still need to use air travel occasionally for visiting family members living in another part of the country or when our children travel to and from college in another state, but carefully considering the need to get on an airplane can make a big difference to the emissions that we cause as individuals.

We could have done all this and more without waiting for a life-changing pandemic. But as we come out of this pandemic with an altered business landscape and more awareness of our personal consumption patterns, we have a rare opportunity to make sure that the planet’s climate doesn’t become an even bigger crisis than the one we are battling now. Transport emissions are just the low-hanging fruit that we should go after as a first step.

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Kumar Venkat is president of CleanMetrics 2.0, a climate analytics firm. Susan Cholette is a professor of decision sciences at San Francisco State University.

Susan Cholette and Kumar Venkat

The pandemic has upended supply chains. No doubt many of you, like us, have had to adjust your purchasing habits. Since we study how companies are now re-tooling their business models, we have considered how some practices could translate into consumer behaviors that might serve us better even in normal times.

Supply and demand shocks are showing the importance of supply-chain resiliency. Companies that depend on global sourcing have been unable to get products or parts as Chinese factories have slowed or shut down production. Anyone visiting Amazon recently may have faced similar supply shocks with estimated delivery dates running into June. On the demand side, producers that specialize in fancy farm-to-table foods for high-end restaurants or high-volume production for cafeterias have struggled as their food service clients have stopped ordering.

Diversified supply chains are typically more resilient to shocks than those that rely on producers in a single geographical region or consumers in niche sectors. Many firms are considering using more suppliers, especially those closer to home. As consumers, we can mimic this by diversifying our own purchases. As much of the food we purchase in supermarkets is produced in other parts of the country or overseas, we should add more local sources. One possibility is to subscribe to a CSA, which will deliver fresh produce from local farmers to your home on a weekly basis. Other options include for-profit social enterprises like Imperfect Foods, which sells misshapen or excess produce and helps reduce food waste in the supply chain.

Consumers can take the practice of local sourcing even further up the supply chain by figuring out what nearby food producers may have available to sell. America imports about two-thirds of its seafood, but if you live near a body of water, you might be able to buy some locally caught fish. For instance, San Franciscans can now visit Fisherman’s Wharf to pick up deliveries from Water2Table, which normally wholesales just to restaurants but because of the large number of restaurant closures now sells directly to consumers.

Buying locally has other advantages. When this pandemic recedes, we will want the producers, restaurants, and stores in our communities to remain in business. If your budget allows, consider treating yourself to takeout from the restaurants that are still open.

Consumers should rethink how to manage their personal stock of food and other supplies. Many businesses have traditionally used just-in-time deliveries from manufacturers and wholesalers to keep their inventory costs low, and consumers have similarly relied on short delivery times or on supermarkets being fully stocked and open round-the-clock for spontaneous shopping. This, of course, does not work during a pandemic as demand spikes and consumers tend to purchase more in fewer shopping trips. But stockpiling months of supplies in our homes is not the solution, from either a moral or a practical standpoint, because it creates shortages for other shoppers and exceeds limited refrigerator and freezer space for perishables.

Many stores are now limiting purchases of scarce items such as toilet paper. As consumers, we can help ourselves and other shoppers by becoming smarter inventory managers and smoothing out these demand spikes. We suggest stocking about 2–3 weeks’ worth of supplies and then using a weekly shopping trip to replace what was used in the previous week. Part of an effective inventory management strategy is meal planning and minimizing the food that goes to waste.

Our final suggestion may sound simplistic, but simplifyingis a powerful tool. Consumers can adopt a business practice championed in high-tech manufacturing known as planned postponement, which purposely delays end differentiation of products until market needs are better known. A practical example of this is buying basics such as dried pasta, canned sauces, and other shelf-stable foods that can be used to make a variety of different meals depending on what you are craving on any given day, rather than buying perishable premade meals. Manufacturers often make use of component commonality across products, and savvy cooks can apply the same idea by substituting readily available ingredients when a recipe calls for exotic or out-of-stock ingredients.

Eventually this crisis will abate and many of the conveniences of pre-pandemic life will once again become available, including being able to order just about any product online for speedy home delivery. But hopefully by then we will also have learned the value, both to our pocketbooks and to our communities, of keeping our personal supply chains resilient by sourcing more locally, managing our inventories, and simplifying what we can.

Susan Cholette is a professor of decision sciences at San Francisco State University. Kumar Venkat is president of CleanMetrics 2.0.

Published on medium.com (Dec 14, 2019)

By Kumar Venkat

I was one of many consultants and analysts trying to help companies cut their carbon emissions a decade ago. In the end, we did not manage to put a dent in the annual greenhouse gas inventories of nations. The record high global emissions this year and the rising US emissions are not surprises. We could have predicted this emissions trajectory years ago.

We would have had to put in place carbon regulations about a decade ago in order to start bending the emissions curve right about now. In the 2000s, many companies were actively looking at their operations and supply chains to find opportunities to reduce emissions. This was in part driven by pressure from consumers and activists, but corporations also anticipated that regulations were just around the corner. When I first started my consulting business, I couldn’t keep up with the demand for carbon footprinting services.

But all that changed as 2010 closed out. I can almost point to the midterm elections that year as the defining moment for American companies. Once Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, businesses realized that there would be no cap-and-trade or any other kind of carbon regulation coming soon. Companies still talked about sustainability in their annual reports, but the funding for voluntary carbon reductions dried up.

I eventually went back to work in the tech industry (where I had come from originally), hoping that the politics would change before it was too late and others with more staying power than me would walk us through the remaining critical steps. When the Paris climate agreement was negotiated in 2015, I was ecstatic. Finally, there was a faint light at the end of the tunnel. I thought of Paris as a statement of intent, a stake in the ground that we had never had before.

Then 2017 came along and the new president announced his plan to withdraw from the one and only global climate agreement. US emissions, after dropping in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, increased last year at the highest rate since 2010 as the economy picked up steam — showing clearly that our economy runs on fossil fuels and we can’t hope to cut emissions without addressing this basic fact.

In the coming decade, we can expect to see additional fallout from the Trump administration’s reversals of emission limits on power plants and gas-mileage standards on light vehicles — two of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in this country. The next decade is also the last one we have to reverse course and begin reducing global emissions every year in order to have a shot at meeting the 1.5 degree Celsius Paris target.

Perhaps this is exactly the kind of dire emergency that we needed all along to focus our minds. But the fact remains that we have no history of ever solving a crisis of this magnitude.

Nothing even comes remotely close. Not the plague in the 14th century. Not the world wars, concentration camps or terrorist attacks. Not any of the floods, hurricanes or fires. We have no useful human experience that we can draw upon, no track record that we can point to. We have yet to mobilize worldwide action after a quarter century of trying.

There are small indications that the tide may be turning. Over 2200 businesses have broken ranks with the US government to support the Paris accord. Polls show signs of increasing urgency around climate change. Youth leaders are calling for true climate action with a passion that is inspiring the rest of us. Not a week goes by without a major climate story in the news, and it is no longer an academic subject. I’ve had more casual conversations about climate change in the last few months than in the previous 20 years.

As I prepare to return to the climate battlefield, I am not confident that we’ll win this one. But I would like to believe that, this time around, an entire army of us will fight like we’ve never fought before.

Published on medium.com (Dec 14, 2019)

By Kumar Venkat

If we assume that just half the US households recycle regularly and spend 10 minutes a week rinsing and setting aside the recyclables, we are looking at over half a billion person-hours of time invested annually. Add to this governmental involvement and subsidies, and recycling may just be the one big thing we do for the environment as a country.

But do we really know what happens once the bins are emptied into the recycling trucks?

One way to look at the environmental benefits of recycling is through the greenhouse gas emissions saved. Recycling in the US saves a modest 2.7 percent of total national emissions, based on 2014 data from the Environmental Protection Agency. Three-quarters of those savings come from just paper and paperboard.

Just adding steel, aluminum and other metals to the mix would extract 89 percent of the emissions savings from less than 60 percent of the recyclables by weight.

Plastics, which are ubiquitous in our society but notoriously difficult to recycle, account for fewer than two percent of the emissions savings from recycling. Other materials such as glass and organic waste offer even less of an environmental return relative to their weight when recycled or composted.

The economics are not friendly to recycling, so closing the materials loop is difficult at best. The supply of virgin materials typically far exceeds the supply of recycled materials and global demand is usually large enough to consume all available production. Prices are then determined by virgin materials and there is generally no cost advantage to using recycled materials in new production since environmental benefits are not reflected in prices.

Plus, the scale economies in virgin production cannot be easily replicated in the more spatially diverse and labor-intensive recycling processes. The market has adjusted to this by exporting a significant part of the paper and plastic waste to countries with lower labor costs, but that may be changing as China begins to tighten the import of waste.

So what we are left with is a rather unsatisfactory system that survives probably because the idea of recycling our waste into new products is a comforting one in a throw-away society.

If we could design a more effective system, we would want to get the price signals right. A meaningful price on carbon could make recycled materials more competitive due to the emissions savings and could trigger a virtuous business cycle that increases the volume of recyclables collected and profitably processed.

In the absence of carbon pricing or a tax on virgin materials, it would make more sense to simply maximize the benefits of recycling while reducing cost and effort by limiting it to as few materials as possible. The materials that deliver most of the environmental benefits are paper and metals. These are also the easiest to sort and process into new products.

Since paper waste is largely generated in urban areas, we could locate highly automated recycling plants close to where the waste is generated. Instead of exporting the waste, we could be processing the recyclables in the US at a competitive cost.

Not recycling plastic might seem like a radical step, but recycling has never been the answer to the large amounts of plastics we use and discard each year. Taking recycling out of the equation would have the added benefit of making our plastic pollution more explicit to both consumers and producers.

While technologies like biodegradable plastics may be viable in the future, reducing and reusing plastics remain the best options today. When plastic inevitably turns into waste, we should send 100 percent of it to landfill and stop subsidizing it under the guise of curbside recycling.

It is time to take in the lessons of our long-running recycling experiment, and design a more efficient and targeted system. We also need to confront the enormous amounts of waste that we generate and acknowledge that recycling as we know it today is not the antidote to all the raw materials and energy expended on single-use products in our society.

Published on CommonDreams (Nov. 28, 2019)

By Kumar Venkat

As you sit down to eat a holiday dinner with family or friends this year, the Earth’s climate may be the farthest thing from your mind. But if you are looking for a good New Year’s resolution in a few weeks, you can’t go wrong with climate-friendly eating. The links between food and climate are significant but fairly simple to understand. It is not difficult to eat well without destroying the climate.

Perhaps the biggest climate decision around food that most of us will make is the choice of proteins. Red meats like beef and lamb have a dramatically higher carbon footprint than plant-based options such as beans or tofu. For an equal supply of protein, beef produces 20–25 times as much greenhouse gas emissions on average as beans, and about 12 times as much as tofu. Chicken and turkey, on the other hand, are much more benign, producing only 3–6 times the emissions of plant-based proteins.

The average American consumes 275 pounds of red meats and poultry per year, which generates about a metric ton of greenhouse gas emissions during production. To put this in perspective, this is six percent of annual US per-capita emissions. Just replacing beef with chicken would cut these emissions in half and is one of the easier solutions if you are not ready to go vegetarian or vegan. For those willing to try meat substitutes, plant-based burger patties generate only a tenth of the emissions of ground beef.

When greenhouse gas emissions of food products are calculated over the full product life cycles, emissions from transportation are generally less than 10 percent of total emissions and therefore not very significant. Moreover, local food production often suffers from inefficient distribution — and higher emissions per pound of food — compared to the highly streamlined logistics of long-distance goods transport.

So you don’t have to buy local to be climate-friendly as long as you are not getting fresh foods like salmon that are air-freighted.

Life-cycle assessments of organic production point to a number of common inefficiencies such as lower yields and higher on-farm energy use. Increased soil carbon sequestration remains the one clear advantage in the first few decades after converting conventional croplands to organic production. But the lower yields would have to be made up through increased food production and land-use changes elsewhere.

Net emissions would likely be greater with any large-scale move to organic production, so eating organic is more a matter of personal preference than a climate solution.

Food processing and packaging do add to a product’s life-cycle emissions. Since plant-based foods start out with low emissions, they see a larger relative impact than animal foods. Processing is likely to be more energy-efficient and less wasteful than home cooking but freezing can more than double the emissions of plant-based foods. Packaging typically contributes less than ten percent of total product emissions in most cases, but it could double the emissions of processed fruits or vegetables that are canned or bottled.

Neither of these impacts is large enough for consumers to avoid processed and packaged foods entirely on the basis of climate.

Finally, the food that we don’t eat has a climate impact from the wasted production, processing, transport and disposal. Nearly 30 percent of the food produced in the US is wasted each year, and over 60 percent of that is consumer waste. This works out to about 240 pounds of avoidable waste per person and contributes 1–2 percent to per-capita emissions. But not all food waste is equal.

Wasted animal foods have 3.5 times the climate impact of plant-based foods on average, so it helps to start by focusing the waste reduction on high-emission foods.

Rather than taking on a laundry list of small actions around food and climate, it might be easier — and more satisfying — to commit to a couple of big things in the new year that can really move the needle. After years of studying the climate impacts of foods, I can’t think of anything more impactful than our choice of proteins, followed by waste reduction. Everything else that we can do for food sustainability is icing on the cake.

Published in The Oregonian (Nov. 17, 2019): https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2019/11/opinion-oregon-must-target-climate-change-not-plastic-bags.html

By Kumar Venkat

My local grocery store recently decided that it would no longer offer single-use carryout plastic bags, presumably to get a head start on Oregon’s upcoming ban on such bags. I, for one, had always saved and reused these bags, usually as garbage can liners, so I got at least two uses out of them. I now buy garbage bags that are made of heavier plastic and hence create more carbon emissions than the flimsy grocery bags.

Data from California shows in fact that purchase of plastic trash bags spikes dramatically when disposable plastic bags are banned. That is not the only unintended consequence. Some customers end up taking home paper bags that have a demonstrably higher carbon footprint than plastic bags of the same carrying capacity.

Consider the best-case scenario: Even if every shopper in this country replaced all plastic grocery bags with reusable bags and purchased no additional trash bags, the emissions savings would be minuscule. Single-use plastic bags already have the smallest carbon footprint to produce as many studies have shown. All things considered, the choice of bags would make essentially no difference in the battle against climate change.

But isn’t tackling the problem of plastic pollution in the oceans one of the aims of this ban? Yes, but less than 1 percent of the world’s plastic waste that is litter or improperly disposed of originates in the United States. We are just not a big enough plastics polluter to help solve this problem.

A year after the ban went into effect in California, the number of plastic bags in the state’s beach litter dropped by more than half, but the actual amount of bag waste saved was less than 750 pounds. We can expect to save significantly less than that in Oregon, which has about one-tenth of California’s population.

Waste reduction in and of itself is a good thing, but we should just be aware that this particular ban might not yield a return proportional to the combined efforts of Oregonians to comply with it. It is a small environmental victory to savor after the failure of the cap-and-trade bill in the summer, but by no means a replacement for meaningful action.

The real existential threat to Oregon and the nation is climate change. The United States is the second largest carbon polluter in the world, so it is logical for states to take the lead on climate given a lack of response at the federal level.Share your opinionSubmit your essay of 500-700 words on a highly topical issue or a theme of particular relevance to the Pacific Northwest, Oregon and the Portland area to commentary@oregonian.com. Please include your email and phone number for verification.

The Oregon climate bill failed largely because of a lack of public appetite for higher fossil fuel prices. Even though the bill would have provided refunds to lower-income Oregonians, there was no way to fully mitigate the disproportionate share of the burden placed on individuals and businesses in rural areas. We need to bring a majority of Oregonians on board by addressing real concerns like these.

Some ideas to consider: exempt the trucking industry for some number of years by offsetting their fuel cost increases through refunds (after all, we all benefit from the products the trucks deliver), help rural Oregonians purchase more efficient vehicles, and perhaps provide other refunds or tax credits in the short term to close the urban-rural divide on this issue.

Climate legislation is going to be much more difficult than banning plastic bags, but climate is the real crisis crying out for a solution.

Published in the Los Angeles Times (Nov. 5, 2019:) https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-11-05/climate-carbon-emissions-consumer-choices

By Kumar Venkat

It can be confusing for climate-conscious consumers to sort through all of the carbon-reduction options out there in search of the ones that can truly make a difference. Even with a background in carbon footprint analysis, I still find it tricky to separate the good ideas from the bad.

I have learned to follow a simple rule of thumb that helps me cut through all the climate-related noise: Don’t sweat the small things when it comes to climate change. Focus your energies and investments on a few big actions that you can sustain over the long term.

But common misconceptions about what can move the climate-change needle make it harder for consumers to make the right choice.

In 2014, California became the first state to pass legislation to ban single-use plastic bags at retail stores. The question of whether paper or plastic is better for the environment has become largely irrelevant as a growing list of states and cities have banned all single-use plastic carryout bags. Yet this high-profile movement does little to reduce the nation’s total carbon emissions.

Even if every shopper in the U.S. switched from plastic to reusable bags, we would reduce our annual national emissions by only 0.02%.

Making a point of purchasing locally produced food is another common action that provides little climate benefit. Much concern has been expressed over the years about “food miles” — the distance that food travels from farms to consumers — and the associated emissions from transportation.

However, transportation emissions are generally much smaller than those from production, so consumers would be better off focusing more on how foods are produced. For example, the carbon footprints of animal-based foods can be two to 20 times larger than those of plant-based foods.

Even when emissions from production are low — as they are with many fruits and vegetables — transportation alters their carbon footprint in a counterintuitive way.

Long-distance transportation via semi-trailers is generally more efficient than local transportation in smaller vehicles. Farm-to-retail transportation emissions of local farmers market produce can end up being more than double that of similar supermarket produce.

In addition, emissions from packaging materials are rarely large enough to justify making purchasing decisions based on how a product is packaged. Packaging typically accounts for less than 10% of the total emissions for most food products, and significantly less than that for durable goods.

Sometimes it helps to put the action you want to take in perspective. The American Cleaning Institute, an organization that represents the cleaning products industry, recently estimated that a household could cut its emissions by 864 pounds of carbon per year by washing four out of five loads in cold water. That number sounded impressive until I calculated that it works out to about one-half of 1% of the annual carbon footprint for a family of four.

Even if every family in America adopted the cold-water washing method, national emissions would only be reduced by less than 1%.

Consider the widely held belief that organic farming is better for the climate. Multiple studies have shown that net emissions would be higher in the long run with organic production due to lower yields. I buy some organic produce to minimize the pesticides my family ingests, but I have no illusions about helping the climate when I do that.

But consumers are not powerless. Significant emission reductions are possible in the areas of transportation and electricity, which are responsible for more than 60% of net U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

A typical passenger vehicle generates about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, which accounts for a quarter of U.S. per-capita carbon emissions. Driving the vehicle 20% fewer miles a year would translate to a 5% reduction relative to per-capita emissions. If public transportation is substituted for half the miles driven, it results in a 15% emission reduction.

Driving an electric vehicle can cut emissions by 10 to 20%. Eliminating a single coast-to-coast flight can save nearly 4% relative to per-capita emissions, but these savings only become significant when enough people avoid flying and fewer planes are in the air.

Many electric utilities in California and elsewhere offer green-energy programs that can supply 100% of a home’s electricity with renewables like solar or wind energy for less than an additional penny per kilowatt-hour. This inexpensive option could cut per-capita emissions an average of 10% while helping to boost investments in additional renewable energy capacity.

Big consumer commitments like these really could have an effect on climate change. Just think of the less-impactful moves you make to “save the environment” as a bonus.

Kumar Venkat is a technologist based in Portland, Ore. As the founder of CleanMetrics Corp., he helped companies quantify and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.