ABOUT

At least in our own circles, there seems to be a great sense of malaise about our ability to do anything about the climate crisis. What is different about this moment is that it is actually now possible to radically reduce one’s carbon footprint, and lead an even more thriving, productive, and happy life.

The intent of this website is to provide straightforward information and a roadmap for people who want to do something about climate change. We have long been struck by the lack of knowledge of individual sources of carbon emissions, and how they can be avoided. A huge cohort of the developed world consider climate change to be the number one crisis confronting humanity today, and yet do almost nothing about it.

The reality is that a network of advocacy and professional communities have been striving for decades to craft an array of sustainability and climate positive options, which are now ready for prime time. Taken together, they can enable mainstream people to live climate positive lives. These communities include:

  • Energy efficiency and green building

  • Solar and renewable energy

  • Green and micromobility

  • Vegan, vegetarian, and organic

  • Radical localism and community

  • Radical simplicity

  • Mindfulness

Even though we are living in the middle of great turmoil in the United States, it is critical that those of us who can act, do act—as a collective we can be a vanguard of action, forming a virtuous cycle of mainstreaming and normalizing, which serves to improve the market and know-how, reducing costs. We also believe it is critical to recognize that, in many cases, government action has already accelerated effective climate solutions. In particular, these include:

  • Electric vehicles (via Federal tax credits)

  • Solar and wind (via Federal tax credits and local and state incentives, now broadly available to individuals through the Inflation Reduction Act)

  • Efficiency (via Energy Star and various local and state incentives)

  • Efficient buildings (via new construction energy codes)

This website is not about whether climate change is real. It is also not about the ethics of inaction. We are assuming that people are coming to this site with the conviction that we are in a slow moving yet massive crisis, and the understanding that the impacts will be borne by the future and those least able today to deal with it—thus, climate responsible.

Who are we?

Climate Responsible recently was reconfigured organizationally as a US nonprofit under 501(c)3. More to come!

Target audience

Setting this site up, we felt like there was a substantial tension between applicability of the information and span of audience. Even within developed countries there are a lot of physical differences—for example, density, associated availability of transit/goods/services, and construction types. North Americans have by far the largest carbon footprints per capita, and frankly this is the world we know. Rather than trying to provide global recommendations, we have focused on North Americans as the primary audience. But, of course, if you are from somewhere else and you find this helpful—wonderful!

Approach

This website has taken a couple of years of weekends, evenings, and dedicated weeks off to complete. We have done my best to review all major information sources, especially in the “why” section, and simply used my expertise and best judgement about which sources seemed best and/or most relevant.

We are big fans of the law of diminishing returns as it applies to promoting climate action—we think a lot of folks are overwhelmed by the magnitude of change, or suffer from analysis paralysis and want to get a perfect plan before diving in. We think the priority is to just get going and make positive change.

Resources

We want to acknowledge three particular resources that this site draws heavily from.

Our World in Data is an amazing, fact-based resource based at Oxford University. They are dedicated to providing accurate, open-source information about an array of subjects, including climate change. We were happy to see Hannah Ritchie, their climate data lead, recently profiled in the New York Times Magazine.

As discussed in the “What, Tier One” section, the Climate Cool calculator and associated research and tools from the University of California Berkeley CoolClimate Network are great. This team has been for some time, with a particularly strong legacy through the BECC conference. Climate action today stands on the shoulders of teams like ClimateCool.

Finally, for those of you who are heavily DIY and want to do house stuff yourself, Green Building Advisor is a great resource. You might consider signing up for GBA Prime, which has a lot of specialized content.

Thanks

Johanna Bjork is responsible for the wonderful design of this site.

Michael Schut for spending many hours editing this website. Mike is a skilled editor, writer, and speaker, and is the editor/author of three fine books. Mike has influenced a lot of this website, particularly around simpler living.