Being Well Podcast: Mastering Change with Brad Stulberg

Each year I use an issue of the Just One Thing newsletter to offer Twelve Good Things that I think are really wonderful and worth your attention.

May you and those you love and the whole wide world be truly well, truly happy, and truly at peace.

For all our efforts, humanity is producing more greenhouse gasses than ever. Sure, we should pressure companies and countries to change. But they keep blocking emissions reductions and making money as fast as they can while the planet burns up.
Meanwhile, as much as we try to have a greener lifestyle, we each have an unavoidable carbon footprint—16 metric tons of CO2 a year for the average American.
Individually, you and I can’t change Exxon Mobil or Saudia Arabia. But for less than half a dollar a day, we can each compensate for our personal carbon footprint through legitimate “offsets,” like donating to plant trees, protect wetlands from the developer’s bulldozer, or deliver water filtration kits so people don’t have to burn wood to boil water so it’s safe to drink.
With others, I’m helping to build a global movement of eventually hundreds of millions of individuals who make a moral commitment to being Net Zero themselves. At scale, this could impact 5-10% of annual greenhouse gasses, year after year after year. This might seem unrealistic, but it’s a lot more realistic than hoping that the fossil fuel industry and its political allies will act against their own profit interests.
It’s easy to feel helpless, and just tune out and give up. They want you to do that. But you have the power to compensate for your unavoidable carbon footprint. This is individual moral action, not companies gaming the carbon markets with wildly inflated offsets.