What Registered Dietitians Can Teach Us About Cutting Carbon

‍This post is the second in a series by author and climate writer Sami Grover, which draws lessons from existing practices within the worlds of personal finance, nutrition, fitness, and more to help inform how we create a practical, real-world approach to building a climate practice in our lives. 

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It’s common to hear people compare cutting our personal carbon emissions with going on a diet to lose weight. These analogies are not always helpful. After all, diets rarely work. And by focusing excessively on weight, they can play into fatphobic ideals of what a “healthy” body is supposed to look like. 

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That said, I’m married to a Registered Dietitian, and I’ve seen firsthand how evidence-based nutrition counseling can help patients work toward their personal health goals. I also believe there are lessons for those of us trying to transition to a lower-carbon lifestyle. 

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For example, when patients first visit with my wife, they often think they’ll need to adopt an extreme, low-calorie diet to meet their goals. Yet many of us can find these “all-in” lifestyle changes hard to sustain. 

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So what can we do instead? 

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From Diet to Exercise to Carbon Emissions, Mixed Solutions Are Easier to Sustain

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One of the things my wife emphasizes is that a solution is only a solution if someone can sustain it. That’s why she’s a huge advocate for what she calls the "mixed solution". It’s an approach that focuses first on the low-hanging fruit and works within, rather than against, the constraints of our day-to-day lives. 

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• Rather than doing an extreme workout five days a week, for example, you could park your car further away from your office, take some weights on your evening walks, and schedule just a couple of trips to the gym each week. 
• Rather than giving up takeout or fast food entirely, you could commit to planning home-cooked meals for three days a week, buying some healthier premade options for a few more, and then researching some less processed takeout options for the rest. 

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The goal is to layer several different, relatively incremental solutions on top of each other so that each additional lifestyle change builds on and amplifies those that preceded it. This approach is accessible to almost everyone and infinitely adaptable to each individual’s circumstances, interests, passions, and needs.

So how can you use mixed solutions to lower your carbon footprint?

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From Car-Free to Car-Light 

In my early adulthood, I lived many happy years without owning a car. In fact, I didn’t even learn to drive until my mid-twenties. Yet as I got older, took on more responsibilities, and eventually became a parent, I found myself increasingly reliant on driving from one place to another. 

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That doesn’t mean, however, that I’ve become powerless to resist car culture entirely. It just means I’ve had to become more creative and pragmatic in how I reduce the environmental impact of my car usage. Here’s what that looks like for me: 

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• Firstly, I telecommute up to four days a week.
• Secondly, I choose to live within walking distance of some excellent grocery stores, coffee shops, not to mention my favorite bar. 
• Thirdly, I drive an old, used, electric Nissan Leaf.
• Fourthly, I have an e-bike for around-town trips. 
• And lastly, when I drive, I carpool for the school drop-off and work from the public library near the school to avoid driving back and forth.

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It’s a little hard to calculate precisely how much these efforts are saving, but I estimate around a 75% reduction in passenger miles driven and an 80-90% cut in actual emissions. Fortunately, transportation isn’t the only area where applying a mixed solution can yield surprisingly impressive results. 

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The Rise of the Reducetarian 

As many within the Commons community know, eating a plant-based diet is one of the best ways to reduce our diet-related emissions. Precisely what that looks like can vary greatly from one person to the next. For some people, going fully vegan is exciting and rewarding. For others, there can be cultural, familial, or dietary barriers that make going animal product-free a challenge.

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Yet even in these instances, there’s still plenty we can do to cut back on our meat–and dairy-related emissions: 

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• We can choose to go vegan before 6 p.m., or become a weekday vegetarian, drastically reducing the number of animal-based meals we eat without having to give them up entirely 
• We can also choose to eat less meat per serving by adding more beans to chili for example, or mixing in tofu or mushrooms and meat in the same dish. 
• And when we do eat a meat-based meal, we can still lean toward lower-emission meats by avoiding red meats like beef and lamb, which are by far the highest dietary emitters.

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A Step-by-Step Approach to Help You Cut Your Carbon

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The approaches you use for diet or home energy use are going to look different to the ones you use for transportation, or reducing household waste. And the steps you take are going to vary depending on if you live in New York City, or in the rural Midwest. Your household income is likely to be a factor in influencing what’s possible too.

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Whatever it is you are trying to tackle, however, I recommend taking a measured, step-by-step approach to start mapping out your strategy. Here are some tips to get you started: : 

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1. Start by asking yourself, what is a relatively high-emissions area of your life where you’d like to reduce your impact? 
2. Take a look at the barriers you see to making drastic changes, such as giving up the car, or eliminating air travel entirely. 
3. Once you have an area of focus, and a good idea of the barriers, you can develop a layered, incremental approach that might include:
   
   

• Reducing frequency: Commuting just once a week instead of every day, or reducing the number of long distance vacations, and staying for longer when you do travel.
• Improving efficiency: Try choosing a more efficient car or carpooling, or flying direct and in economy, instead of business class and with multiple connections.
• Embracing sufficiency: Try finding ways to reduce the distance you drive or choose a vacation spot closer to home. 
• Choosing different technologies or products: You could explore taking a train instead of plane or switching to an electric car instead of gas.

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Again, exactly what mix of solutions you apply will depend on what carbon puzzle you are trying to solve and your specific barriers to action. But the general lesson here is that, when you look at the data on emissions avoided, layering several incremental solutions on top of each other can look quite similar to a single, more radical and drastic change. 

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The Interesting Carbon Ethics of Going Half Way  

There is, of course, a valid criticism that a ‘mixed solution’ strategy pushes a piecemeal solution when revolutionary change is needed. But here, it can be helpful to remember the notion of a “carbon handprint.” Our goal as individuals, after all, is not to get ourselves to net zero emissions on our own. Instead, it’s to build a society where net zero emissions is the default position for everyone.

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In pursuing that goal, viewing the challenge as a collective dance can be helpful, where each of us plays a unique role in bringing others into the mix. We can, and probably should, each seek to do more. But if everyone who cares gets too far out in front, it can be hard for others to follow. 

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When I wrote my book about being an imperfect environmentalist, I interviewed climate scientist and author Peter Kalmus. Peter has done more than most to lead an ambitiously low-carbon lifestyle. And yet, he too acknowledged that if you go too far, too fast, there is a danger of losing those who might be inspired to take action themselves: 

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“It’s a little like surfing on a wave. You want to be pushing a little further than where the system is at.”

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For those of us who are not yet ready to commit to an extreme green lifestyle makeover, the “mixed solution” can be a great way to surf that wave while collectively moving toward a low-carbon future.