Consumers really can affect global warming — particularly if they live in the US

I’ve always been just a hair skeptical about all those admonitions to consumers to save the world — you know, the “Live simply, that others may simply live”-type instructions. They felt a little too much like guilt-tripping to me, with perhaps not enough corresponding actual environmental good being done. Well, I stand corrected...

What I’m talking about is a recent paper (PDF) that appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It turns out that U.S. consumers could, by taking a series of 17 actions that the authors of the peer-reviewed paper say would result in “little or no reduction in household well-being,” reduce U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by about 7.5 percent.

That’s equivalent to the total emissions of France.

Read full blog post here at InvestigateWest