Positive actions

People at home & at work feel powerless to help reduce climate change in part because they lack accurate, accessible, and actionable information on how best to achieve potential savings through their own steps. From a householder’s perspective, a desire to reduce carbon emissions, even combined with knowledge that doing so has net financial and environmental benefits, is insufficient to yield effective action unless that person knows which actions will produce the benefits. Available evidence indicates that although many householders are motivated, they lack the necessary knowledge to act. Moreover, their beliefs about which actions are most beneficial are often mistaken, and the most readily available sources of behavioral advice are not helpful.

When strategies are proposed for households, they often appear in laundry list format, giving little or no priority to effectiveness. It is easy for households that want to cope with rising gasoline prices and heating and cooling bills to respond by taking small actions under the impression they are saving energy, while they are actually making a negligible dent in their personal energy consumption. Now there's a new book that aims to take the panic out of good decision making for individuals. By Gerald T. Gardner and Paul C. Stern its called The Short List: The Most Effective Actions U.S. Households Can Take to Curb Climate Change. For more go to http://www.heldref.org/env-gardnerstern.php