Study finds Americans misjudge climate impact of everyday choices, incl. dog ownership

Study: Americans misread which climate actions matter most

Researchers reported that many Americans struggle to correctly identify which personal decisions contribute most to climate change, even when given options that range from home-efficiency steps to dietary and transportation choices. In the study, people were asked to rank the climate impact of actions such as switching from a gasoline car to an electric one, carpooling, reducing food waste, recycling, and avoiding plane flights, the researchers said.

The study’s results highlighted a pattern: participants tended to place too much weight on actions that feel tangible or are widely promoted, while placing too little weight on behaviors that are responsible for larger amounts of greenhouse gases. The imbalance showed up in the way participants rated the “top” helpful actions and the “lowest-impact” actions, AP reported.

Stanford professor Madalina Vlasceanu, a report co-author and professor of environmental social sciences at Stanford University, said the mismatch appears in part because marketing can focus attention on certain lower-impact behaviors. She said people “over-assign impact to actually pretty low-impact actions such as recycling, and underestimate the actual carbon impact of behaviors much more carbon intensive, like flying or eating meat,” according to the study’s report.

Vlasceanu said the study also found that three of the actions ranked highest for helping the climate were the same actions that participants underestimated the most. Those high-impact choices included avoiding plane flights, choosing not to get a dog, and using renewable electricity, while actions participants said were less helpful included switching to more efficient appliances, replacing light bulbs, recycling, and using less energy on washing clothes.

Researchers and experts tied the misjudgments to psychology and to the information people receive. Jiaying Zhao, a professor who teaches psychology and sustainability at the University of British Columbia, said the human brain responds differently to emissions than to physical waste. She said, “You can see the bottle being recycled. That’s visible. Whereas carbon emissions, that’s invisible to the human eye. So that’s why we don’t associate emissions with flying.”

Zhao added that people are also more likely to give higher psychological weight to actions they do more often and that are more frequently discussed. She said, “Recycling is an almost daily action, whereas flying is less frequent. It’s less discussed,” and that participants as a result gave recycling higher weight.

The study also treated pet ownership as a surprising climate decision, largely through the climate impact of meat. AP reported that the researchers said dogs are “big meat eaters,” and that meat contributes to climate change because farm animals that enter the food system release methane, a greenhouse gas. Zhao told AP that people do not clearly connect pets with carbon emissions, saying, “People just don’t associate pets with carbon emissions. That link is not clear in people’s minds.”

Zhao said the link can vary across types of pets and feeding choices. She said she owns a dog and three rabbits and that she could adopt “100 bunnies that will not be close to the emissions of a dog, because my dog is a carnivore.” She also said a dog owner can lower their impact by choosing food sources other than beef and that she tries to minimize her dog’s carbon footprint by feeding her less carbon-intensive protein sources, including seafood and turkey.

The report described aviation as another key contributor because flying produces carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides, as well as contrails that affect how warming gases escape into space. It said a round-trip economy-class flight on a Boeing 737 from New York to Los Angeles produces “more than 1,300 pounds of emissions per passenger,” citing the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency. AP reported that skipping a single flight saves about as much carbon as swearing off eating all types of meat for a year, or living without a car for more than three months, according to U.N. estimates.

Beyond meat and flying, the study discussed other household and consumption choices. AP reported that switching to renewable energy such as solar and wind can have a large positive impact because it does not emit greenhouse gases. It also said recycling is effective for reducing waste headed to landfill, but that its climate impact is relatively small because transporting, processing, and repurposing recyclables can rely on fossil fuels, and it noted that less than 10% of plastics are recycled, citing the Environmental Protection Agency.

The researchers and experts said misleading information and outdated messaging can also contribute to miscalculations. Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told AP that “There has been a lot of deliberate confusion out there to support policies that are really out of date.”

The study suggested a way to reduce the errors by changing what people see and when they see it. After participants finished ranking actions, the researchers corrected their mistakes, AP reported, and the participants adjusted the actions they said they would take to help the planet. Vlasceanu said, “People do learn from these interventions,” and she added that after learning, “they are more willing to commit to actually more impactful actions.”