Your Climate Budget
I’m going to make a bold assumption here: you’re willing to spend some money to reduce your climate footprint. But unless you’re pretty lucky in life, that’s not going to be an infinite amount. What you need is a “climate budget.”
You should know by now that this is not the type of website where I make you sit down and fill out a bunch of spreadsheets to figure this out. You may also realize that this is the point where I tell you that what you really need to do is ask the right questions.
But first, a little context. How much do you spend on your home (and transportation, since we’re looking at that too) annually? There will be a wide range here — so these are very much rough-cut numbers — but according to the annual Consumer Expenditure Survey data collected by our friends at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2020 an average U.S. household spent about $13,500 on home maintenance and appliances, utilities (electricity, natural gas, and other fuels), and transportation. (The big ticket item there is transportation — almost $10,000 a year — unsurprisingly mostly going to cars and related expenses.) If you’re lucky enough to live sixty years as an adult paying your own bills, that’s more than $800,000 dollars of spending related to your personal energy use.
Your figure may be fairly different, but if you don’t want to sit down with your receipts or credit card bills and do some math, this hopefully gives you a sense of magnitude. You’re probably spending thousands of dollars every year and hundreds of thousands over the course of your lifetime on heating, cooling, cooking, washing, and moving around — the items and activities that make up a large part of your climate footprint. How much should you spend to make those “climate smart”?
As you’re pondering the answer to that question, here are two things to ask yourself:
How much do you spend on other things that are important to you? You may have heard some variation on the saying “show me your budget and I’ll show you what you value.” A big portion of the spending involved in Steps Zero through Three will have a direct, personal return — whether in utility bill savings, home comfort, or the convenience of never having to stop at a gas station again unless you need to use the bathroom — but some of it will involve using your own money to pay for the greater good. I can’t tell you how much that should be, but I hope it will be just as much as you’re willing to spend on whatever else you think is important.
Do you have resources that others don’t? Here’s where you should look at the Energy Equity section of this site if you haven’t already. This is not meant as a guilt trip, just a practical consideration: if we’re going to do what we need to in order to manage the impacts of climate change, a significant slice of people need to step up and make changes to how they use energy. There are only so many people who have the resources to make those investments — so if you’re one of them, you’re a valuable asset in the climate fight. Don’t sit on the sidelines.
You don’t necessarily need to come up with a specific number at the end of this mental exercise — especially since your situation may change along the way as you reach different decision points for each of these steps. But the process of thinking through these questions will hopefully help you make “climate smart” choices along the way.