The Climate Smart Handbook

You’ve heard of this mess called “climate change” and think it’s worth doing something to stop it, but it feels like a huge and complicated project to take on in your personal life. It’s also not crazy to have doubts as to whether your own individual efforts (and spending) are going to really make any significant difference at the planetary level.

The fact is, because climate change is such a big problem, everyone has an important role to play in solving it — and that includes individuals and families, who do contribute significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions. We need to transform whole sectors and whole markets in order to reduce emissions enough to make a long-term difference. And who can help do that? You. Our entire world economy is set up to cater to (and encourage) certain types of decisions and ways of life. If you change those decisions, you change the market; especially if there’s a lot of people making the same choices and allowing the businesses that provide clean energy services to reach a viable scale.

That said, ten or even five years ago it might not have been an easy lift to make the switch to clean energy. But these days, pretty much all of the technologies necessary for you to switch to clean energy are here and can be affordable for many people. You just need a plan to incorporate them in your own life. That’s where this website comes in.

You’re ready to take action in your daily life to reduce your climate footprint. Great! Now let’s go ahead and spend the next few hours learning more about your utility bills.

Wait, that’s not what you had in mind? That’s fine. You don’t need to become an energy expert to go “green.” You just need to (1) know when are the key decision points you can take advantage of to reduce your climate impact without Herculean effort; and (2) understand how to make choices at those points that will really make a difference, so that you can be confident your time and resources are well-spent. You won’t end up an energy expert, but you’ll be “climate smart” — able to ask the right questions at the right times and understand the answers.

Using these tools, you’ll be able to take the three essential steps to reducing your climate footprint:

(1) Decarbonize: Many people who are concerned about climate change have already started to switch to using clean energy. But you may still have important questions on how to cut through the marketing pitches to make smart choices among the different “green” energy options on offer today, so you can maximize the climate bang for your buck in energy spending.

(2) Electrify: The fact is, at least for now electricity is the easiest type of energy to get from sources with the lowest climate impact. That means moving as much of your energy use as possible to electricity (versus oil, propane, natural gas, or other fossil fuels) is vital to achieving the greenhouse gas reductions necessary to make a real dent in climate change. Fortunately, the technologies needed to make this transition, like electric vehicles, heat pumps, and induction ranges, are rapidly becoming affordable for more and more of the population.

(3) Automate: This one may have you scratching your head, but it’s actually key to enabling you to be climate smart with a minimum of effort and cost. For now, the main thing to know is that effectively transitioning to clean energy may mean your energy use needs to become more complicated than just getting electrons from a wire or natural gas from a pipe and paying your bill every month. But using automation technology and services to manage your energy use with an eye toward climate impacts can mean that your experience doesn’t change – keeping energy use about as simple and convenient as it is for you right now.

That’s it: decarbonize, electrify, automate. It may not be as catchy as “reduce, reuse, recycle,” but it’s the environmental mantra for the climate age.