Your Carbon Footprint is the amount of greenhouse gases that you generate in your daily activities. It includes the emissions generated from heating your home, driving your car, producing the goods you buy and the food you eat, etc. If you want to find out what your carbon footprint is, you can use this calculator, or this one.
In CCL, we believe that reducing your own emissions is important but not sufficient. What is really needed is a comprehensive national policy (a great first step would be the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act!). Thus, we think two of the most important things you can do are: call on your elected officials to support impactful policies, and vote for candidates at every level of government who prioritize climate action.
If you are looking for ways to reduce your own carbon footprint, these articles provide great suggestions:
And, to see the relative impact of different actions, see the figure below from a research paper by Seth Wynes and Kimberly A Nicholas, “The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions”, Environ. Res. Lett. 12 (2017).
