A study by the National Academy of Sciences indicates that many Americans struggle to accurately rank personal choices related to climate change. People tend to overvalue low-impact actions like recycling while undervaluing significant factors such as flying and meat consumption. The highest-impact actions, which include avoiding plane flights, opting against dog ownership, and using renewable electricity, are often underestimated. Marketing trends and the invisibility of carbon emissions influence these misconceptions, where more readily visible actions are given undue weight.
"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."
"The top three individual actions that help the climate, including avoiding plane flights, choosing not to get a dog and using renewable electricity, were also the three that participants underestimated the most."
"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."
"Recycling and using energy-efficient light bulbs were more heavily marketed than the reasons flights or dog adoption are relatively bad for the climate."
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