If you could do one thing to help stop climate change, what would have the biggest impact?
Start recycling?
Go thrifting?
Switch to LEDs?
While these are all good options, none of them are at the top of the list.
We crunched the numbers and came up with the 10 most important steps you can take to reduce your total carbon footprint (which is about 28.8 metric tons a year, by the way).
Depending on your lifestyle, all of these may not apply, so use the list as guidance on some of the best things you can do to help the planet.
1. Move Your Money Out of Big Banks = ~4.6 metric tons a year
You might be asking yourself, what do big banks have to do with climate change?
Banks take their customers’ deposits and use them to fund interest-bearing loans, which earns them revenue. The world’s 60 biggest banks poured 6.9 trillion dollars directly into loans for the fossil fuel industry from 2016-2023.1
According to a study by Project Drawdown, keeping $1,000 a year in a traditional big bank like Wells Fargo, Chase, or Bank of America has roughly the same carbon footprint as flying from New York to Seattle.
If you were to deposit your money at a climate-friendly institution like Aspiration† instead, you’d avoid funding fossil fuel companies and decrease your banking-related emissions by about 76%.2
Switching your bank to a climate-friendly alternative is potentially the most powerful climate action you can take!
(For the full list of assumptions and calculations for this and all solutions in this list, check out carbon emission methodology here)
2. Live Car-Free = ~4.5 metric tons a year
This comes in at a very close second place, assuming:
You can take the subway to work each day (50 weeks each year, 5 times a week)
You take one longer trip every other month using intercity rail
All other trips are done by walking, bicycling, or kick scooting
Depending on where you live and work, living car-free may not be an option. Fortunately, there are other transportation-related options you can try further down the list.
3. Move to Climate Friendly Investments = ~3.1 metric tons a year10
Do you invest in stocks, bonds, index funds, or have a retirement plan like a 401(k)? If so, have you ever considered the climate impact of that money?
Similar to how your bank deposits can fund fossil fuel companies, your investments may be doing the same thing.
For example, if you own an index fund of the S&P 500, you own a tiny slice of 500 companies. Some of those may be fossil fuel companies, so you “own” a tiny slice of their carbon footprint.
How big is this impact?
The average U.S. family owns about $489,000 across their regular investments and retirement accounts, and with an average household size of 2.5, the average personal carbon footprint of those investments is about 6.4 metric tons.4,5
By moving to a more climate-friendly investment fund (like our Redwood mutual fund), you can cut your investment carbon footprint nearly in half.
4. Switch to an Electric Vehicle = ~2.2 metric tons a year
The climate impact of switching to an electric vehicle depends on a few things:
How much you drive
What vehicle you’re replacing
How green your local electricity mix is
In most cases, making the switch to an EV vehicle can substantially reduce your carbon footprint. And if you can power your EV with renewable energy, that’s even better.
5. Switch to a Vegan Diet = ~ 1.74 tons a year.6,7
The carbon footprint of raising livestock for meat and dairy is much higher than growing most fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes. Cows famously produce a lot of methane, and clearing the land needed for the animals we eat often involves deforestation.
Even if you can’t go completely vegan, the more you can eat plant-based, the larger your climate impact will be.
6. Drive a Hybrid Vehicle = ~1.5 metric tons a year
If you don’t have access to electric charging or have a lifestyle or live in a place where charging is difficult, an EV vehicle may not be an option. But switching to a hybrid (no plug required) still has a huge impact on the carbon footprint. That’s because you need less gasoline to travel the same distance, saving gasoline and money at the pump.
7. Install Residential Solar or Buy Green Electricity = ~1.4 metric tons a year
Powering your home with renewable energy like wind or solar can have a huge impact on your carbon footprint.
Don’t own a house or can’t afford installing solar at the moment? You may still be able to make an impact if your residence participates in a community solar program or if your utility provider offers a green energy plan. It’s worth checking to see if these options are available in your area!
8. Cut Out Red Meat = ~1.0 metric tons a year
Not ready or can't change your diet to a fully plant-based one? Try cutting out red meat (meat from cows, pigs, sheep, and goats.) and replace it with other forms of protein like chicken, fish, eggs or beans.
9. Switch to an Electric Heat Pump = ~0.63 metric tons a year
If every American installed heat pumps in their home, we could reduce the national emissions by up to 9%.8 How?
1. Heat pumps are up to 3 times more efficient than gas furnaces or air conditioners for heating and cooling
2. Heat pumps run on electricity, rather than directly using fossil fuels like natural gas (electrical grids are powered by a mixture of wind, solar, hydro, coal, and natural gas)
Additionally, while the upfront cost is high for heat pumps, about 59% of households (65 million people) will save money in the long run if they install them.8 That’s good for your wallet and the planet.
10. Adopt a Vegetarian Diet = ~0.6 metric tons a year
The reasoning here is the same as it is for vegan diets. Vegetarian meals include more plant-based foods, which are significantly less carbon-intensive to produce than meat.
You may be wondering why a meatless diet has a lower carbon footprint than a vegetarian diet. Based on leading research from John Hopkins University, vegetarian diets often rely heavily on dairy products to get sufficient protein. Since dairy has a very large carbon footprint, much higher than chicken and fish, this can actually result in the average vegetarian diet having a slightly larger carbon footprint than swapping out red meat for chicken.7
Of course, there are plenty of other great reasons to be a vegetarian other than the direct climate impact, and vegetarian diets still have a much lower carbon footprint than the average U.S. diet.
The runners up
Here are some of the impactful actions that didn’t make the top 10.
Replace natural gas with electric appliances in your home = ~0.39 metric tons
Reduce food waste by not throwing away food at home = ~0.30 metric tons
Take trains instead of flying (domestic flights) = ~0.27 metric tons
Buy half of your clothes and furnishings used = ~0.27 metric tons
Upgrade your home to LED lights = ~0.21 metric tons
Take one fewer domestic round-trip flight = ~0.14 metric tons
Adjust your thermostat by 3°F to heat and cool your home less = ~0.02 metric tons
While these actions aren’t quite as impactful at lowering your carbon footprint, they all have powerful climate and non-climate benefits, and it’s worth doing as many as you can.
Putting it all together
Climate change is one of the biggest challenges we’re collectively facing, but the data clearly shows that you can make a difference.
If you took the top 5 most impactful actions above (green your bank, live car free, green your investments, go vegan, power your home with renewable electricity), you could cut your carbon footprint by an estimated 15.3 metric tons a year - nearly a 47% reduction in your total footprint.
Even if you can’t do all of these things, focus on what you can do, and make incremental progress towards the rest.
The good news is that two of the top 3 things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint don’t require you to radically change your lifestyle or break the bank.
They do, however, require you to move your money out of your bank.
If every household in the U.S just moved their money to a climate-friendly banking institution, it would be the equivalent of avoiding 1.437 billion tons of CO2 each year - or over 161 billion gallons of gasoline. That’s more than the annual gasoline consumption of the entire nation!
If you’re interested in learning more about our climate-friendly banking products, visit our site and consider applying!†
From Chad Hunter, Aspiration's Head of Sustainability.
References
1. Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Indigenous Environmental Network, Oil Change International, Reclaim Finance, Sierra Club, Stand Research Group, Urgewald, and Center for Energy, Ecology, and Development (2024). Banking on Climate Chaos. Fossil Fuel Finance Report 2024.
2. Alexander, J.B., Moinester, P., and Kraus-Polk, J. (2023). Saving (for) the Planet. The Climate Power of Personal Banking (Project Drawdown).
3. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.) (2023). Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2019 to 2022: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances. Fed. Reserve Bull. https://doi.org/10.17016/8799.
4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2021). Consumer Expenditure Surveys Tables. https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables.htm.
5. The Federal Reserve (2023). Survey of Consumer Finances, 1989 - 2022. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/table/index.html#series:Transaction_Accounts;demographic:all;population:all;units:mean.
6. National Center for Health Statistics (2018). National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 1999–2000 to 2017–2018.
7. Kim, B.F., Santo, R.E., Scatterday, A.P., Fry, J.P., Synk, C.M., Cebron, S.R., Mekonnen, M.M., Hoekstra, A.Y., de Pee, S., Bloem, M.W., et al. (2020). Country-specific dietary shifts to mitigate climate and water crises. Glob. Environ. Change 62, 101926. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.05.010.
8. Wilson, E.J.H., Munankarmi, P., Less, B.D., Reyna, J.L., and Rothgeb, S. (2024). Heat pumps for all? Distributions of the costs and benefits of residential air-source heat pumps in the United States. Joule 0. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2024.01.022.
9. U.S. EIA (2023). The majority of U.S. households used natural gas in 2020. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55940.
10. Aspiration's Personal Carbon Footprint Calculation Methodology (2024). https://www.aspiration.com/resources/carbon-footprint-calculation-methodology