It was the summer of 2012 when sustainability scientist Kimberly Nicholas decided she couldn’t live like this anymore. She was attending a climate change conference in Austria, listening to talk after talk about how bad global warming was and how much worse it was going to get. All the while, Nicholas was thinking about all of the planet-heating carbon that she, like most other attendees, had dumped into the atmosphere by flying there.
“It really felt like a conference of doctors smoking cigarettes and telling our patients to quit,” Nicholas said.
But after a beer with a U.K.-based friend who took a train to the conference, Nicholas, who is American but lives and conducts research in Sweden, realized something: She could have done that too. Since then, Nicholas has stopped flying within Europe, cutting her air travel emissions by 90 percent in the process. She has also stopped eating meat and gone car-free. To ensure she’s making lifestyle changes that will have the biggest carbon bang for their buck, Nicholas conducted peer-reviewed research on the subject. In 2017, she and her colleague Seth Wyens published a paper on the individual behavioral changes that have the greatest benefits for the climate. Topping the list? Flying less, followed by driving less and eating a plant-based diet.
Nicholas has now expanded that paper into a book, Under the Sky We Make. A crash-course on why climate change is happening and how to fix it interwoven with beautifully written, witty anecdotes about a scientist’s personal journey toward sustainability, Under the Sky We Make pushes back — politely, but with science — against the narrative that individual actions make little difference to the climate. Rather, if you’re a wealthy person living in a wealthy country, the book makes a compelling case that your individual choices matter a lot. For the “carbon elite,” as Nicholas describes her intended audience, the decision to take fewer flights or install solar panels on your roof materially reduces the amount of carbon in the sky forever, not least because it can inspire similar behavioral changes amongst your peers.
“We all have to take responsibility for what we can control,” Nicholas said. “And people like me, and like my friends from college who I initially started writing this book for, are one of the major sources of emissions.”