Encouraging people to adopt low-carbon lifestyles is useful but no silver bullet for climate change. Plus, deep sea mining of thermal vents may look commercially attractive but will lead to the extinction of many unique animals.

Can personal behaviours be changed to reduce emissions?

If all eight billion of us used only renewable energy for all our needs and followed only vegan diets, global greenhouse gas emissions would plummet. That is obvious and sounds attractive in terms of reducing global warming but it’s also completely unrealistic in the foreseeable future for a whole range of reasons. Still worthwhile emissions reductions could be achieved by widespread adoption (particularly in wealthy developed countries and the rapidly emerging economies) of four changes to personal behaviours:

Replacing the use of personal petrol and diesel driven vehicles with EVs, combined with more walking, cycling and use of public transport.

Replacing much of our air travel with high-speed rail and teleconferencing.

Installing home solar panels and batteries and increasing home energy efficiency.

Eating more plant-rich meals.

The important word above is “widespread”. Trying to change the behaviour of individuals simply with programs to persuade them to change is not terribly successful at the population level. Even with long-term effort, typically at most 10 per cent of the population move in the desired direction.

Achieving widespread adoption of the four high impact behavioural changes recommended above is dependent on government policies that actively support the desired changes by making it easy, attractive and practical for people to change (eg, free public transport and a reliable network of high-speed rail services), providing incentives to change (eg, subsidies for home batteries) and disincentives for individuals to keep producing GHGs (eg, higher taxes on meat products and petrol-driven vehicles).

Clearly, many of the changes individuals might want to make are also facilitated or inhibited by the products that are available to them, so similar principles should be applied by governments to changing the practices of producers and retailers (eg, to reduce food and other product packaging and avoid the destruction of carbon-rich environments such as wetlands and old growth forests).

All levels of government can also promote individual behaviour change by modelling good behaviour themselves – by providing........

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