Transcriber: Petra Molnárová Reviewer: Melissa Csikszentmihályi
Let’s face it, we’re in a climate crisis.
Understanding that can feel daunting.
What can I do?
Should I be taking shorter showers?
Ditching my straw at the coffee shop?
Do I need to abandon my worldly possessions and move to the woods?
Or should I just accept the doom of humanity?
The climate crisis is not any of our faults,
and none of us alone can solve it.
But a common misconception is that we’re powerless to make a difference.
What if I told you, you do something every day that influences
the majority of global emissions?
That’s right.
We spend money,
and our household consumption influences 65% of global emissions.
Just think about that.
Whether it’s how we power our homes, prepare our food,
transport ourselves, or what we choose to buy,
we affect our shared climate trajectory through our money.
And those of us in developed countries,
with higher incomes and higher standards of living,
have an outsized role to play,
because carbon footprints are directly correlated with income.
It's both empowering and challenging.
It’s good to know our choices matter, but we can’t place every choice every day.
We need to know where to focus.
By taking ownership of our emissions, and finding our biggest levers for change,
each of us can find our role in the climate solution.
That’s why I started Joro.
With the Joro app, you can track the emissions of everything you buy,
connect your cards and let the app do the work.
We’ll show you real-time insights into the footprint of everything,
from groceries to flights.
Then the guides and recommendations to reduce the emission within your control
start to develop a carbon intuition,
or a sense of your most impactful levers for change.
You might find that you can erase your commutes footprint
by skipping meat at lunch or by shopping second hand,
cut your footprint from clothes in half
and save money too / your home energy bill and footprint by focusing
on the energy intensive choices.
Surprisingly, not your lights,
but the ways you use heating and cooling.
With Joro, you don’t have to stop there.
Even the most committed of us can’t reduce our footprints to zero,
but with Joro, you can go Net Zero today by offsetting the emissions
you can’t yet avoid.
Our team does the work for you.
Maximizing the impact of your dollars by automatically buying carbon credits
from offset projects you can trust, every month.
We vet projects that reduce and remove carbon in innovative ways.
For instance, protecting forests, capturing carbon and seaweed in oceans,
and even storing carbon deep underground.
Most importantly, with Joro,
you’re not only going Net Zero as a person, you join a community.
Together, we’re shifting demand away from fossil fuels and voting
for a greener and more equitable world with our dollars.
I started Joro because I saw the effects
of the climate crisis firsthand.
In 2015, I was living in Ethiopia,
working in agriculture and economic development.
That year, we saw the worst drought in recent history.
Over 10 million people were affected.
I met farmers whose livelihoods were destroyed.
And since 2015, the signs have only gotten more stark.
Wildfires are ravaging the US, especially in California,
where I live now.
Flooding, hurricanes, and cyclones are causing death and destruction
in island nations across the world.
While those with higher incomes
disproportionately contribute to the crisis,
folks in poor and vulnerable communities are the most affected.
Climate change is a human problem.
It causes human suffering.
And solving it requires each of us to be part of the solution.
It’s personal.
But how do we understand how we fit into these larger systems,
and how we can make an impact?
When we think about where emissions come from, we often break them down
by sector at a macroeconomic scale:
energy, transportation, agriculture, industry.
Countries and companies measure their emissions in these economic buckets.
But somehow, when it comes to people,
we often think of ourselves as separate from the systems that cause emissions,
yet we’re the ones buying the goods and services sold by the companies
that are accumulating those emissions.
So what if we change the way we demand goods?
What if we shifted rapidly together away from fossil fuel intensive products?
What would happen?
We’re already seeing the answer play out.
Let’s take agriculture.
Meat products, especially beef, are a major driver of global emissions.
If they were a country,
cows would be the world’s sixth-largest emitter.
Yet, between 2005 and 2014,
Americans ate 19% less beef,
driven by an increase in plant-based diets,
and this trend is growing quickly.
Gen Z, Millennials are 3 times more likely to be plant-based than folks
over the age of 50.
As a result of shifting tastes and preferences,
not as a result of policy, our food systems are getting greener.
Let’s take another example, travel.
Flights are a major driver of emissions.
In 2018, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg started school climate strikes,
which elevated the debate around flight shame.
In the months afterwards, Sweden is on 9% drop in intercity flights
and German airports saw a 12% drop.
In early 2021, this year, French lawmakers moved to ban short-haul flights
where trains exist, citing carbon emissions as the major reason.
Thousands of individual travelers choosing to fly less
has caused ripple effects, resulting in systems-level changes
that make lower carbon travel easier for everyone.
Our demand can change the system if we do it together.
Voting and advocating for policy change are incredibly important,
but we often overlook how our dollars can also help fuel or bait the crisis.
So go ahead.
Download Joro, develop a carbon intuition.
Focus on achievable choices that matter.
Compensate for what you can't yet change and give yourself some grace.
Gradually, you start taking bigger actions, get other people on board,
and then use your voice to advocate for larger change.