Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

by William MacAskill

One common recommendation is to turn off or shut down electronic devices when you’re not using them, rather than keeping them on standby. However, this achieves very little compared to other things you could do: one hot bath adds more to your carbon footprint than leaving your phone charger plugged in for a whole year; even leaving on your TV (one of the worst offenders in terms of standby energy use) for a whole year contributes less to your carbon footprint than driving a car for just two hours. Another common recommendation is to turn off lights when you leave a room, but lighting accounts for only 3 percent of household energy use, so even if you never used lighting in your house, you would save only a fraction of a metric ton of carbon emissions. Plastic bags have also been a major focus of concern, but even on very generous estimates, if you stopped using plastic bags entirely, you’d cut out one hundred kilograms CO2 equivalent per year, which is only 0.4 percent of your total emissions.