Gabe Plotkin is the Chief Operating Officer of Tradewater, a company that improves the environment and creates economic opportunity through the collection, control, and destruction of potent, high impact greenhouse gases.

Climate change is scary. The magnitude of the problem makes it hard for people to commit to direct action to solve it, hoping instead (reasonably but perhaps impractically) that government will do the work. The actions we as individuals do manage are spurred by sporadic panic: when there’s a catastrophic storm or forest fire, one jumps into doing this and that to reduce emissions. But after the adrenaline subsides, our attention is then caught by some other crisis and we neglect climate change.

This is entirely understandable and normal. But how do we counteract it? Just because something is a natural tendency doesn’t mean we should give into it. How can one replace inertia with calm, consistent, unstoppable action? This episode has a concise solution that includes the carbon offset credit, a tool that our guest, Gabe Plotkin, helps us come to grips with.

More about carbon offset credits and why destroying the gases in refrigerants is critical to reaching drawdown—the time when the carbon load in the atmosphere levels off and begins to decline—can be found here.

To offset your household’s or your business’s greenhouse gas emissions, go here, to the Tradewatwer website. It takes only a few minutes. If you know yourself well and are pretty experienced in knowing that you get annoyed by too many options, don’t bother with the carbon calculator on the right hand side of the screen. Instead, use the left-hand side of the screen where you enter a straightforward dollar amount. The average household in America emits 20 tons of carbon a year, just go with that and pay $300. If you want to do more and can afford to offset both your home and someone else’s, enter $600. If you live in a small apartment in a large city, don’t own a car, and suspect you emit only half the greenhouse gases of the average household, enter $150. Or if you want to cover only one ton of emissions or maybe want to give that as a gift to someone, one ton is $15.

There are many websites from other reputable businesses like Tradewater that offer carbon offsets. But the point of this episode of our podcast was to reduce the volume of choices a person faces. Having an excessive number of options stands in the way of making a decisive, ethical action to make the world a better place. That’s why we recommend one specific website rather than saying something more general, like “shop around.” 

Underneath the “reduce your emissions” mandate lie a series of essential soft skills. Without having the underlying abilities to make a significant change in behavior, someone typically starts off with enthusiasm and then trails off over time. It leaves a good-intentioned person feeling that they failed to follow through on something they genuinely care about.

The sources we recommend here help not just with reducing greenhouse gas emissions but with making any type of behavioral change. They explain why doing something small and repeating the action consistently is the most assured path to keeping the promises we make to ourselves. These books break down the science of how to adopt a new good habit or drop a poor one: “The Slight Edge” by Jeffrey Olsen; “Atomic Habits” by James Clear; and “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. Being able to follow through on something isn’t a personality trait; it’s a skill that can be taught, practiced and learned.