Electric vehicles tend to produce fewer emissions across their lifespan than gas cars.

A READER ASKS: What can a Bostonian do to help ease climate change?

Trying to take action to ease climate change as an individual can be a daunting task; the biggest sources of carbon emissions are not the average resident, but larger companies and institutions.

According to a report released earlier this year by Carbon Majors, a database of production data from 180 of the world’s largest fossil fuel and cement producers, 36 of the largest fossil fuel companies were responsible for more than half of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2023.

Locally, emissions are similarly stilted. According to the city, buildings account for 70% of emissions across Boston; 4% of buildings account for the majority of emissions from buildings.

That means the most effective actions to address greenhouse gas emissions and the changing climate, would come not from individuals, but bigger organizations.

“But we can’t just wait for everyone to decide to do the right thing,” said Hessann Farooqi, executive director of the Boston Climate Action Network.

Historically, some of the largest greenhouse gas emitters haven’t made solving those problems easy, often developing strategies to shunt responsibility for dealing with institutional emissions onto the individual.

The concept of a personal carbon footprint — the idea of tracking how an individual’s actions or lifestyle produces greenhouse gas emissions, with the goal of addressing or limiting those emissions — was popularized by a public relations company on behalf of fossil fuel company BP in the early 2000s.

Other efforts like plastic recycling have been pushed by oil and gas companies, who produce those plastics, despite the fact that limited amounts of plastic have actually been recycled.

Some institutions and organizations have begun to “take leadership and … choose to do the right thing,” by decreasing emissions and improving resilience, Farooqi said.

For example, last year MIT, Harvard and Mass General Brigham, along with a consortium of other smaller institutions, announced a joint investment in two clean energy projects in Texas and North Dakota as a way to balance out some of the emissions they produce. Hospitals across the region have announced steps to try to clean up some of the most polluting aspects of their work. And colleges and universities have drawn plans to reduce or eliminate emissions in the coming decades.

But other steps are needed to move the needle.

That might include government guidelines and regulations — for example, the city of Boston’s Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance, which requires large buildings in the city to report and reduce their emissions to net-zero by 2050.

In the meantime, residents can take their own steps to address environmental challenges.

In 2024, the state of Massachusetts launched a campaign to encourage individual climate action that included steps like home weatherization and installing heat pumps, purchasing electric vehicles or opting for public transit, and installing solar panels or joining a community solar program.

Those sorts of individual actions can have an impact. Electric vehicles aren’t a perfect solution — their production and the electricity used to charge them come with their own emissions — but research from MIT found that across the board, they tend to produce fewer emissions across their lifespan than gas cars.

And weatherization of a home can offer significant energy savings, reducing energy consumption by up to an estimated 30% per month.

But many of the solutions included in the state’s campaign can be costly or require being a homeowner (though the state did include some efforts that don’t fall into those buckets — for example, community solar programs are a way for residents to opt into solar without installing panels on their own roof, or riding a bike or public transit offer cleaner and cheaper transit options than buying an EV).

Many of the proposed solutions might attract a limited audience.

Weatherizing a home or installing solar panels becomes a challenge if a resident doesn’t own the building they live in. Even owning an electric vehicle becomes more complex without a place to charge it at home, though state bodies and the city of Boston are working to make on-street charging more accessible for residents without a driveway or garage in which to charge overnight.

The price tag on many of those solutions can also be challenging when residents have other financial obligations, too.

Electric vehicles tend to be more expensive than gas cars off the bat, though costs throughout their lifetime might end up lower.

Installation of an air source heat pump can cost between $8,000 and $15,000 for a system that heats and cools the whole home, but smaller “mini-splits,” which heat and cool an individual room, cost less at $1,500 to $5,000. Weatherization costs can vary from home to home, but might cost between about $4,700 and $7,000.

In its campaign, the state also included details about rebates and other cost-saving measures, with the pitch that they needed to bring lower-income residents on board if Massachusetts is going to meet its emissions reduction goals.

Even then, the cost or time commitment some solutions require can scare people off, Farooqi said. “It is true that there are lots of ways that we are often asked to take action on climate change that just don’t work for most of our lives,” he said.

In between those two categories of institutional and individual action, however, is a third option: that of collective action.

For example, joining a municipal aggregation program, which includes a higher proportion of credited renewable energy than a basic utility rate, or opting to take public transit.

In Boston, the municipal aggregation program, called Boston’s Community Choice Electricity program, is optout, meaning residents are automatically enrolled and have to indicate they don’t want to participate. Residents can change their status to enroll or opt out through the city’s website.

Those actions can have a broader positive impact, too; paying subway fares or opting into municipal aggregation electricity programs would mean increased financial support for those efforts that could result in continued or improved operations.

“Fundamentally, [collective action is] the only way that we can do this in a way that’s both effective and scalable and replicable, but also in a way that’s affordable to Boston families,” Farooqi said.

Farooqi said that sort of collective effort is the bread and butter of the Boston Climate Action Network. He pointed to other steps like shopping at local businesses, which can reduce emissions from transportation, as well as supporting climate action through voting, especially in local elections (Boston voters go to the polls on Nov. 4 to vote for City Council and mayoral candidates).

Other efforts that are currently more individually focused could be more effective if collective solutions to tackle the same issue were developed, Farooqi said.

“Something like home energy efficiency can be way simpler if we make it a collective action, rather than one that every individual has to figure out on their own,” he said.

That kind of collective effort extends to engagement in supporting the development of new city-led solutions. In August, the city of Boston released a preliminary draft of its new fiveyear climate action plan.

The document — really a draft of the official draft the city will release in the fall — encouraged community input.

To ensure the plan reflected community needs, the draft included survey questions that encouraged residents to weigh in on how proposed changes might mesh with their daily lives. The city asked participants to share concerns about things like the impact of electric delivery trucks in their neighborhoods and whether they’d consider switching from a gas to an induction stove — an upgrade that can improve indoor air quality — if financial support were available.

In an interview following the release of the draft, Boston’s first Green New Deal Director Oliver Sellers-Garcia said the city was looking to shift its process and conduct more engagement with community members to decide what goes in the plan.

“So many of these plans have really shot for the moon before everyone gets a chance to look at it together,” he said in the August interview.

Farooqi said that sort of buy-in is important to make the city’s plan effective.

“Implementing these programs is hard,” he said. “It’s much easier when people are already bought into the process from the beginning, and they can help define it and shape its priorities and its values, rather than something happening and then they only find out at the very end.”