For years, I’ve been hanging our laundry to dry. Not outside on a clothesline in a poppy field, nor from a sun-drenched Tuscan balcony, but in our Ann Arbor basement, over by the boiler, on a beat-up folding rack with a bent metal crossbar.
It started when my wife and I lived in a subsidized university apartment during my medical training. On weekends, I hauled damp laundry up the stairwell and hung it piece by piece: first our clothes, then our newborn son’s, tallying up the pounds of carbon emissions I was avoiding.
It felt small because it was small. But that, I’ve come to think, is also the point.
The argument against individual climate action is familiar and, in many ways, correct: most greenhouse gas emissions emanate from industrial systems, not personal decisions. But it’s often interpreted too narrowly, implying that one person’s behavior doesn’t matter. And there is nothing like an energy shock — spiking gas prices, geopolitical instability — to remind us of the fragility of our energy systems and the need to modify our routines. I believe that the energy transition will depend not only on the infrastructure we build but on the behaviors we normalize. The two are inseparable.
The idea of the “carbon footprint,” popularized by marketers for oil giant BP in the 2000s, encouraged people to look inward at their own consumption rather than outward at the industries driving emissions. A backlash against personal climate responsibility followed, often framed on the left as a distraction from corporate responsibility, and on the right as moral posturing outweighed by large polluters in China and elsewhere.
That backlash is not wrong. Yet over time, it has hardened into something more pernicious: a kind of intellectual permission structure for inaction. The most corrosive myth in today’s climate discourse is not denial. It is the belief that because individual actions are small, they do not add up to anything meaningful.
But even hanging laundry is not nothing. Colleagues at the University of Michigan recently did the math: switching entirely to line drying could save 3 tons of CO2 and over $2,000 over the lifetime of a typical drying machine. Partial adoption cuts emissions substantially, too.
More importantly, modest substitutions in how we use energy help to rewire what feels normal. Energy stops feeling like an abstraction and more like something you actively choose to use (and thus something you can use less of). Other decisions follow more easily: turning down the thermostat a degree, buying a more efficient appliance, eating less beef or flying less.
Small actions are not the endgame. They are an entry point. But as a mentor once told me, good habits are the foundation of good doctoring. The same is true of greener living.
Americans have a tendency toward extremes: all-in or all-out, purity or abandonment. But most meaningful change lives in between, in partial measures that compound over time across millions of households.
In our basement, I’ve shifted from purism to pragmatism. I hang the bulky items first — pants, sweatshirts and t-shirts — then fill in the gaps with smaller stuff. I don’t usually hang my kids’ socks, and I’ve stopped draping the queen sheet into a soggy fort. (Those go in the dryer for a quick cycle, carbon be damned.)
To be clear, while we all bear some responsibility for climate change, that responsibility is not shared equally. Likely, no amount of line drying will cancel out the carbon emissions from private jets. But the danger lies in interpreting that fact as either total blame or total irrelevance.
In our case, small changes did not remain small. As our incomes steadied, and with federal and local incentives, my wife and I began to scale up. We bought an electric vehicle, reinsulated sections of our house and affixed solar panels to the roof.
Hanging laundry has become something of a ritual, an act that imposes order on a chaotic day. And maybe that’s where the energy transition should begin — not with sweeping change but folded into the rhythm of our everyday lives.