Catastrophic climate change is looming. The Earth just endured its 12 hottest months in 125,000 years, and scientists say humans can only avert ecological disaster, if we cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 70% by 2050.
That may sound daunting, but Oakland entrepreneur Sanchali Pal said it is within people’s power to make meaningful choices in their own lives. Her free new app, Commons, helps people track and reduce their carbon footprint — the total amount of carbon dioxide and other emissions they generate — by tracking how they spend money on food, utilities, clothes, furniture or travel.
“Basically, I wanted to make it easier for people to make sustainable choices,” Pal said. “I knew, as a consumer myself, how hard it was, how much work it took to get the information required to actually make progress and measurably lower emissions.”
The Boston-reared Pal was first inspired to track her own carbon footprint during college at Princeton. She subsequently lived and worked in India and Ethiopia, where she saw how people’s daily lives were increasingly compromised by rising temperatures, drought, floods or access to water. After monitoring her own activities in an Excel spreadsheet for six years, she lowered her own emissions by 30% and saved about $2,000 a year.
With the Commons app, users input basic lifestyle information, including the size of their homes, how often they fly and how often they eat meat; meat production is known to require large amounts of land and involve the destruction of forests. If users choose to connect the app to their credit or debit cards, it automatically estimates the emissions of each purchase to provide a real-time update. The app also provides rewards, which users can take in cash, donate to an organization or redeem for carbon offsetting.
“To have a sustainable lifestyle, it doesn’t have to be extreme,” Pal said. “You don’t have to be vegan, you don’t have to stop flying, but you can make a lot of important progress towards reducing emissions with choices that are better for you, too.”
Q. What prompted your interest in this?
A. During my senior year at Princeton, I was taking a sustainable economics class and saw the documentary, “Food Inc.” After tracking my carbon footprint in an Excel spreadsheet, I thought, if people lowered their emissions even 5 or 10%, and hundreds of thousands of people were making these choices, that would matter a lot.
Q. What changes really surprised you?
A. I was eating about 12 meals with meat per week. By cutting that down to two, I calculated I was taking half a car off the road every year. I didn’t have to go fully vegetarian. What if my entire dining hall of 250 people at Princeton did that? That would be taking 125 cars off the road each year.I now eat meat once a week. I still fly, but I think about whether the trip is worth it and whether it fits into my carbon budget.
Q. With people tracking their carbon footprints, does that put too much onus on individuals? A 2017 study showed that major corporations have created the majority of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.
A. Yes, climate change was set in motion by decisions that governments and companies have been making over hundreds of years. But that doesn’t mean we’re powerless to make a difference. Households influence over 65% of global emissions through their spending choices, how we heat and power our homes, whether we buy clothes new, the food we buy, how we travel. We have the ability to send a signal to companies about the world we want to live in with our spending choices.
Q. How does linking your spending to the app track your emissions?
A. Say, you spent $50 on gasoline at Shell, and you live in Oakland. The price of gasoline here is $5 a gallon, which means you bought 10 gallons of gasoline — then the carbon footprint is 100kg of CO2. Meanwhile, maybe you made a separate purchase of $50 at a local thrift store. The app assigns that a zero-footprint because buying clothes that already exist is a sustainable purchase. We show you a real-time feed of emissions and which purchases are sustainable.
Even if you don’t link your spending to the app, you can access our whole library of content, which includes guides on everything from how to switch to community solar, if you’re a renter, to building a planet-friendly wardrobe.
If you choose to offset your footprint, we evaluate and curate offsetting projects. Not all offset projects are created equal, and many don’t have the impact intended. We take about a 20% fee to evaluate these projects, and that’s how we make money.
Q. Speaking of offsetting, let’s talk about the concern that it’s used by large companies or very wealthy people, including celebrities who claim to be environmentalists, to justify using private planes or making other unsustainable choices by saying, “I’m offsetting.”
A. Among the ultra-rich, flying is really a big part of their carbon footprints. Higher incomes are associated with higher-emission lifestyles. That’s why the United States has a higher carbon footprint per capita than, say, India, or why the top 10% of wealthiest households globally are responsible for over half the emissions.
Offsets are tools we have to address the emissions we can’t reduce in our own lives. In that way, offsets play an important role. They provide much needed financing for projects that are reducing our carbon around the world. (But) offsets cannot be a license to pollute. I think there’s a big role for us as consumers to call out folks who use a disproportionate amount of emissions in a way that is not responsible.
Q. In looking at your app, I have to admit, I never thought about why flying economy is better for the environment.
A. One of our investors is (“Game of Thrones” actor) Maisie Williams. She doesn’t fly private, and she doesn’t fly very much. When she does, she flies economy. Her carbon footprint was actually just a little bit higher than mine. She aims to be climate neutral. When fewer people fly first or business class, more seats can be put on a plane, and we’ll have fewer planes flying.
Q. What are other choices people may not have thought about?
A. They could think about which banks they use. Relatively new research shows that a lot of major banks lend money to fossil fuel companies or finance fossil fuel projects.
Q. Are you scared or hopeful about the future?
A. I’m definitely scared but also hopeful. We don’t have much time. It’s the end of 2023, and the US has pledged to cut its emissions by half by 2030. But I wouldn’t be doing this work, if I didn’t think we had a chance.
I went to a talk the other day by a climate economist and heard something inspiring. Recent reports said, we might be too far gone to keep global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. But, he said, five decades ago, we were shooting at 9 degrees warming, and then we were shooting at 4 degrees warming. Now, we’re at 1.5 to 2 degrees. U.S. emissions also have gone down significantly over the last decade. For the average American, it used to be 20 metric tons a year, now it’s 15 metric tons a year. That’s huge progress.
ABOUT SANCHALI PAL
Age: 33
Title: Founder & CEO at Commons
Home town: Oakland
Education: A.B. in economics from Princeton, MBA from Harvard
FIVE THINGS
Pal loves to cook and explore Bay Area restaurants, especially in Oakland; Mela Bistro and Lion Dance Cafe are favorites.While she isn’t fully vegetarian, Pal has lowered her food footprint by about 85%.Pal was featured in Time Magazine for her work on Commons.She lived and worked in India and Ethiopia for several years.Her standard coffee order is a cortado with oat milk – less milk than a cappuccino, but more than a macchiato.
