Want to fight climate change while being a lazy sod from the comfort of laptop? I hear ya.

I looked up a few different ways to do so so you didn’t have to.

Search with Ecosia

Ecosia is a “search engine that plants trees.” All its advertising profits go into planting trees, and it claims 40 million trees planted to date. Ecosia also offered to buy Hambach Forest from German energy company RWE, to stop it being chopped down to make way for a coal mine, and has an ethically-sourced clothing shop from which it invests profits back into tree planting. It Add the browser extension and start planting trees today. If you want to keep using Google, install Ecosia for your elderly relatives and buy some merch instead.

Invest in Jumpstart Energy

Jumpstart Energy enables you to invest or donate small amounts of money to provide clean energy to selected communities around the world, helping to remove the risk of coal or other dirty power sources stepping into the breach. It offers two types of projects: gift projects and return projects. Gift projects are impact-focused donations. Return projects mean you make some profit on your investment.

Unrelated image of a lazy monkey

Donate to Cool Earth

Cool Earth works with rainforest communities to stop deforestation. In their words, “The more biodiverse a forest, the more carbon it stores. We work with communities to monitor the wildlife and keep an eye on the forest using satellite imaging.” And according to David Attenborough, “Helping Cool Earth to halt tropical deforestation makes a real difference. Perhaps the biggest difference we will make in our whole lives.”

Measure and offset your carbon footprint

Use a tool such as Carbon Calculator to estimate your annual carbon footprint, and offset it with a (probably relatively small) donation to a non-profit such as https://trees.org/. Or each time you fly purchase carbon offsets — many airlines offer this option but often not in an obvious manner.

Buy your clothes from Patagonia

Patagonia commits 1% of its total sales or 10% of its profit, whichever is more, to environmental groups. And in more recent news, the company is giving back its tax cuts to grassroots environmental organizations. CEO Rose Marcario wrote, “Based on last year’s irresponsible tax cut, Patagonia will owe less in taxes this year. We are responding by putting $10 million back into the planet because our home needs it more than we do.”

Divest from fossil fuels and invest in renewables

Funds committed to fossil fuel divestment now total more than $6tn. Sounds impressive. Probably nowhere near enough. If everyone took an hour or two to check what their pension and index funds are invested in, and moved away from coal, oil, and other fossil fuels, we’d take a collective jump in a better direction.

Don’t listen to the haters

For every small action you take there will be someone who reminds you that 100 companies that cause 71% of climate change or that it doesn’t matter what you do because large developing economies are still building coal plants. Whoopdeedoo. You can’t tell the government of China or executives of Shell what to do and neither can I. But if a couple of billion of us moved a few of our hard earned dollars away from companies killing the planet and toward offsetting our own carbon footprint, we’ll all be in a better place.

Got another idea? Add it in the comments….