You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hew. There's something powerful we can do to reduce carbon emissions, something more powerful than electric cars or eating a plant-based diet, though both of those are also important. In her 2022 talk from TED at BCG, entrepreneur Tessa Clark shares this simple

and effective tactic to help address the climate crisis and it all starts in our own homes.

After a short break. So it turns out there's a super simple solution to the climate crisis.

Do you want to know what it is? Yes.

Good. I was hoping you would say that.

All too often, the climate crisis is illustrated with images of polar bears, of wildfires and of floods,

while the headlines talk about government negotiations and net zero targets,

which makes it all feel so far removed from us.

But there's something we're not being told.

And it's that 65% of all greenhouse gas emissions

are generated as a direct result of household consumption.

So that's you and that's me.

What this means is we have enormous power to solve the climate crisis.

And one of the simplest and most effective ways in which we can do this

is to do something that humans have been doing for thousands of years, but that in modern

life, we've largely forgotten. Put simply, it's to share more and waste less. Let's take food,

for example, globally, one third of all the food we produce each year

gets thrown away, which is worth over a trillion US dollars. And the environmental impact of this

is nothing short of devastating. If it were to be a country, food waste would be the third largest source of

greenhouse gas emissions after the USA and China. That's because a land mass larger than China is used

every single year to grow food that's never eaten. That includes land that has been deforested,

soil that has been degraded, species that have been driven to extinction. It also includes all the packaging and manufacturing,

...