When it comes to reducing emissions, what actually works?

A recent study published by the National Academy of Sciences found that, when asked a series of questions about actions that would be beneficial to the climate, people tended to assign very little weight to the most impactful actions and vice versa.

“P eople over-assign impact to actually pretty low-impact actions, such as recycling, and underestimate the actual carbon impact of behaviors much more carbon-intensive, like flying or eating meat, ” Madalina Vlasceanu, report co-author and professor of environmental social sciences at Stanford University, told the Associated Press .

So why do people, myself included , often get it wrong? One possible explanation is that psychologically, we can see a glass bottle going into the recycling bin, whereas we cannot see