Illustration of hands holding a phone showing a social media post of a heat pump

The spotlight

You’re probably familiar with the concept of a carbon footprint: a personal tally of transgressions that contribute to planet-warming emissions. The “carbon footprint” is well established in the climate movement’s lexicon, despite the guilt and shame that it evokes — and despite the fact that many people now know the term was popularized in an ad campaign by the oil company British Petroleum, a shockingly effective gambit to put the onus of addressing the climate crisis on individuals, not the corporations or governments that have contributed the most to the problem.

But if carbon footprints are a lie, where does that leave individuals who want to do their part — and need a way in to thinking about what that part can be?

In a piece published earlier this month, Grist’s own language and culture expert, Kate Yoder, offers up a new possibility: “climatemaxxing.”

“I’m always interested in words,” Yoder said. In 2022, she coined the term “heatflation,” referring to the way climate impacts like extreme heat have cascading effects that contribute to the rising costs of everyday goods. She recently stumbled on the word “sleepmaxxing,” one of many examples of the suffix “maxxing” being used to refer to optimizing certain areas of life, like getting quality sleep. “I was like, hmm, what would climatemaxxing be if that were a thing?” she said.

Taking a cue from wellness and self-improvement trends, the idea of climatemaxxing, as Yoder proposes it, is to reframe our thinking about the climate actions we can take, both as individuals and collectively. If it’s seen as an optimization challenge, it becomes aspirational, even fun.

“The words that we use for climate action — even ‘underconsumption core,’ ‘deinfluencing’ — all sort of have this tone to them of making yourself smaller,” she said. “And I thought climatemaxxing was a very good counter to that.”

She hasn’t yet seen any instances of the term out in the wild (although she did hear from a teacher friend who shared the story with his high school science class, after teaching them about the carbon footprint). But spawning a hashtag isn’t necessarily the goal.

“I’m not trying to make ‘fetch’ happen,” she joked. What she is trying to make happen is a broader reflection on the way we think and talk about participating in various forms of climate action. “I thought of it more as an interesting thought experiment. What if climate action was driven by feeling good instead of feeling bad?”

Read Yoder’s piece below, in full, to join in this thought experiment — and consider what “climatemaxxing” could mean for you.

— Claire Elise Thompson

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Forget about your carbon footprint. Try ‘climatemaxxing.’ (By Kate Yoder)

There’s now an easy way to turn any aspect of life into something to optimize — just add “-maxxing.” Gymmaxxing is about getting ripped. Moneymaxxing means accumulating wealth as fast as possible. Over the past couple of years, this social media-driven wellness fad has spread to more and more activities: Tanning is sunmaxxing; drinking plenty of water is watermaxxing. Even at night, the grind for self-improvement continues, with sleepmaxxing hacks designed to help you achieve peak rest.

You could view this trend as a response to a world that feels unpredictable and overwhelming — a way for people to assert control over what they can. And there are few things more unpredictable and overwhelming than climate change, especially as President Donald Trump has begun unraveling policies intended to help the United States shift toward a cleaner economy. With that vacuum in leadership, what if there was a new movement for people to leverage their ability to do something, in any way they can? Why not call it “climatemaxxing?”

Think of it this way: Climatemaxxing would be an optimization challenge, finding the biggest ways to tackle climate change at home, at work, and in your community. Sure, you could #climatemaxx your commute by biking, but achieving maxximum impact might mean joining a committee to make your town more bike-friendly for everyone. And if all you have energy to do is eat a can of beans, a climate-friendly source of protein, for dinner, hey, what once might have been considered a boring meal is now an effort to self-improve by climatemaxxing your diet. Forget about your carbon footprint — climatemaxxing frames action as an aspiration, not a sacrifice, as well as an antidote to despair.

It’s hard to take any word with a double X seriously, but the idea could inject positivity into a conversation that’s often anchored in guilt and moralizing. One reason why people resist accepting the reality of climate change is that it means admitting they are part of the problem, thanks to the greenhouse gas emissions associated with driving, flying, and eating meat.

“It’s hard for anyone to accept themselves as being the villain of the story, especially in a story so large and wide-sweeping as climate change,” said Emma Frances Bloomfield, a communication professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Climatemaxxing could flip that by helping people see themselves as heroes instead, she said.

The term might be a bit ironic, since sustainability is typically about reducing your carbon emissions. But climatemaxxing could be seen as maximizing climate-friendly choices, almost like a game. “If you think about certain behaviors as associated with points, then you could think of climatemaxxing as accumulating as many sustainability points as you could,” Bloomfield said. It could also make a meme out of something that would otherwise be weird to share: Picture someone posting a photo of their home’s new energy-efficient heat pump with the hashtag #climatemaxxing.

By embracing the small things but aiming higher, climatemaxxing could also sidestep the debate over what kind of action matters most. Obsessing over your personal carbon footprint has been criticized as a distraction from the big-picture challenge of how to slow global warming. The oil company BP famously promoted the idea of a “carbon footprint,” and Exxon Mobil and Shell have adopted language that holds individuals responsible for climate change.

This critique, however valid, ends up pitting personal responsibility against collective action, as if it were an either-or choice with no middle ground. It has also bred pessimism. In 2019, two-thirds of Americans believed their personal choices could impact climate change, but three years later, that number had dropped to just over half, according to polling from the Associated Press and NORC.

“I think sometimes there’s this really counterproductive narrative of, you know, throwing up my hands and saying, ‘Well, nothing I do can matter,’” Kimberly Nicholas, a sustainability professor at Lund University in Sweden, said when that poll came out in 2022.

Climatemaxxing offers a more flexible approach to taking action. It doesn’t have to make a distinction between mitigation (cutting greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation (preparing for and responding to disasters). If you live in an area that’s prone to wildfires, for example, you could climatemaxx your home by removing burnable vegetation close to your house, lessening the risk of it catching fire and spreading the flames around your neighborhood. That’s the sort of thing that could have helped temper the recent catastrophic fires in Los Angeles.

The ethos of -maxxing may feel counter to a movement to make the world a better place. For years, it’s been associated with anxieties about physical imperfections and the pursuit of wellness through buying fitness trackers, wrinkle removers, and crystal-infused water bottles.

The suffix originally comes from gaming, where “min-maxing” refers to maximizing a certain character trait, like strength, at the expense of another. The double X came into play in 2015, when the term “looksmaxxing” — trying to hack your way into being more attractive by any means necessary, including surgery — spread on online forums frequented by incels, or involuntary celibates. Soon enough, a meme was born, and people began applying it to more and more activities, skincaremaxxing with moisturizers and smellmaxxing by dousing themselves in cologne.

Some commentators have suggested that climate change is precisely the sort of thing that makes people seek out these types of control in their lives. In the 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells wrote that the emergence of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, the luxury exercise class SoulCycle, and other wellness trends spoke to a growing perception “that the contemporary world is toxic, and that to endure or thrive within it requires extraordinary measures of self-regulation and self-purification.” He called this tendency a cop-out, but warned, “This purity arena is likely to expand, perhaps dramatically, as the climate continues to careen toward visible degradation — and consumers respond by trying to extract themselves from the sludge of the world however they can.”

So there would be a certain irony in adopting -maxxing for climate action. But memes can push back against dangerous ideas by adopting the same format as what they’re targeting. For example, when the pandemic lockdowns in 2020 led to a temporary dip in air pollution and an apparent increase in birdsong, people began posting: “Nature is healing, we are the virus.” A critic of the phrase — which implies that human suffering is good for the planet — created a viral meme by posting “nature is healing” on social media alongside photos of ride-share scooters submerged in a lake.

It’s a lesson that people who care about climate change could learn from. “The problem in the climate movement isn’t just the abundance of carbon, it is the lack of joy,” Pattie Gonia, an environmentalist and drag queen, said in a recent TED talk. “The scientific facts, the doom and gloom — they scare people, they wake them up, but joy is what will get people out of bed every day to take more action. And if there’s one thing I learned from the art form of drag, it’s that you can take fighting for something seriously without taking yourself too seriously.”

— Kate Yoder

More exposure

A parting shot

As Yoder writes in her piece, wellness and self-care are often about focusing on the things in our lives that we can control. While the scale and severity of the climate crisis can easily make a person feel helpless — not to mention the assault on climate progress coming from the federal government — there are still things we can tangibly influence. In last week’s newsletter, we explored the power of simply paying attention to what’s going on in your own backyard, one way to start #climatemaxxing. I, for one, am eagerly watching these spring buds bloom on the tree outside my house, which I have learned is a red maple.

A photo of sprawling tree branches with small red flowers all over them