The most effective 1.5°C lifestyle designs don’t care about climate
What if the most effective drivers of climate-friendly lifestyle changes are the ones not interested in it at all? This article explores how unintentional 1.5°C lifestyle designs — innovations, policies, and strategies not motivated by, and often not even mentioning, climate change — are proving far more effective at driving low-carbon behaviors than conventional sustainability efforts.
“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” Scott Bessent said lately in a speech. He later reinforced the point in an interview, stating that “prosperity is not about buying cheap baubles from China.”
What I find interesting here is that Mr. Bessent is not part of sustainability circles — certainly not a sufficiency champion. He’s a former hedge fund investor who currently serves as Treasury Secretary in the Trump Administration.
Yet, as I read his comments, I couldn’t help but wonder: Could Bessent be another example of an unintentional 1.5°C lifestyles designer?
What is unintentional 1.5°C lifestyles design?
This concept refers to actions or interventions that influence how people live — shaping their behaviors in ways that support much lower-emission lifestyles, even though they aren’t driven by climate concerns in the first place. Through strategies, innovations, or policies that are not motivated by — and often don’t even mention — climate change, these efforts end up foster sustainable lifestyles that align with 1.5°C goals, sometimes precisely because they bypass conventional approaches to making people’s lifestyles more sustainable.
To be clear, the design itself is intentional — after all, as Bill McDonough reminds us, “design is the first signal of human intention.” However, the primary intention behind these efforts — and the way they’re presented to the public — isn’t to support 1.5°C lifestyles or any climate goals for that matter. It’s often something entirely different. And yet, the outcomes may not only align with climate-compatible living, but also prove more effective — perhaps exactly because sustainability wasn’t the goal or the motivation in the first place.
Going back to Secretary Bessent — could the new tariffs policy, including the closure of the tariff loophole that supported the rise of Shein and Temu, be considered an example of unintentional 1.5°C lifestyles design?
The Trump administration’s new tariffs certainly aren’t intended to promote 1.5°C lifestyles. But by raising the prices of imported goods — including fast fashion and other non-durable items — they may unintentionally create less favorable conditions for overconsumption. In doing so, the tariffs could nudge people toward more cautious consumption and — without meaning to — promote sufficiency-driven behaviors, or what Jungell-Michelsson and Heikkurinen describe as “behavioral change towards less and moderate individual consumption.”
While the long-term outcomes of these tariffs — and whether they’ll remain in place — are still uncertain, there are other examples of unintentional 1.5°C lifestyles design that have already proven effective at scale. And that, after all, is the holy grail of any intentional 1.5°C lifestyles intervention.
The most surprising argument against unnecessary consumption
One example is personal finance, a field focused on helping people understand how to better manage money, build wealth, and create financial freedom through smart saving, investing, and income strategies. This fast-growing industry includes a rising number of podcasters and personal finance gurus who aim to help people make better sense of their finances. I started following some of them — and to my surprise, I quickly realized that many are effectively promoting 1.5°C lifestyles without ever mentioning climate change or linking their advice to environmental concerns.
One example is Andrew Giancola, a popular podcaster whose show — unsurprisingly — is called The Personal Finance Podcast. Like many of his peers, Giancola offers financial advice, encouraging people to save more and earlier to ensure they have sufficient funds for emergencies and retirement.
What I found particularly interesting, however, is how he frames consumption. In an episode titled 10 Reasons You Need to Look Poor!, he challenges the common misconception of what wealth looks like. “What a lot of people think is that the person who drives the Ferrari or has a massive mansion is actually wealthy. In a lot of different situations, the person who is truly wealthy is the person who has control of their time, of their energy, and everything that they do day in and day out,” he explains.
His core message is that buying high-end luxury items doesn’t just fail to signify real wealth — it actively works against it. These purchases take away money that could instead be invested in your future and long-term financial freedom.
The idea of investing in yourself and particularly in your future rather than in status-driven consumption, which you can’t truly afford many times, is also a key theme for another popular personal finance columnist, Michelle Singletary, who writes the Washington Post’s personal finance column “The Color of Money.” Whether she’s writing about being savvy about owning a car, the importance of saving early, or not being ashamed to say ‘no’ to unnecessary spending, Singletary consistently encourages practical, values-driven choices. Like Giancola, she helps educate and nudge people toward practices aligned with 1.5°C lifestyles — without ever mentioning sustainability or climate change.
However, the best indication for the power of personal finance advice to support 1.5°C lifestyles comes from the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) movement, which has received significant attention, especially among millennials and Gen Z. is “a financial movement that prioritizes intense budgeting, saving and investing to reach retirement age before the typical retirement ages of 65 to 70, allowing people to leave the workforce early and live their lives as they choose to.” You can find many stories online like this one about Amberly Grant, who combined a frugal lifestyle with financial savviness to eventually retire from work in her 30s. The drive for financial independence — and making early retirement a reality — pushes people to seriously consider how to boost their saving rate and reduce their cost of living.
The 2.3 million members of Reddit’s subreddit r/financialindependence demonstrate the high level of interest in FIRE as a strategy for a better life. What’s interesting is that even when many people succeed in retiring early, they continue practicing the principles of a simpler lifestyle that enabled them to get there — principles that, again, are closely aligned with 1.5°C lifestyles. And notably, FIRE has nothing to do with climate or sustainability. It’s just focused on two very fundamental wants: financial independence and early retirement. That’s it.
Designed for flexibility, not for the planet — but still cutting emissions
One of the outcomes of the pandemic was the growing popularity of working from home (WFH), which quickly evolved into the broader normalization of hybrid work environments — where employees have the flexibility to work from home at least a few days a week. As of now, while some large companies and the federal government have been vocal about bringing employees back to the office full-time, the majority of companies with hybrid or fully remote workforces do not plan to change their policies, according to a new survey by Stanford and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
The continued popularity of hybrid and remote work has everything to do with economic and operational benefits: “The survey findings suggest employers are satisfied with the benefits they are seeing from work-from-home arrangements — reduced floorspace needs, better productivity, and lower quit rates.” These findings are further supported by a study conducted by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, which shows that “hybrid work had zero effect on workers’ productivity or career advancement and dramatically boosted retention rates.”
What neither the executives nor Bloom’s study considered as a benefit was climate change or sustainability — specifically, the reduction in carbon footprint when workers shift from onsite to remote work. Largely driven by the elimination of daily commuting, the climate benefits of remote work don’t appear to be a factor for companies — or even for most employees themselves. The design of flexible work environments has been shaped by goals like improving productivity, expanding hiring pools, boosting retention, reducing costs, and supporting better work-life balance. Emissions reduction isn’t part of that design logic — and yet it’s one of its clearest outcomes.
Similarly, from the employee perspective, remote work is appealing not because it reduces their carbon footprints, but because it delivers on things they actually care about: more autonomy, more job opportunities, and more time for themselves.
The drug that beats our addiction to junk food
The last example I’d like to share is perhaps the most surprising one. It relates to a challenge many sustainability efforts have long focused on — and largely failed to achieve: reducing the consumption of junk food, which carries not only serious health risks but also significant climate impacts. In a recent article on the New York Times, Tomas Weber revealed how GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are curbing cravings for ultra-processed, high-sugar foods. By directly dulling the reward response in the brain and reshaping what users find desirable, these drugs have led people to bypass chips, soda, and candy — not out of guilt or virtue, but because those foods simply no longer taste good. As Weber notes, “For decades, Big Food has been marketing products to people who can’t stop eating, and now, suddenly, they can.”
This development makes beverage and food companies very worried. “The prospect of tens of millions of people cutting their caloric intake down to roughly 1,000 per day, which is half the minimum amount recommended for men, is unsettling the industry,” Weber writes. What’s particularly interesting here is that GLP-1 drugs appear to be succeeding where decades of sustainability-driven education, creativity, innovation, and policy have come up short.
Apparently, to overcome food companies’ work of formulating product for maximum “bliss”, what you need is not a better message or policy — but a better drug: one that shuts down cravings while offering a faster, more accessible pathway to a widely desired outcome — weight loss. In other words, forget the long-winded explanations about the harms of processed and ultra-processed food. To win people over, just offer them a tool that works better and easier — and aligns directly with one of their strongest personal goals: losing weight.
Design in an era of discontinuity — lessons on how to move forward from here
So, what can we learn from the examples of unintentional 1.5°C lifestyles design?
First, to be clear: the success of unintentional 1.5°C lifestyles design interventions doesn’t mean we no longer need intentionality in sustainable design. On the contrary, I agree with Baldassarre et al.’s point that “the transition to new societal or economic systems, such as a circular economy, requires the intentional design of new products and services, and experimentation with new business models to deliver them.”
However, there are two key lessons we can draw from the examples above. The first is that we need to acknowledge, as Alex Steffen argues, that we are living in an era of discontinuity — a break from the world as we knew it. This discontinuity, as Steffen emphasizes, is not only about risk or instability; it also signals the potential for transformation. In his words, it “means change in ourselves and our societies.”
Using the lens of discontinuity, it’s not surprising that we occasionally see alignment between the outcomes of disruptive change efforts and low-carbon lifestyles. After all, such changes aim to transform the systems we currently rely on — systems that are, by and large, deeply unsustainable. In other words, discontinuing unsustainable ways of living could sometimes generate forms of living that are, at least to some degree, more sustainable.
Of course, let’s not be naïve — this isn’t always the case, and it may well remain the exception rather than the rule for some time. We can just as easily find ourselves — say, through the widespread use of AI or policy miscalculations — deepening ecological harm rather than alleviating it. Still, some alignments with 1.5°C lifestyles can be expected to emerge, even if they’re unintended.
Returning to intentional 1.5°C lifestyles design, the key lesson here is the need to meet people where they are — by focusing on and prioritizing their most important needs and motivations. This isn’t just about reframing 1.5°C lifestyles as financial freedom or a pathway to “the good life.” It’s about returning to the fundamentals of human-centered design: putting people — their needs, challenges, desires, and daily experiences — at the center of the process. With this kind of refocus, it becomes easier for designers to stay grounded in the lived realities of the people they’re designing for, and to create solutions that are truly desirable and usable.
Still, the question remains: Can we drive ambitious sustainability goals intentionally, without losing sight of the actual people we’re designing for — and make it work for them?
It certainly won’t be easy, as we can see from current efforts, and it does require better strategizing to make it work. One way forward is to adopt what von Busch and Palmas call a ‘system hacker’ mindset. As they describe hacking, “it is modifying something beyond the predefined design field of original intentions and customization. It is about scratching one’s own itch, but using unexpected methods. Hacking is to find an own way, to encourage exploration, collecting curiosities into action.”
In other words, we might think of it as designing for 1.5°C lifestyles while ignoring it at the same time — as if climate compatibility is not the key priority, but still embedded in the outcome. Can we design for the climate crisis while avoiding it at the same time? If we can hold this tension, we may unlock more effective pathways for intentional design of low-carbon lifestyles. If not, we may simply find ourselves waiting for the next happy accident of unintentional design to show up.
Raz Godelnik is an Associate Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons School of Design — The New School. He is the author of Rethinking Corporate Sustainability in the Era of Climate Crisis. You can follow me on LinkedIn.
