Humanity has a shrinking window to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet climate action is severely lacking on the individual and policy levels. We argue that this is because behavioral interventions have largely neglected the basic principles of operant conditioning as one set of tools to promote collective climate action. In this perspective, we propose an operant conditioning framework that uses reinforcement to encourage low-emission behaviors and punishment to discourage high-emission behaviors in the domains of transportation, food, waste, housing, and civic actions. This framework not only helps explain positive and negative spillovers, but also provides a recipe to design individual-level and system-level interventions to generate and sustain low-emission behaviors to help achieve net zero.