Local food makes basically no difference unless you're talking about crops that have a shelf life of a day or so. For everything else, distribution is well under 10% of the carbon footprint.
Shorter showers make basically no difference to carbon footprint unless your water is heated by an antique. Our electric water heater is less than 10% our power bill, and most of that goes into standby mode.
Smaller cars matter more than the above, but are basically just pissing into the wind. Halving transportation CO2 per mile won't be anywhere close enough to keep us under 2.5C.
Taking public transit a bit more often also doesn't matter. What percentage of your CO2 footprint is it reducing?
Avoiding fast-fashion mostly matters for microplastics (the clothing industry's carbon footprint isn't that big), but I doubt clothes were ever a significant fraction of the plastic you throw away.
Summarizing, if everyone did everything you said, we'd still be completely screwed. We need infrastructure level fixes instead:
- ban power plants that emit CO2
- set up international protections for timberland, and sanction / bomb any country that ignores them (cutting down rainforests should be treated in the same way as terrorist attacks)
- add a $2 per gallon atmospheric carbon capture tax to gasoline. This means that, for every gallon of gas sold, we'd sequester the emissions of two gallons worth of gas. It also means EVs and hybrids, hydrogen fuel cell, and other technologies will rapidly become more popular
- fund public transit (busses and trains) at the same level as the road network
- tax the crap out of plastic so that natural fibers (and paper bags) are economically viable. This'd less than double the price of stuff.
No individual can pull any of those levers except via political means or via technological innovation.
Shorter showers make basically no difference to carbon footprint unless your water is heated by an antique. Our electric water heater is less than 10% our power bill, and most of that goes into standby mode.
Smaller cars matter more than the above, but are basically just pissing into the wind. Halving transportation CO2 per mile won't be anywhere close enough to keep us under 2.5C.
Taking public transit a bit more often also doesn't matter. What percentage of your CO2 footprint is it reducing?
Avoiding fast-fashion mostly matters for microplastics (the clothing industry's carbon footprint isn't that big), but I doubt clothes were ever a significant fraction of the plastic you throw away.
Summarizing, if everyone did everything you said, we'd still be completely screwed. We need infrastructure level fixes instead:
- ban power plants that emit CO2
- set up international protections for timberland, and sanction / bomb any country that ignores them (cutting down rainforests should be treated in the same way as terrorist attacks)
- add a $2 per gallon atmospheric carbon capture tax to gasoline. This means that, for every gallon of gas sold, we'd sequester the emissions of two gallons worth of gas. It also means EVs and hybrids, hydrogen fuel cell, and other technologies will rapidly become more popular
- fund public transit (busses and trains) at the same level as the road network
- tax the crap out of plastic so that natural fibers (and paper bags) are economically viable. This'd less than double the price of stuff.
No individual can pull any of those levers except via political means or via technological innovation.