All consumer and commercial goods must be moved to get to the end user, along with all the pieces used to put these goods together, hence Supply Chain. Each item created and sold leaves carbon fingerprint via the shipping required to move it along. What can we do to lower the impact that each individual item has on our environment?
While there are some products where a large scale supply chain network is necessary (industrial equipment, commodities, etc), there are many, if not, most products can in be made locally. The 2 biggest industries that come to mind here are food and clothing. Not to get into the weeds here, but food is something that can be produced locally and consumed at affordable prices if we keep everything in season. The main challenge would be figuring out what we would call “local”. Today’s society has urban metro areas that have left little land for agriculture. The question is, do we call “local agriculture” at the county level? state level? or national level? It is entirely possible to cut down the effects of consumer supply chains. The challenge here would be that consumers would have to accept less variety of products and foods being available to them. The local market would also need to maintain a level of efficiency and scale to have supply and prices that can compete against the large global supply chain.
For many products, consumers don’t actually pay the full price of what they are buying. This is because of subsidies for things like fuel and corn that keep the prices on these commodities low. There is also the environmental effects of large industry that the taxpayer (you and I) actually end up getting the tab on. These include things like water usage, degradation of soil, environmental accidents, public infrastructure created to support these industries, etc. Externalities are everything that doesn’t get factored into the price of a product, that someone else ends up passively paying for in the end. Don’t quote me exactly on this, but I once read if American consumers paid full price for one gallon of gasoline with all externalities factored in, the price would be around $20 a gallon or so.