And how will we be able to tell if these "Steps" are working?
Also applies to a reply to Vince:
Do you want a certificate to know your Co2 footprint?
I don't think you need that.
If you use less plastic bags but instead tupperware for the fridge, or a reusable bag for groceries. If everyone would already do that, that would be millions of plastic bags less per day.
That's one exemple.
Now I know that there is a lot of BS that is sold as green, I work in construction and the whole passive, 0 energy houses are BS, they make people sick actually.
A lot (most) comes from the industries, and that's again where all the problem lies, as with so much modern problems, big fat companies are destroying everything out of greed.
Exemple:
The lightbulbs when first developped lasted 2500 hours. That was too much for the industry so they made a cartell and decided to lower the lightbulbs lifecycle to a 1000 hours.
So they messed around, took less good material,.... and in 1940 big ads garentueed 1000H lightbulbs.
That was long ago and it has gotten worse.
Now the lightbulbs are discontinued, which already pisses off alot of people, but they replace them with highly nocive ones instead of subventening LEd light bulbs, which are the future. Again Industry taken over the politics.
Apple products are design to break. First Ipod had a builtin deadline in the battery (there are court papers of it).
Nice to built a PC into the screen, but you throw away a perfectly fine screen when changing the PC.
In todays industy, it is easier to buy a new product rather than meant/ repair a broken good. Which again leads to pollution as we throw so much stuff just away (which is so complex or too complex too recycle).
Packaging of grocery food is an other thing, there are numberous possibilities for packaging ecological (like corn plastic, or wood plastic), but no the industry rather takes good old plastic that doesn't decomposite itself. And then they even wrap them twice or three times more then the packaging required.
On CO2, there are a lot more saving to do in the industry than in the consumer section.
Let's take a simple exemple: Servers. They are ridiculously cooled down. Studies have shown that letting them warm up slightly more (+2 - +5°c), which won't harm the hardware, alone in germany the energy saved would be enough to close down two nuclear reactors.
(And on the nuclear, I read in other threads that it is clean and some made fun or called it stupid of W&N because he was against it. So whole Germany is dumb to shut down every reactor? Is it clean that you have at the end of the process a material that is highly nocive, toxic for thousands of years? I am not wholly against nuclear power, but we need first to at least haverst it. What we are basicly doing is the same as taking fossils, burn them to cook water and then use the warm water to generate power. What a waste. Nuclear has huge energy (as seen in Fukushima), but we still can't haverst it. When we can solve the problem of really haversting the pure power of nuclear, then and only we can use that power, because now we are using a % of it's real power and then we let it rot away in a cavern)
So as you see above, there is only so little the consumer can achieve, but there are things he can do: buy products that are grown ecologically (food or other goods), don't throw away. Buy more responsible and with a bit of forsight. Use the power of the buyer!
Do we human really need a new cell phone every year, do we need to light the house when we are not there, or have the heater on and the windows open, do we need the 5 liter engine over the 3 liter one?
There are things the individual can do. Alone they are worth nothing, but multiply it by 3 billions and you have achieved something.
But as you saw in my exemples, there is a bigger problem lying behind all this : Industries controlling everything (markets, politics, daily life). And that need to change. As cute as the occupy mouvement is, they will achieve nothing again big players as long as they don't begin to think. Yes there is a huge pervertism in our capitalist society, but that doesn't mean capitalism is bad. Capitalism is good and is the basic evolution of basic trade and money concept. So saying we need to abolish capitalism is not helping the problem nor them.
But at least it made people think about the problem lying ahead of us. And the Industry is trying to start the war now with things like SOPA or ACTA, which is a good thing as finally people will wake up and have a chance in abolishing the power of the big players. Because they don't want to evolve their arcaic business models into modern standards (internet), now they try to force us into their old business models again by criminalising the new medium. But people will not let the free internet go without a fight.
If we win that fight, we have a good chance in our futur at least to limit the power of industries, if we loose, industries will dictate even more our lives then now.
. 
Let's blot out the sun and let the good times roll. 
