In Palo Alto, we like to pride ourselves on eating locally grown foods, buying the food from places like community farms, farmer's markets and Whole Foods. All this is great and cuts down on carbon emissions and increases your green footprint.

But we forget that we buy everything else shipped from across the world. What good does it do to eat locally grown food when you buy stuff shipped in from Asia? We buy our hybrid Toyota's shipped in from Japan, hmmm that's a lot of gasoline and carbon emissions used right there to have your car shipped. Our BMW's and Mercedes Benz's all shipped in from Europe. Our bicycles are shipped in from China, our clothes made in Singapore or Taiwan, and our furniture shipped in from Indonesia, our blankets, computers, cell phones, radios, kitchen appliances all shipped in from tens of thousands of miles away. If you really want to reduce your carbon footprint stop buying imported goods and start buying American. Even better, buy things made by people right here in California. I've never heard any of the green folks even touch this issue of how many cars can we take off the road if we just start using locally produced goods. We probably could reduce our carbon footprint in the amount of millions of more cars taken of the road and in turn help China and the rest of the world reduce theirs too.