Low Carbon Diet - where to start?

I am a member of the Cool Los Altos team, a group of volunteers who is helping our city and its residents reduce our carbon emissions. We managed to get the City Council and Mayor to agree to adopt the Mayor's Climate Protection Agreement last month (yeah!), and now we're putting together plans for how to get our city's residents at large to adopt a greener lifestyle in the months ahead.

So we're struggling with the question of what changes to ask people to make. When you look at the options for changes that we can promote to our residents, there are many. They range from reducing the amount you drive to lowering your thermostat at home to taking shorter showers. But when I tried to think through all the options and come up with a framework for deciding where to start, I came up with 3 criteria that help to determine the best options: ease of adoption, impact on the environment, and measurability. For now, I'm trying to decide between "ease" and "impact".

In my opinion, realistically, most people will not make wholesale changes to their lifestyle in a short period of time. And many carbon-reducing options are not realistic for large segments of the population (e.g. how many of us live and work near train or bus routes?).

My personal bias is for relatively easy, incremental changes. Clearly the changes required for us to overcome global warming are massive and systemic, so we need to start the ball rolling at a basic level that everyone can adopt. When combined with a growing awareness of other changes that we can make and the impact of each - coupled with the confidence that comes from having made 1 change successfully - I think we'll see a depth and breadth of adoption that will surprise us a couple years from now.

One of our neighboring cities (Palo Alto for those who are interested) has decided to push reusable bags as a major initiative. On the one hand, replacement of plastic and paper bags with a reusable bag is estimated to save only 80 pounds of CO2 annually per person; but, it does qualify as a relatively easy lifestyle change. It also occurs to me that it's a good choice for a community-wide initiative because it's one of the few activities that occurs in a public setting, thus introducing the ever-powerful force of peer pressure (you *will* sense the eyes of others upon you when asked "paper or plastic?").

I'm interested to hear from others what changes they think are the most important to promote to others at this point. Is it the easy to adopt and implement ones, or is it the ones that have the most impact on our environment?

Kent
www.ecounit.com