Badger and Geoff Cox are entirely correct, of course. The difficulty in ‘buying locally’ for example is that billions of £/$/€ of low value things are now only made in China, India and other countries that are developing but polluting while they’re at it.
Washing-up bowls, ironing boards, dust pans, brooms – just an endless list of low-value everyday household and industrial items are pouring out of factories ‘east of Suez’ and unloading at Rotterdam for European consumption. There are vanishingly few ‘local’ manufacturers of such goods. It can’t be made to pay.
And as for high tech – the Chinese are coming up fast on the rails. Hi-Sense, the electronics campany, has yet to establish a reputation as solid as Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Samsung or LG but its TVs, for example, are now being recommended by the reviewers as worth buying whereas 12-18 months ago they were dismissed as simply not good enough.
The same goes for their air-con. You only buy air-con once every 20 years, ideally. I bought Mitsubishi. If I’d known I was going to move to FR 3 years later I would have saved 100s € and bought Hi-Sense. Five years from now, I would buy Hi-Sense.
I think it’s the case that those living today and the next 3 or 4 generations to follow exist/will exist in the period of transition to seriously reduce energy consumption/pollution/global warming – if there is to be one before, it’s too late!