I love that analogy. No, you’re not going to personally save the world by reducing your carbon footprint. But you know what you are going to be? One leaf on a tree in a forest, making that little bit more oxygen that helps collectively make the world a better place.
And that’s worth doing. Especially if you can encourage other people to be leaves too.
People always take private jets as an example. And while they are very polluting, air traffic is only responsible for 2-3 % of all CO2 emissions. Transportation in general is responsible for almost a quarter of all emissions, and almost half of that is just regular cars, road freight is a third and the rest is aviation and shipping. So all the passenger cars are responsible for around 12.5 % of all emissions. That’s mostly just people going to work or grocery shopping.