Individuals can and should reduce their direct CO2 footprint. Most of personal energy budget goes for transportation and heating and/or cooling the living spaces. Two solutions enable you to stop directly burning stuff: EVs and heatpumps.
Beyond that, cap-and-trade scheme has worked to reduce SO2 emissions and it will work to reduce CO2 emissions.
Am EV over a fuel burning car is huge improvement, however EV’s alone are not a sustainable solution to our transport needs. There needs to be mass transit and wider adoption of cycling/walking in more towns and cities. EV’s are still burning fuel if they’re not charged using 100% renewable energy, which clearly we are not at yet, and at the end of the day they’re _still_ an inefficient means of transporting people over any distance.
To reduce transportation emissions worldwide, there needs to be greater emphasis on alternative modes of transports to cars, electric or not.
- Long distances should be covered by train/bus.
- Medium distances by metro/bus/tram/whatever works in a given city’s geography and layout.
One issue with individual action, in the absence of a market incentive such as cap-and-trade or a carbon tax, is that reducing your use of power/fossil fuels reduces demand, thus ever so slightly reducing prices, which will give others licence to use more. It doesn't 100% cancel out your efforts, but it does reduce the effect.
One issue with EVs is that they aren't necessarily a feasible option for a lot of households due to their cost. Putting a market incentive in place would lead to a hundred different ways of reducing our CO2 emissions from driving, not limited by the ingenuity of one person or organization. More people working from home, more carpooling, distributed co-working spaces, more use of public transportation, even shifting how we design and zone our towns and cities, are a few things I can think of.
I strongly recommend that anyone who wants to take a very direct, immediate, simple action to move the USA toward having a carbon fee and dividend policy* take a look at this (or at the very least, send it to your environmentally concerned friends and family): https://citizensclimatelobby.org/senate/
(*a tax on carbon, where, that get returned to all citizens so as to reduce or even eliminate impact on lower income families)
Beyond that, cap-and-trade scheme has worked to reduce SO2 emissions and it will work to reduce CO2 emissions.