Your actions alone won't solve the CO2 problem, so you might as well enjoy your life.
Most of the actions you list at a societal scale are completely pointless, literally the only action we need as a civilisation (collectively, not individually) is building nuclear.
With abundance of clean energy that nuclear can provide, we can drive fast, procreate a lot, and eat globally.
> With abundance of clean energy that nuclear can provide, we can drive fast, procreate a lot, and eat globally.
You're thinking only of energy, but the world we live in is more way, way complex than that. Keep that up and we're living on Trantor, or Coruscant, not the Earth.
Anecdotally, and I have no reason to doubt this, 200 species go extinct every day.
Most people only know about 200 people. Imagine if one day you woke up and suddenly everyone you knew -- family, friends, colleauges, aquaintences, the people you see behind the checkout -- was gone. Just gone.
Imagine that happening every day.
Or maybe you have 1,000 followers on Twitter. Imagine every day you lost 200 of them. After 5 days, you don't have any followers.
So: 1,000 species gone every 5 days. Less than a week. You do the math for a year.
And that's just one angle on the problem. Another is that we are poisoning ourselves: plastics are endocrine disrupters. Microplastics are a serious environmental problem. We are using materials in our day-to-day life that haven't been proven safe to actually use. Nobody did studies to see if the things you are using are safe: they just wait until they're proven problematic and then "phase them out" over 5 years ... if you're in a country that does that (some countries still use DDT which is persistant and fucking toxic).
And you're right that our actions alone won't solve the CO2 problem, or most other environmental problems. That needs to happen at a government and corporate level. But it's our responsibility to put pressure on those institutions.
And you can make changes locally that affect your sphere of life. We live on a farm and have planted the landscape back, in places, with thousands of trees. These support birds, insects and small animals. It reclaims a little of what was lost. It doesn't make a huge difference in the broader sense, but it makes a big difference in the lives of other creatures.
Choose a lever: Their jobs. Getting re-elected. Align the goal with their fidicuary duty to increase shareholder value. Historical imperative. Whatever.
There is some degree of agreement that nuclear fuel cycles exist for fissionable fuel. In other words, the waste from one reactor can simply be used as fuel for the next. There are already some niche uses for reactor waste, up until recently the decommissioned reactor in Chernobyl was actually still in use for some stuff like this.
How many steps there are in this cycle and if actually is a net positive in energy production has not been born out by any research I am aware of. So your skepticism is warranted.
One other note is that reprocessing is distinct from breeding.
Reprocessing doesn't create new fissile material. You're stuck with the small fraction of Pu239 in the waste (which is about a 7th of the original U235). It buys you very little extra energy at huge financial cost and in the current form releases more radiation than the rest of the nuclear industry combined if you exclude weapons tests and chernobyl -- it even rivals coal in terms of radiation released per joule. Plus there is a hidden amount of CFCs and other extremely potent greenhouse gases involved in the process.
Breeding to close the fuel cycle would be great (if it could be done economically and safely), but there is a laundry list of reasons why it may never happen, and every tonne of fissile material used before it happens is 200GW that can't be produced until a decade is spent breeding it back.
Easy for you to say but how many human lives have been improved over the last 70 years do to economic growth which is highly dependent on fossil fuels?
Billions?
Many people wouldn’t mind being frozen in 1950’s USA (except those with cancer), but probably not 1950’s China or India.
Most of the actions you list at a societal scale are completely pointless, literally the only action we need as a civilisation (collectively, not individually) is building nuclear.
With abundance of clean energy that nuclear can provide, we can drive fast, procreate a lot, and eat globally.