As far as Foreign imports of consumer goods accounting for a huge chunk of our carbon, that claim has never held up when I investigated it. In particular, Our World in Data had some fantastic plots showing that, though I don't have time to locate them at the moment.
Could I turn the tables on you and ask for some substantiation of the claim that import of consumer goods is a major source of emissions attributable in the US? Because the amount of carbon that goes into making a computer seems pretty trivial compared to that of making a car, and from burning a gallon+ a day.
Also, for evidence of the inherent sustainability of urban areas over suburban areas, check out these maps:
https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/maps
I forget if they account for carbon from imported goods or not, but it's a consumption based inventory, rather than the typical production based inventory.
The embodied carbon in Chinese exports peaked in 2008, and has been decreasing, the most recent estimate I found was 1.4Gt in 2015 [1]. This is already less than the US transportation emissions of 1.7Gt in 2015 (from the EPA PDF I linked above).
And the US share of that 1.4Gt is only about 18% (409/2273B$ [2]), for about 0.25Gt of CO2 equivalents.
[1] Fig 1C https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
[2] https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/CHN/Yea...