Ben, Thank you this worked for me 
I did have to rename the cacert.pem to cert.pem in order for it to work.
I also had to follow the instructions by @henning found on this thread:
http://community.localwp.com/t/getting-a-curl-error-when-trying-to-update-plugins-in-local/28093
to enable updates to work for that plugin.
Thank you again!!!