It has been my opinion for a time that our 'developed' consumer countries are extremely wasteful in terms of goods/resources/energy. As to wether or not the human species advances in technology and wasteful actions have caused or are going to cause global climate changes is neither here nor there, as global climate changes occur naturally in vast cycles and sometimes very rapidly without any interference from us. Energy and resources are the real problem. Energy and resource requirements grow and grow, and then grow some more as the consuming population increases. There is a finite amount of energy that can be harnessed from our environment with our available technology. At some point in the future we will require more energy than it is possible to extract from sunlight/carbon fuels/uranium atoms/magnets(if you believe that!). At that point, important things will stop working. This will compound the problem, and will result in a human catastrophe certainly involving large scale famine and drought, as the energy required to gather enough resources is exhausted.
The next problem may make the above irrelavant however, if we continue to gather our energy and resources in ways that damage our own environment (and this cannot be denied) poisoning the air, land and sea with carbon fumes/nuclear waste/pesticides... that list could go on for pages... then, aswell as inadvertantly causing the extinction of many of earths myriad species, we WILL cause an extinction of... you guessed it, ourselves. (that's not such a big deal if like me you believe that life will go on, human or not. All things have their end.)
Air is the single most important resource on the planet, closely followed by fresh water. Most large scale (developed world company scale) energy and resource industries are currently unable to operate without poisoning one or both of these two things.
On topic, the key is - we consume too much, much more than we need. If we ALL try to consume less or closer to what we actually need, pressure will be taken off the energy and resource gathering process and give us the time we need to develop clean methods and technologies and to replace the old ones. Of course in the developed world this may mean giving up a few or possibly many of the multitude of luxuries that abound within our societies. Just don't forget, they are luxuries, not neccessities. We CAN do without - giant refridgerators/blue toilet water/endless cheap supplies of cash crops - tea, tobbacco, sugar/personal automobiles/microwave walky-talkies... to pick a few I personally would have no trouble giving up.
I would have a rather harder time being told I wasn't allowed a personal computer though, as a thorough-bred consumer myself.
An attitude change is required - when you see a 7 foot LCD covering your mates wall you think 'Wow! that's amazing I bet my Xbox would look fantastic on that!' but what you should be thinking is 'My word! what on earth do you need a screen like that for? surely that is a waste of electricity?' If governments could somehow make people think large & expensive = wasteful & irresponsible rather than large & expensive = I'm considerably richer than you. It could maybe be done similar to the way smoking has been villefied here in the UK - the kids no longer think its cool.
my 1 dollar and 55 cents,
Sam.