I call bullshit. We cannot change the world by "not providing a market". A good historical exmaple is slavery which provided cheap cotton. A few utopians (in the negative sense) started communes that grew their own cotton or bought non-slave made products. Meanwhile Fredrick Douglas spoke and agitated against slavery. If he boycotted cotton, he never considered it important enough to mention it in any of his speeches. And I know for certain that Harriet Tubman, Old Moses, who freed a thousand slaves wore cotton. She never had any money; no way she could have afforded anything else.
Individual "voluntary simplicity" is not going to take us where we need to go. Let's take the case of passenger ground transportaton. We could indeed run the U.S. transportation on renewables - but not at our current efficiency. Sustainable biomasss could provide about 22 quads of energy total compared to the 98 the U.S. used in 2004. We could also continue to get a bit from hydro, and could expand geothermal/ We get an insignificant amount of electricity from wind, but could get up to half without storage. (Actual practice in some counties in Germany have shown you can get up to half your electricity from intermittent sources such as wind without need for storage or expensive backup. http://tinyurl.com/4g27a
We could get much of our low and medium temperature heat from solar energy. That still is not going to match the 98 quads we consumed in 2000, much less matching the population growth to the present and into the future. But we could get 30-40 quads total.
So take the case of transportation. What can you do as an individual? Buy a diesel car, and run it on biodiesel, knowing you are using five to twenty times as much as could be used sustainably if this was done widely? Take buses which actually get fewer passenger miles to the gallon than cars? If you are in NY city you could take an electric train that could be run off wind power, and a few other places as well. But in most of the U.S. you don't have sustainable transportation available.
"Ah, but you can walk or bicycle" lifestylists, will insist. Baby, in large parts of the U.S., people can't afford homes near enough to work to bicycle or walk. And if you start talking about the end of work I'm going to reach through the monitor and strangle you. Yes we would be better off as a society with fewer hours of work and less stuff more equally distributed. But most people are not in a position to balance stuff that way; you can't live on nothing, and to get the bare minimum to live on takes work for most of us. End of work applied on an individual basis is a pretty clear exercise in class priviledge.
Does that mean the problem is not solvable? Of course not. But he solutions are social solutions, not individual solutions. For example there is Cybertran http://www.cybertran.com/ an ultralight rail system that would be practical not just in urban areas but in edge cities and most suburbs. (I know the line about how you can't do pssenger rail in low density population areas. If you are talking actual agricultureal land this is true. It is possible for suburbs if the stations and cars and rail is cheap enough, and compact enough and Cybertran is.) Cybertran uses 1/19th the fuel per passenger mile to generate the electricty to run it as your average automobile or light truck.
For areas and purposes for which Cybertran is not suitable, there have been four passenger electric sedans demonstrated with a 250+ mile range at 55 mph that would be mass produced cheaply enough to sell for $20,000. http://www.evuk.co.uk/hotwires/rawstuff/art24.html
For people who need a longer range than $250 miles, the same technolgy used in the electric car could run on a hybrid engine and get $75 miles to the gallon.
And of course we could provide a more equal distribution of income that would allow more people to make a leisure/consumption trade-off and use bicycles and walking more, improving public health as well.
The above is just an example. There are other technologies for freight
transportation, water and air transportation, industrial consumption, climate control and appliances in buildings.
I could go on; the bottom line is we could improve end use efficiency enough to run our society on renewable energy even with out reducing the amount of stuff we consume. (Though I think a lowered consumption , increased leisure one would be a great one.) But you are not going to get there through individual action. To get Cybertran requires a city, or better yet a state comitted to replacing bus systems with Cybertran light rail. To get electric cars requires strong enough regulations to force car companies to sell them. (Yes I know California tried it. And the car companies sabotage the program - eventually taking electric cars away from their drives and crushing them. [The electric cars were made available on a lease only basis - so they remained the property of the auto makers.]) To get effiicient buildings will require a massive public works program to weatherize, and insualte every existng building in the U.S., and retrofit solar space and hot water heating wherever practical (most of the U.Sl - including NY and Boston.).
And you know what? Most people in the U.S. would support this; at least every survey has shown this. But it is strongly against the interest of the owners of capital. Not just the car and auto companies. Capital in general hates the idea of more taxes for more public works and more regulations to tell them how to spend the money they extract from ordinary people. As you wer told by another poster, it is fundamentally a class issue. And the approach you outlines actually helps to speed the degradation of this planets suitability for human habitation, because it reduces the odds of winning.
Look at it this way; if 20% if the U.S. population did everything they could as individuals to live sustanably, you see an improvement, maybe even better than a 20% improvement, but you would not reach the minimal sustainability needed to maintain a technological civilization. If you could get 20% of the population to strongly support a politcal movement, that would probably be enough to win the changes to turn the nation around. I'm not saying either is easy. But political action offers a lot more possibility of success than lifestyle changes.
Are lifestyle changes usesless? Hell no. If you are in the position to make such lifestyle changes and demonstrate that you can have a better life than people not doing it, it constittues a kind of propaganda ; but it makes sense only as part of a larger political movement, and to the extent it does not drain energy from it.