Even if we curbed consumerism our current appliances, infrastructure, agriculture and transportation still gobble up large amount of energy / emit carbon. They

Even if we curbed consumerism our current appliances, infrastructure, agriculture and transportation still gobble up large amount of energy / emit carbon. They will need to be replaced one way or another. Nobody is proposing we magically manufacture billions of new units of everything tomorrow and kick out all the stuff we purchased yesterday. Turnover takes years or decades anyway. Just like the EU did not make possession of incandescent light bulbs illegal, they just mandated that all new ones sold beyond a certain date must meet energy efficiency standards that can't be met by incandescent ones. > We have to consume less, build cell phones that are upgradable and last a decade instead of 2 ~ 3 years. Cars already last more than a decade. As long as moore's law is not entirely dead cell phones will be obsolete simply by advances in the underlying hardware and software exploiting those hardware advances, you don't even need planned obsolescence for that. And ultimately it depends on the individual product whether it requires more energy to build or during its lifetime. Without checking I bet a space heater will burn significantly more energy during its operation than manufacture, and replacing it with a heat pump would be a net gain at almost any point in its lifecycle.