That's the whole point though. It's kind of all or nothing. You're either part of "consumerist" society, or you aren't.
The laptop is just one tiny example. A good economist could point out better than I could just how many insignificant things in your day have a huge toll on resources, or at least contribute to larger things that do.
Just by looking at this site, you're generating advertising revenue, and supporting the advertising industry in general, which is a large part of our economy.
I left cartoon network on in the background while i've been using the net. There's some anime show on right now (i'm not a big fan personally). All the characters are cartoons, but could be described as what most western people would consider "hot". This reinforces that notion of attractiveness to the people watching, both in how they look, and their clothing. This probably helps gyms to some small extent, and companies that sell diet products (diet coke, pepsi, low far oreos, etc), and makes people that don't fit the ideal feel bad about themselves. They probably cope with that either by eating more, joining weight watchers, or buying something else that makes them happy to forget that they feel bad about how they look compared to society's ideal.
This thread was about global warming and the environment originally, and kamikaze's disgust about the lack of anything being done about it. I think what I'm trying to get at is that the roots of all this are much more deep seated, and complicated.
I live in Palo Alto, CA. There are like, a zillion Priuses here. I see like 20 if I go ANYWHERE, even the grocery store a mile away. I bet all those people feel good about their Prius, and how they're helping be part of the solution. But the fact is, it's a stop gap measure that still uses the highway system, helps the car industry, doesn't promote mass transit, doesn't help cities get redesigned for not needing a car to get to places, and basically doesn't really solve the real "problem" of emissions, or dependence on carbon fuel sources.
One of the main highways around here is the 101. You take it to go just about anywhere. During rush hour (i think around 3 hours in morning, and the afternoon, according to HOV lane rules), you can't be in the 4th lane. To be honest, I think this just fucks up traffic patterns, and wastes a lane. The result is a faster moving 4th lane, that is not used to capacity, and thus the other 3 lanes get more crowded than they should be. So, cars move slower, go at slower speeds, in lower gears (frequently stop and go), and thus burn a lot more fuel. Plus, the presence of the HOV lane means that people that can enter it (cars with 2 or more people, or smug assholes in their Priuses) hop on the freeway, mess up traffic while merging over to the HOV lane (all the people doing this and lane changing cause everyone else to brake, which ripples, and slows a lot of people down), ride the HOV lane for a while til their exit, then cause the same effect merging 4 lanes back to their exit lane.
So, while the purpose of the HOV lane is to promote people to car pool (or drive hybrids, since that lets you in too), the real purpose was to reduce emissions, or fuel use. Does it do this? If you ask me, it does the opposite.
People are so caught up in what intuition tells them is "better" for society, but in reality, they're not really making a difference.
What would make a difference is if all of society as a whole was more educated, questioned things, made informed decisions, and understood these issues for real. Instead we get people that either are too dumb to give a shit, or waste a lot of energy on stop gap measures that don't do a lot in the long run.
Furthermore, what could REALLY make a difference is vast policy changes, that are mandatory, and need to come from the government. I'm talking re-organizing city layout, completely changing transit, etc. We mandate ethanol usage in fuel in America, when this is not efficient, and in fact, is hurting us, because putting 10% ethanol in our fuel requires more corn growing, shipping, and just makes the gas less efficient. The real reason it happens is because the corn lobby is so big in this country, not because of sound scientific reasoning.
So how do you fix the government forcing something to be done back asswards (such as caving to the corn lobby, because it helps them get elected?) That's right, better educate the population.
I feel like the environmental movement is the new war on drugs. We spend billions on fighting drug "crime", when drugs being illegal is what makes them expensive, which is what makes peopel commit crime to afford them, and what makes it profitable for gangs and other people to operate, and overcrowds our jails with "drug offenders", which wastes even more money.
Bottom line is that people need to look at the root causes or problems, and the real solutions. Only then will we make real progress. In the meantime, you'll have people driving Priuses while drinking bottled water that had to get shipped 100s of miles to them instead of drinking from their tap.