That attitude is a self fulfilling prophecy.

People have rarely been presented with any realistic trade offs between the climate and their own consumption. Typically it’s been “become and aesthetic and give up all material goods or it’s pointless”. Large portions of waste and pollution are already accounted for by the time individuals are presented with a choice.

Whats your suggestion exactly, and what's a realistic trade off that you think will have dramatic impacts? Economic nudging I think can do some things, certainly taxes and gov't investments (i.e. build a nuclear power plant, people don't care how they get power largely as long as they get power). We have people recycling a generation later even though it's annoying but now that's supposedly terrible among environmentalists anyway so you can do some things I grant.

But if your plan is decrease global consumption (not even per capita, just absolute consumption cause the environment doesn't care how many people there are) X% it doesn't even matter what that number is you will fail.

You overestimate the number of decisions people make consciously and underestimate how much people are simply responding to their environment and taking the path of least resistance.

“Decreased consumption” only means less resource utilization in this instance, it doesn’t mean that people are necessarily materially worse off.

An obvious and example would be efforts to expand awareness about the longevity and repairability of consumer electronics. Many people don’t want to continually throw things away when they break.