I once heard the back-to-nature approach deftly savaged as "abstinence-only decarbonization."
There is some low-hanging fruit to be plucked in terms of reducing consumption but the vast majority of the decarbonization effort should be focused on different modes of production. There are solid quantitative reasons to focus on cleaning up production instead of decreasing consumption, as well as the obvious political advantages. In 2014 the IPCC estimated that coal power had a median CO2-equivalent emissions intensity of 820 grams per kilowatt hour and that rooftop photovoltaic generation had a median intensity of 41 grams per kWh, 95% lower. So you could ask people to turn off their air conditioners in the summer, and if you convinced half of households to endure that discomfort it would actually reduce emissions much less than if everyone air-conditioned like before but via solar power instead of fossil power. Imposing austerity on energy services is a painful and not even particularly effective way to cut emissions.
