HIV vaccine a reality!

[Zenda]

Unless you can control the demand curve (market power), you can't control anything else.

Demand is what consumers want. So if demand for ecological damageing products decreases by 90%, production has to decrease too. There is no 'elasticity' here, because the responsible consumers we are talking about don't come back for cheap prices.

they will take advantage of your altruism to their own benefit.

Even if that's true, so what? I was doing it for myself, remember? If we keep rejecting every solution that might benefit others more then ourselves, nothing will happen.

A boycott of those products would require the participation of almost the entire economy to be successful, not just consumers, but downstream producers as well.

Why? If end-consumers stay away, it doesn't matter what producers in the middle do.

And, in the case of producers, the 10% "boycott breakers" would soon be able to purchase 100% of capacity - because they would crush their competitors out of business with cheaper inputs.

The ones doing the boycott are consumers, not competing industry owners. Let them buy all 100% capacity. They still have only 10% of the former market.

People are A not smart enough, and B to selfish to really change something as an unorganized group.

Individual people are smart and altruistic enough, but (organized) groups usually are not. Groups need to be popular to attract members. Besides, if low human intelligence was the real problem, we might as well give up now. Any government applying Pigovian taxes, for example, would be voted away too. This would mean that only non-democratic forms of government would be able to solve problems like this.

I consider myself a responsible person in this sense but I also now that I could probably cut my energy use down 30 % without major problems.

But you don't, apparantly. Why not? Waiting for laws or high taxes to regulate your own energy use? We wouldn't need those if you didn't wait for them. Just being intelligent is not the solution, just as being dumb is not the problem. You have to act on your responsibility too;)