So you're saying that people won't want electricity

If electricity is necessary to survival, yes, they'll want it.

won't want goods to trade with others for stuff they want?

There will still be "trade," but it will be oriented toward achieving the means of subsistence rather than the accumulation of capital.  See Maria Mies' and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen's The Subsistence Perspective for further elaboration.

Let's say some community decides, yes we want to strip mine our coal and use it for a nice new and shiny CO2 emitting power plant.

How likely is this scenario?  You're going to have a community which lives in an area, which is planning to ruin that area's ecosystem for the sake of extracting coal, and which will have neither coal nor livable land once the coal runs out?  Who's going to vote for that?

How about if they decide that they need that water for irrigation, and screw the downstream communities?

There will still be a United Nations to adjudicate disagreements between communities.

How on earth do we transition to the magical utopia where the New Ecological Man understands and internalizes his long term interests?

What is the point of this sarcastic little dig?  Figure it out yourself, if you even care.

What happens during that transition period when local communities still have that old understanding of progress?

Are communities in power now?

"Imagine all the people/ Sharing all the world" -- John Lennon