A fixation on system change alone opens the door to a kind of cynical self-absolution that divorces personal commitment from political belief. This is its own kind of false consciousness, one that threatens to create a cheapened climate politics incommensurate with this urgent moment.
[…]
Because here’s the thing: When you choose to eat less meat or take the bus instead of driving or have fewer children, you are making a statement that your actions matter, that it’s not too late to avert climate catastrophe, that you have power. To take a measure of personal responsibility for climate change doesn’t have to distract from your political activism—if anything, it amplifies it.
Bullshit, straight up bullshit. It makes a difference at scale, but at scale it is miniscule when compared to even small mass polluters.
That’s not to say you should live as pollution-causing as possible, but spare me the pearl clutching over my paper plate usage.
Did nobody here read the article? Manifesting holistic change starts at home, precisely because it creates an appetite for change over status quo. A person who puts in individual effort is far more likely to tolerate and advocate for collective effort. The idea that top down change will not impact individuals is as ridiculous as the notion that resistance to top down change isn’t rooted in anxiety over individual impacts.
Your argument is every bit as naive as it is noble.
I have been on this hill for years, ever since the whole “recycling does nothing” attitude became popular.
People who make these individual lifestyle changes are more likely to advocate for holistic change. Meanwhile those who adopt a cynical take on environmentalism are more likely to disengage entirely. This seems incredibly obvious to me.
I love the “nascar doesn’t hurt the environment, big companies do! f1 doesn’t hurt the environment, it’s big oil’s fault! racing my shitcrate down the road doesn’t hurt the environment, even though I’ve modified the carb so unburnt fuel spews out the back because VROOOM VROOM makes me sound like a real man, no, it’s uh, all those datacenters fault!”
whatever their fetish is, they’ll die on that hill defending it instead of changing.
Think about it: their own children will pick up the tab, be the ones who suffer the worst for these silly fucking games, and they literally don’t care. THEIR OWN KIDS. Zero fucks given. When they don’t even care about the future shitshow their own kids will have to suffer, what leverage can be found?
The issue is, the “wisdom” isn’t “don’t worry about personal emissions”, it’s “take voting extremely seriously. Become a single issue voter, that issue should be climate”
But there’s a psychological thing where people take the discount today and the payment later.
Okay, let me write in “Climate for President” and see how that goes.
Voting isn’t going to do shit.
Get involved. Protest. Refuse to work for terrible companies. Convince the people around you to protest and vote.
Voting isn’t going to do shit.
Convince the people around you to protest and vote.
Which is it?
Voting by itself doesn’t do shit. Organizing and convincing people to vote based on an issue does.
Voting isn’t going to do shit.
Voting can buy us time and keep us a situation more conducive to making changes outside the electoral system. Protesting under a fascist regime is a good way to get a life sentence, get deported, or put on a blacklist.
I would amend the quote to say “voting alone isn’t going to do shit.” IMO without direct action it’s just a slower slide into fascism.
Agreeing with both of you basically. I just don’t want anyone thinking that voting on its own is sufficient to address the problems we’re seeing
Voting is literally a require to enact meaningful change in the long term. At no point has change in a western society come from a protest movement being given carte blanche to create new laws. The protest movement creates awareness, shifts the Overton window and causes people to elect a government which passes new laws.
This week I decided that my next six months will be dedicated to making solarpunk stuff, stay with an eye open for me and hopefully it encourages you to create some stuff to.
There is an alternative, it is better and we are already making it true!
BP oil company pushed the idea that our individual carbon footprints matter so that everyone can share the blame of what the fossil fuel industry has done.
Don’t fall for it. Only corporations pollute enough to matter. Only corporations can provide alternatives to fossil fuels. Only corporations can make a meaningful reduction to greenhouse gas emissions.
The most significant difference individuals can make is to create political and legal pressure by voting and protesting.
Why not vote and protest and consume less?
Exactly. They’re right, but it’s just a way to not feel guilty about driving a gas guzzler or using a gas furnace. No the corporations are more guilty, but that doesn’t make you innocent for just shifting the blame, the same tactic they did. We ALL need to change our ways.
I didn’t say “don’t consume less”.
Just pointing out that the fossil fuel industry paid a marketing team to push the idea of individual carbon footprints for a reason.
100 companies have been responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That means that the remaining 29% of emissions are shared by all the other companies and consumers. Even if you split that remainder evenly between all other companies and consumers, that’s only 14% all emissions being caused by consumers and it’s probably more likely in the single digits.
This is why the fossil fuel industry pays a marketing team to get the public focused on their individual carbon footprint. So you’re focused on the less than 14% of the total emissions instead of the other 86%
That factoid is vastly misinterpreted. In particular, the term “responsible for” does not mean “emitted”.
The study it’s referencing studied only fossil fuel producers. And it credited all emissions from anyone who burned fuel from that producer to that producer. So if I buy a tank of gas from Chevron and burn it, my emissions are credited to Chevron for purposes of that study.
The study is not saying that 100 companies emit 71% of global emissions. It’s saying that 100 companies produce 71% of the fossil fuels used globally.
Why wouldn’t Chevron be responsible for the emissions for the fuel they provide? The fossil fuel industry has entrenched themselves and made it as difficult as possible to not use their products. Even to go so far as to influence how our cities are built.
I’d love to not use any fossil fuels but I can’t afford solar panels or a heat pump so I have to either burn gas or my family freezes to death. I have to get my electricity from coal because my family can’t survive without electricity.
I don’t have a choice because of the choices made by the fossil fuel industry.
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“70% of fossil fuel emissions come from corporations”
“That number attributes your personal emissions to corporations, you should also try to lower your personal impact.”
“Why would I lower my personal impact, the corporations are responsible for 70% of all emissions!”
Lol come on now, at least engage with the fucking argument and facts smh
So you’re saying you’re plan is for individuals to choose the choice that is not an option?
You’re saying the solution is for everyone to stop using electricity?
Stop driving to work and earning money is the solution?
Buy solar panels without a house to put them on?
This is why the individual carbon foot print doesn’t matter. Because it is a systemic problem. So the large majority of people don’t have the luxury of being able to reduce their carbon footprint. And it is such a small percentage to begin with.
This is why BP is paying a marketing firm to convince the public to focus on their individual carbon footprint.
We need systemic change not paper straws.
Maybe I was overly harsh earlier, I saw elsewhere in the thread that you are vegan. So am I , and I’m sure you’ve heard the “I didn’t kill any animals, the farms did” or “the meat at the store is already killed” or “I’ll go vegan when eating meat is illegal” and I’m not sure how you reconcile the two.
When purchasing new appliances, choose more efficient appliances over less efficient one’s. Replace all your incandescent lightbulbs with LEDs. Limit your use of air conditioning to reasonable temperatures. Choose energy-saving programs for your washing machine and hang your clothes outside to dry when it’s warm instead of using a dryer.
Stop driving unnecessarily. If there is decent enough public transit, use it instead of a car even if it takes longer. If the distances are short, use a bicycle. Choose food that causes fewer carbon emissions - locally grown vegetables are the best in that regard.
On its own none of these matter. Combined however they will significantly reduce your emissions. None of these cause significant sacrifices.
Not only should we ban plastic straws, we should continuously ban more and more plastic. First plastic straws, then plastic bags, then plastic packaging. The systematic change will happen either gradually or spontaneously. I prefer the latter but if the former is all we have it must be encouraged as much as possible.
While this is basically true, what it ignores is the impact personal decisions make on the ethos around us to build support for legal pressure. I have family that doesn’t disbelieve climate change but isn’t motivated by it, and by us going mostly meatless and buying and EV they’ve started meatless Mondays and Thursdays and are considering an EV for their next car. Our individual actions ripple out, and create a public normalization for these types of changes so that it isnt an uphill battle to get uninformed laypeople to care about climate policy at the polling stations
I’m vegan, I drive an EV and I’m saving money for solar and a heat pump.
Just pointing out that the fossil fuel industry paid a marketing team to push the idea of individual carbon footprints for a reason.
100 companies have been responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That means that the remaining 29% of emissions are shared by all the other companies and consumers. Even if you split that remainder evenly between all other companies and consumers, that’s only 14% all emissions being caused by consumers and it’s probably more likely in the single digits.
This is why the fossil fuel industry pays a marketing team to get the public focused on their individual carbon footprint. So you’re focused on the less than 14% of the total emissions instead of the other 86%
I’m not saying me driving an EV does statistically anything to reduce carbon emissions, or even that if I got all my friends and family to go vegan and bike instead of drive cars that it would. I am saying that the broad public doesn’t care about these issues enough to consume differently or vote for policy or politicians that make their lives less convenient in order to fight climate change, and that instead our individual actions to avert climate change contribute to a public ethos that can accept lifestyle changes and that may potentially hold the mega polluting corporations to account and fix our throw-away durable goods culture in a way that media-demonized protests and pestering bought-and-paid politicians never can.
I am saying that the broad public doesn’t care about these issues enough to consume differently or vote for policy or politicians that make their lives less convenient in order to fight climate change
Which is why focusing on our individual carbon footprint doesn’t work. You need 100% participation and not enough people care.
With protesting/voting you can force change with just the majority of voters. Which is around a quarter of the population.
The most significant difference individuals can make is to create political and legal pressure by voting and protesting.
Well can also stop giving them our money. Reduce consumption of their products through alternatives and overall reduction. We can also divest our investments away from funds that include their shares.
I’m not saying to do nothing as individuals.
Just pointing out that the fossil fuel industry paid a marketing team to push the idea of individual carbon footprints for a reason.
100 companies have been responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That means that the remaining 29% of emissions are shared by all the other companies and consumers. Even if you split that remainder evenly between all other companies and consumers, that’s only 14% all emissions being caused by consumers and it’s probably more likely in the single digits.
This is why the fossil fuel industry pays a marketing team to get the public focused on their individual carbon footprint. So you’re focused on the less than 14% of the total emissions instead of the other 86%
That includes downstream emissions. So if your car runs on BP oil, those emissions would be part of BPs emissions.
There is a reason BP is not advertising people to drop their cars. BP wants two things in its campaign. First of all to make clear that it is your lifestyles fault and secondly that besides munor changes you do not have to change that at all.
They are responsible for those downstream emissions because they entrenched themselves and made it so the majority of people don’t have a choice. Even going so far as to influence how our cities are built to make us dependent on them.
Most people cannot afford to get a car let alone an EV. The only reason we are seeing EVs in the first place is because of government intervention.
If the individual doesn’t have a choice because of choices made by the fossil fuel industry then the individual isn’t responsible for those emissions.
How do people die from not having a car? It must be a lot of them, given that most can not afford them, but depend on them…
You don’t know that people use cars to get to work? And get food?
If I were to stop using fuel I would have no way to get to work and earn money. Which means no house or food or anything.
Why does that need to be explained to you?
I have both been able to work and get food without using a car.
Which, as I said, is exactly why we should stop giving them our money. Divestment is a key thing people can will hurt these companies massively.
“We” as in consumers don’t use enough to hurt companies by divesting.
By all means do anything you can to reduce your individual carbon footprint. But do so knowing it is just a drop in the ocean. Such a small difference that it might as well be nothing.
But if you convince the public that our individual choices can fix climate change then we end up with paper straws instead of systemic change.
"We” as in consumers don’t use enough to hurt companies by divesting.
I think you’re confused by what divesting is. That’s us as business owners, not as customers (obviously we as customers can hit them simultaneously from the other side too).
Yes, individually it doesn’t hurt them much, but it becomes the death of a thousand cuts.
If you can put pressure on your pension provider, local government, church, favourite charity or any other organisation you care about to drop funds with them in entirely then all the better.
By all means do anything you can to reduce your individual carbon footprint
Divesting is not to do with that, it’s about hitting these companies right in the share price.
Here is the definition of divesting.
You seem to be confused about what individual carbon footprint is because you’re talking about business choices as if they are an individuals choices.
Business owners divesting has nothing to do with an individuals carbon footprint.
If you can put pressure on your pension provider, local government, church, favourite charity or any other organisation you care about to drop funds with them in entirely then all the better.
This is accomplished by group action and legal/political pressure which is the opposite of reducing your individual carbon footprint. That is the systemic change I am saying we need.
Not telling people they need to walk to work so they don’t burn fuel. Or get solar panels to stop funding coal, when they live in an apartment.
Those 100 companies are fuel producers making fuel that everyone else burns. By that metric my gas company is responsible for 100% of my gas-based greenhouse emissions.
I hate how often that study gets misused.Why wouldn’t they be responsible for the emissions from the fuel they provide? The fossil fuel industry has entrenched themselves and made it as difficult as possible to not use their products. Even to go so far as to influence how our cities are built.
I’d love to not use any fossil fuels but I can’t afford solar panels or a heat pump so I have to either burn gas or my family freezes to death. I have to get my electricity from coal because my family can’t survive without electricity.
I don’t have a choice because of the choices made by the fossil fuel industry.
If the providers are to blame for all emissions and the consumers are free of responsibility, then all consumption is equal. If Exxon is the responsible party, then the guy buying the gas guzzler to stick it to the libs is the same as the guy driving a hybrid, as neither is to blame for their emissions.
I understand choosing comfort over living in a cave or dying, obviously, but that doesn’t mean we’re free of any and all blame. Any time a new climate report comes and it’s worse than the one before I understand that my existence and choice of comfort played a part in it . I don’t just go “oh that Exxon, smh” and carry on guilt free.
No one said consumers are free of all responsibility.
No one said “oh that Exxon, smh”.
Trying to fix climate change by reducing individual carbon footprint doesn’t work because there are a lot of people that:
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don’t have the luxury of being able to not use gasoline or solar.
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Don’t care
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It requires 100% of the world population to take it upon themselves to do the right thing just to fix the smallest part of the problem.
Fixing it with voting/protest reduces emissions for everyone. The rich, poor, industrial emissions, commercial emissions. All emissions.
smallest part of the problem
This is what I’m trying to get across to you here. You’ve posted the same notion multiple times in this thread. The consumer share isn’t the smallest part, it’s most of it. All the oil we extract serves to make products, transport products, sell products to the consumer - you. It’s not being being burnt for fun.
When you engage in consumption, any amount of it, you’re pulling a string connected to a million other strings that mostly end up in an oil well one way or another. The luxury you speak of is in that consumption, not the lack of it.
And if you think otherwise, compare your lifestyle, your lifelong level of comfort to that of someone who spent their whole life living in a hut in Mali, whose lifelong emissions equal a few months worth of yours. Now try to tell that person that you’re not responsible for the gas you burn, it’s the fault of those that provided you with the option to do it. It’s insulting.
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Every person is individually responsible for burning down at least one billionaire-owned property.
the corporations will not save us. be very wary of any “solution” that allows you to continue unchanged and to shift all responsibility to someone else, there’s a reason that perspective is so pervasive
Like I’m all for that we need to hold a fire under corporations. But we also need to change too. Just because they do like, 70% of it doesn’t mean we’re off the hook. We’re buying those products that they pollute for. We drive the cars that are polluting. We buy the cheap clothes that they shamelessly pollute. We each have to change.
Yep. Who did Dasani bottle all that water for? Paying humans with mouths
Corporations have absolutely no incentive to change, consumers need to vote with their wallets if they want something to happen. But no, everytime someone points out this blindingly obvious fact we get the “uhm actually corporations need to change, it’s not my fault they’re feeding off my unsustainable habits.”
We have to work together, we only have power to effect change when we work together, solidarity is our strength.
File under “green washing.”
If a company offers a more expensive “choice” of a greener option, rather than just being ecologically responsible by default, then you are being sold a product. That is, you get to express your superior “green” ethics by identifying with your purchase.
The company doesn’t actually care about the environment. They’re just doing the minimum to capture extra $$$
I’m not completely sure of what point you’re making. Would you buy the cheaper product even if you could afford the more expensive green one?
Because if the answer is “no”, then you are still agreeing with OP; and if the answer is “yes” then you are saying you want to knowingly buy something that is harmful for the environment and encourage a company to make more of it, while deflecting responsibly and saying that corpos and govs are the ones who have to do something.
I am agreeing with op. Corpos and govs are the ones who have to do something. We individually and collectively also have to do something. Nothing changes for the better unless we have buy-in from individuals. The binary you’re presenting is one I didn’t intend with my comment. I was saying we should watch out for green washing, when functioning as a consumer.
That is, If you can avoid doing business with companies which are harming the environment then you should. The same goes for doing business with companies which are half-assed or insincere in their efforts (though these are naturally preferable).
So if you can’t avoid a purchase, and there isn’t a good choice, then obviously you should pick the most ecologically sound option available to you.
My main point is no one should feel virtuous for picking, like, “eco green Coca Cola” just because 5% of the proceeds go to saving the rainforest. They’re a reprehensible company, so far better to just not fuck with Coke in the first place.
Ah, I see, I definitely agree with everything you’re saying; I just got a bit confused. When you talked about “green option”, I was thinking something like fast fashion vs clothes that will last, for example.
Oh I can see how the word “option” could read like that. Glad you brought it up, to give me the chance to clarify
You can say this, but you can’t make it happen. What is more realistic, changing the attitudes and habits of billions of individuals quickly enough to reverse climate change, or enforcing restrictions on thousands of companies?
Why not try to do both?
That’s fine, but the focus should be on the thing with 99% leverage and not on the thing with 1% leverage.
The thing with 99% leverage sadly has only a chance of 1% to happen while the 1% leverage thing you can just make happen. And if you make the 1% thing happen in more people the votes for the 99% thing start to go up as well. And eating less meat does have an impact. For years now i read headlines that year n had less pig meat being eaten in total than year n-1 (pork being the focus as my country afaik does not have a big beef industry so it’s not as relevant to report about it)
We have very little influence on the industry as a whole but if you buy less meat, the meat industry actually becomes smaller over time. The alternative products also become more and more. Super markets over here all have a vegan shelf at least and there’s more vegan only restaurants opening up in my city that even made my meat eater colleagues go there to eat from time to time.
if you buy less meat, the meat industry actually becomes smaller over time.
that has never happened.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-production-tonnes?tab=chart&country=~OWID_WRL
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-production-tonnes?tab=chart&country=~DEU I’m talking over here where our meat industry has become smaller each year for 8 years now
or here the whole of EU if you want https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-production-tonnes?tab=chart&country=OWID_EU27~OWID_EUR~DEU
if the industry continues to grow, the location of the farms doesn’t seem to matter.
your local decline can be explained by any number of factors, and there is not enough evidence to conclude it is due to you or your whole town reducing meat consumption.
Finally someone said it.
“But the companies”. The companies will only stop doing what they do if you don’t buy from them.
Exactly! We can’t blame these companies and then buy their stuff and deflect all responsibility.
It’s sort of a cycle that runs on apathy, ignorance, and lack of empathy.
Powerful groups manipulate and coerce people and markets
Manipulated, coerced people buy more of what they are pushed to
Consumer votes in leaders that support this exploitative cycle making laws facilitating companies manipulating and coercing their behavior
We need to break out of this cycle by conscientiously rejecting this manipulation, buying less, voting, running for office, etc. (i.e. degrowth)
And this is why we’re doomed.
Other quotes I found compelling from the article were these:
Ultimately, a personal action versus political action binary is unhelpful. The environmental movement needs to sustain a way to do both: agitate and organize for systemic change while also still encouraging individual behavior changes.
[…]
Which is to say that personal action and collective, political action are self-reinforcing. Individual lifestyle changes can act as a kind of alloy that strengthens political activism. To do the difficult work of walking more lightly on the planet is to bind commitment to conviction.Exactly, also systemic change will have individual consequences. By bearing them early we demonstrate that these burdens are smaller than often imagined.
I love the taste of meat. I struggled to imagine a life without it. I have been a pescatarian now for nearly 3 years. It’s inconvenient at times, but not as much as it once was. Seafood is a treat for me, and I imagine many people can live with meat like that. I am healthier, and I am happy with my choice. By making systemic changes to food people will eat less meat, but while the transition will be uncomfortable, the end result won’t be nearly as bad as they fear.
Wait, we actually have to do something? /s
Change has to come from both sides, from companies as well as from consumers. Yes, Your actions don’t really matter when you try to reduce waste, but the oil tanker spills millions of liters into the ocean, or when you use electricity from renewable sources while there is coal extracted and burned to fulfill the need of energy.
But as a consumer you can change the perspective about it by observing it from the personal economic side. This way, doing something in favour of reducing waste or doing something to lessen the effect of the climate catastrophe is merely a side effect of your actions:
- I don’t have children, because I don’t want to take responisbility for them. Also, I don’t like children. This saves me a lot of money, which I don’t have.
- I am relying on a car. But instead of driving a truck-like 5l-gas guzzler, I drive a small economic car. 90% of the time I drive alone anyway. A small car means less fuel consumption, less tax, cheaper repairs. Also, there are more parking spots availiable for me in the city, since the car is shorter than other vehicles (at least for parallel parking).
- When running errands, I combine them with using the car. For instance, I do my grocery shopping on the way back from work, and I can make use of my car’s storage capabilities. This saves me precious time, since I’m on the road anyway.
- When buying clothes, I don’t buy the cheapest clothes availiable. Mid-price ranged clothes are more durable, and they can be worn longer and are cheaper in the long run. Also, I don’t use fabric softener. Not only does it contribute to polluting the enviroment - fabric softener reduces the capability for towels to dry things (which defeats the purpose of a towel), because it hinders the fabrics’ capillar effect for storing water in the fibers. Additional to that, I don’t use an electric dryer. I hang my clothes to dry. This measurement extends your clothes lifetime, which is saving money.
- Although I am a meat eater, I am open-minded to vegan food - in the last decade it came a long way and there are good substitutes. Some of them are trial and error though (some taste like a stack of hay smells), but the alternatives are out there. It doesn’t have to taste exactly like meat. The worst thing that can happen is, that you expand the list of things you can eat.
- And the most important thing of all: DON’T BUY USELESS CRAP! Sure, the cloud-based app-operated thing is appealing, but what happens, when the company that produces it goes bankrupt? The cloud service gets shut down! You have a paper weight now. I don’t buy such things, because I don’t want my home cluttered with stuff I don’t need eventually. When I buy new stuff (mostly to replace broken stuff that I can’t repair) I do research first and evaluate what features of the desired thing really benefit my needs. I rather buy expensive stuff that is more durable an has a longer lifetime over all. In the long run it turns out to be less expensive.
In my opinion it makes more sense to analyse your actions with the affect of personal economic impact in mind than to view it in the sense of reducing the impact of the climate catastrophe. Because since your neighbor isn’t, you can easily feel helpless and de-motivated.
you might add to your list : choose a bank and insurance company that use your money for ecological/local/social projects
The author is somehow surprised at the reactions they get when they nitpick people on their individual actions.
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There’s a better way to frame all this: change comes from within. We obviously have to vote and pay attention to politics and speak up to our elected officials because that’s how “not being ruled by a monarch” works. But ultimately all real changes, even in the world, come from within.
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Money in politics is poison, sure, and we’re definitely fucked if it isn’t solved immediately, if not sooner.
I was speaking in the assumption that everyone here would be on the same page about that.
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I agree to an extent. More often than not, the purchasing decisions of “consumers” are not free choices, and even if they want to do things that are more ethical, sometimes those ethics conflict.
Until recently, I didn’t have the luxury of caring about the supply chain of most of my purchases because I didn’t have enough money to buy anything but the cheapest version of what I needed.
I also try to buy or build repairable devices to reduce waste and make it so that I am buying fewer things in the long run. Unfortunately, primarily because of decisions made by large companies and investors, the components to do this can often only be found on AliExpress. There are no local options, and there are no options that have a transparent supply chain.
On top of that, the monopolistic companies and the politicians that support them have created a system with a lot of inertia that removes options for “consumers” by undercutting the market and buying out competitors until nothing but the monopoly remains. Lots of towns only have a Walmart and/or a Dollar Tree where they can purchase household items because those companies put all the local shops out of business. The people there are stuck at no fault of their own.
The people who do have the money to make better climate decisions with their spending are definitely in a better position to make more free decisions, but, again, companies have not designed products to have interchangeable parts or to be repairable at all. Often times alternatives just simply do not exist.
Cell phones, laptops, cars, etc. are all basically required for people in the US because of decisions that individuals have no control over.
And finally, the distribution of impact of an individual is heavily skewed toward the rich. The changes that poorer people can make do have some impact, and there are knock-on effects that make those impacts stronger, but to frame this as the fault of anyone outside of capitalists and their pet politicians is pretty disingenuous.
In short, people usually can’t make free decisions about how they spend their money, and even if they could, they don’t have all the information they need to make good decisions, and they are actively being fed mis/disinformation to further keep them in the dark. To blame them is probably wrong, and to think that individual action is worth putting effort into at the cost of collective and political action is a bad idea. It should really only be a supplement.
The line is reduce, reuse and then recycle for a reason. Not buying something and buying second hand are affordable for everybody. Unfortunatly the later takes more time.
Most poorer people straight up cannot afford the better option up front.
Lots of things are basic social requirements if you want to have access to lucrative careers. If you’re not wearing the right clothes, good luck at job fairs, interviews, networking events, etc. Can’t afford the pricey ones that will last? Your options are get the cheap ones or have a worse chance at income that you need to survive. This is, again, not a free choice.
On top of that, again, the distribution of climate impact is skewed heavily toward the rich. Without including that in these arguments and articles, and simply saying everyone needs to do these things, people are biasing the burden on poorer people.
Finding good secondhand options takes a lot of time. So much so that it is literally a job that people have. More often than not, the decision is frumpy clothes that will make you stand out in a bad way that can easily affect job prospects, self esteem, how your kids are treated at school, etc. or to buy the cheap stuff online.
Most of the time, the stuff at the thrift store isn’t much cheaper than the cheap stuff online, and often it IS the cheap stuff that will break soon that people have discarded. Take a walk through your local thrift store and it’s probably overflowing with clothes from Shien, halfway broken knockoff IKEA furniture, and cheap (probably broken) single-use kitchen gadgets.
None of this even touches on the carefully targeted advertising on social media that primes people to have the kind of consumption behavior that fuels these companies to begin with.
Nowhere local stocks the parts to repair most second-hand items. Parts for older items are often hard to find because they are no longer made. I mean, you’re replying to someone who builds repairable versions of such items. Why do you think that is necessary?
Do you have the skill-set to do as they do? I do, and yet, I assure you, skills, a 3D Printer and a friggen machine-shop at my disposal can only do so much to compensate for a supply chain that has been absolutely gutted and continually re-worked to force consumption, and of products from the far end of the globe, at that.
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These companies are getting this pressure because they are well known and because of coordinated collective action against them. By all means, avoid them. That said, there are tons of reasons that people still buy from these companies.
For 3M, they produce the most readily available and performant masks, respirators, air filters and adhesives, which are a necessity in a lot of situations. For instance, I build my own air purifiers using standard HVAC filters and PC fans for myself and friends/family (so that they have have repairable units that use standard parts), and often 3M filters are the only performant ones that I can buy while avoiding Amazon, another company worth boycotting. In addition to that, 3M products are used in sooo much stuff these days that it’s very easy to support them without knowing about it.
For Starbucks, I know of quite a few towns where Starbucks is the only coffee shop (because they aggressively forced out the competitors), and there is no library or similar public space available. I’m sure as hell not going to tell the people of that town where Starbucks is the only quiet place that they can read or work or get a coffee that they are the problem here.
There are tons of other, similar situations that force or heavily influence people to buy from shitty companies.
On top of that, I’m positive that the vast majority of alternatives are similarly bad, and they just haven’t been the target of collective action yet. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
This whole argument gives very “yet you participate in the system, how curious” energy, and is pretty divorced from reality.
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I’m talking about things like this: https://www.cleanairkits.com/products/luggables
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Yeah, I think there is some confusion here. This isn’t to protect a computer, it’s to cycle all the air in a room in a few minutes and filter down to pm2.5. HVAC filters are a very different kind of product than what this company offers.
A whole lot of people hate this notion because it essentially frames it as the consumer’s fault, but at the end of the day it kind of is.
Absolutely. Producers and consumers have joint responsibility for getting us where we are. Climate action requires joint action by consumers and by (or, more likely, against) producers.
Because politicians follow the money. And they understand voters follow the money. So polls may show that legislation against fossil fuel companies is popular. But politicians look at all the gas consumers buy and ask themselves “what will voters do if we pass fossil fuel legislation and gas gets more expensive”? And then they decide not to pass fossil fuel legislation, because even if voters say they want fossil fuel legislation they know how the voters will respond if that legislation makes their consumption habits more expensive.
It’s a lot easier to pass higher gas taxes in cities where 90% of residents take public transit to work than in cities where 5% do.
I was ranting in a different thread about the “discourses of delay” that corporate and right-wing propagandists use to delay climate action. And the fascinating thing is, the idea that only individual consumption matters (the BP carbon footprint ad campaign) and the idea that only the actions of corporations matter (a typical American activist attitude) are both industry propaganda. The former is meant to discourage political action. The latter is meant to discourage individual action. And by framing it as one against the other, propagandists discourage us from taking effective action on either.
We can do both. We have to do both.
