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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Also boots theory is something to keep in mind. As in buying quality is often cheaper over the long term.
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.
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.
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.