been thinking recently about “individual consumer choices don’t matter” wrt environment and climate change.
Can’t find the article on it with a study and all that, and not sure if we even reblogged it, but the funny thing is - while the statement is mostly true - it’s so funny how the conclusion was “wealth eats up good intentions”. As in, middle and upper class people, while identifying as “green” and self-reporting environmentally friendly day-to-day consumer choices, still have a bigger ecological footprint than poorer people, because due to their affluence, they travel by plane more and have bigger houses and cars.
And I’m just like...
so what you’re saying is, the consumer choices that matter aren’t what’s in your weekly grocery cart, but what house you live in and with how many others? What car and how many you buy (spoiler: more than one per person is... too many lmao), how often you fly unnecessarily (spoiler: don’t fly unless necessary!) and stuff like that.
Like. Middle and upper class people aren’t being FORCED to buy/build/rent bigger houses than they actually need! They’re not forbidden from letting more people live in their houses! They’re not being forced to go on vacations by plane several times a year! They’re not being forced to own multiple cars and get new ones every couple of years!
Of course most of them do. But it’s still their individual choice. I, a poor person, have never owned a single car in my life and hope to never do so. I have chosen to live in a single, medium-sized room in a flatshare, and I have flown a total of 3 times (round-trip) in my entire life and hope to never fly again, even though it’s totally fun and I loved seeing the clouds and landscapes from above. Like. I would make these choices if I had more money, too!
I’d probably invest the surplus money (if I had any) in climate-friendly things, like food forests and community gardens and donate and build a big house for all my housing-insecure friends to live in and so on. Or at the very least use my status and influence to lobby for better and cheap and accessible public transport.
So like... saying individual consumer choices don’t have much of an impact lets middle and upper class people off the hook imo. You just have to focus on the big stuff (the kind of stuff most poor and working class people can’t afford or have no choice over) and not weekly grocery store trips.
(not to mention that consumer choices don’t have to be individual consumer choices - well-planned mass boykotts do have impacts!)