• Paraphrase
• Claim
  • earth-friendly, justice-supporting consumers cannot translate their values into meaningful impact.
• Evidence
• “the shading and distancing of commerce” Princen (1997) is an effect of information assymetry.
  • producers up and down a supply chain can hide the negative social and environmental impacts of their operations, putting conscientious consumers at a disadvantage. //
• this is a result of the evolution of alienation accelerated by the industrial revolution that created the dualistic abstractions of producers and consumers.
• Before that, producers and consumers lived often one and the same in small village settings
• After the Industrial Revolution, producers became manufacturers with imposing factories that were cutoff from the general population

• This set the conditions for opaqueness that have plagued us ever since. //

• time constraints, competing values, and everyday routines together thwart the rational intentions of well-meaning consumers (Røpke 1999)

• assigning primary responsibility for system change to individual consumers is anathema to transformative change (Maniates 2001, 2019)

• This can be broken down into three broad categories of reasons:

  • Rebound effects
    • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=jevon%27s+paradox
    • increases in consumption consistently thwart effciency-driven resource savings across a wide variety of sectors (Stern 2020). -sustainability scholars increasingly critique “effciency” both as:
      • a concept (Shove 2018)
      • as a form of“weak sustainable consumption governance” (Fuchs and Lorek 2005).
    • Many argue that, to be successful, effciency measures must be accompanied by initiatives that limit overall levels of consumption, that is, “strong sustainable consumption governance.

  • Attitude-behavior gap

  • Behavior-impact gap

// - see also Kevin Anderson's presentation on "The Ostrich and the Phoenix" - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=ostrich+and+the+phoenix - humans opt for the just-in-time techno path because we can "kick the can down the road" and procastinate and allow the next generation deal with the problem - As Anderson shows, there isn't enough time for renewable energy to scale to make a difference in the short term and the difficult social problem of massive social behavior change is unfortunately the best way to solve the problem - the allure of technology is that it can fix any problem - the reality is that last generation's technology is unfortunately often the source of this generation's problems - technology not only produces progress, but the unintended consequences produce progress traps which become the inspiration for new technology in an endless cycle of self-created problems giving rise to avoidable solutions