POL101Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Carbon Footprint, Consumerism
Individuals and Climate Change
● Green consumerism has potential to impact climate change, but the conditions under it
has constrictions. For it to be a solution, it has to be a gateway to politics. It has to
generate something more than just buying stuff. Individual action to be effective has to
be more than the behavioral choice, but has to be political as well.
● How much choice/control do individuals have? Is it really an individual level problem or is
it a structural problem?
○ Predisposes that I have a significant amount of control in my carbon footprint.
● Is relying on individuals to change their behavior an effective means of responding to
climate change? Under what conditions?
○ The extreme of this argument is saying we don’t need the international treaties,
national climate change policies, or NGOs/corporations, etc. changing things,
that we can take this problem on ourselves, saying we can deal with this problem
without relying on anybody else. This could add up if everybody did it, if
everybody in the global north did it.
● How is individual action political action?
○ Carbon footprinting - how much control do you have over your footprint?
■ Main elements: share of public services, home (gas, oil and coal), home
electricity, private/public transport, holiday flights, food and drink, clothes
and personal effects, car manufacture & delivery, etc.
● What is in your control in these categories and what is outside
your control?
● Ex: for food, we don’t control how they’re produced or the
availability of the different food products, etc.
■ The locus of control tend to be relatively limited both in number and in
impact. Individual action has to put into impact.
● Political necessity of individual action
○ Why does Wapner call individual action ecologically futile?
■ Individual action could be ecologically futile, in fact, you can do more
harm than good sometimes with your individual choices, IF your individual
choices remain individual, as in, if they are not connected to the structural
aspects of climate change. In other words, all the aspects you couldn’t
control in your carbon footprinting, are the structural aspects.
○ Why is it politically necessary?
■ Politics is the way you link individual actions to those larger structural
links. This happens through normalization, coalition building, and
symbolic politics. the key is, they can’t be private, they can’t be invisible
actions. Politics is necessary to translate individual actions into structural
change.
■ Symbolic politics
● Celebrity choices are more visible than our choices, given his
status as a movie star. This kind of thing matters because it
contributes to normalization, and the idea of what should be
expected and what should be the new normal.
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Document Summary
Green consumerism has potential to impact climate change, but the conditions under it has constrictions. For it to be a solution, it has to be a gateway to politics. It has to generate something more than just buying stuff. Individual action to be effective has to be more than the behavioral choice, but has to be political as well. Predisposes that i have a significant amount of control in my carbon footprint. This could add up if everybody did it, if everybody in the global north did it. Main elements: share of public services, home (gas, oil and coal), home electricity, private/public transport, holiday flights, food and drink, clothes and personal effects, car manufacture & delivery, etc. Ex: for food, we don"t control how they"re produced or the availability of the different food products, etc. The locus of control tend to be relatively limited both in number and in impact.
