Should I Turn Down the Thermostat or Overthrow the Capitalist Mode of Production? - Marxist-Humanist Initiative
marxisthumanistinitiative.org
“Should I Turn Down the Thermostat or Overthrow the Capitalist Mode of Production?,” by Brendan Cooney. Challenges assumptions that rising greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to consumers’ behavior and the fact that the wrong leaders are in charge. [...]

From the article:

Furthermore, this article argues against the common tendency to regard all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as the result of production for household consumption, an assumption that tends to focus blame for climate change on the moral failings of individuals. In reality, consumer choices are not the driving factor in the growth of GHG emissions, GHG emissions are not reducible to the carbon footprint of consumption goods, and proposed solutions to climate change that focus on changes to household consumption habits can have little effect on the overall growth of GHG emissions. In the end, this flawed way of thinking is merely a form of victim-blaming, in which individuals are made to feel guilty for massively destructive social forces far beyond the control of individual decision-making, all in order to take the focus away from any substantive social movement aimed at replacing the capitalist mode of production with a more sustainable and rational society.

  • Another CatgirlEnglish
    8·
    22 hours ago

    This is totally true because I use about 15x more kWh of electricity at work than at home. Why? We have an electric boiler supplying bathroom hot water, we still use incandescent lights, we have huge electric ovens for soldering, etc. With green Facilities leadership we could cut our factory emissions by a lot, and there’s only so much supply chain transparency that can be supplied to consumers before they just don’t really know which product is greener (and some of our customers are military and they don’t give a fuck about supply chain carbon emissions). If factory leaders here were B-corp environmentalists we’d be hiking up prices on military grade product and spending that profit on green infrastructure upgrades at our factory.

    • compostgoblin@slrpnk.netEnglish
      2·
      17 hours ago

      Tbf on the electric boiler, it’s probably better to have that than a gas boiler, in terms of CO2 emissions. It depends on how clean the local grid is. The incandescents make no sense though - LEDs are so much better. Even if you don’t care about using less energy for environmental reasons, upgrading the lights would save enough money in energy costs to pay back pretty quickly

      • Aphelion@lemm.ee
        3·
        21 hours ago

        They’re still on every shelves in every hardware store in the US. Freeeeeedumb.