#1 HOW MUCH IMPACT DOES THE CONSUMER HAVE?

Hi reader,

today I want to talk to you about a topic ever-more present in the contemporary debate and ever-more important for our lives: the climatic crisis. The urgency to make decisions to resolve the crisis or at least limit the damages already permanent to our planet is ever-more pressing, and the first way to have an active role as citizens in this is talking about it, to find innovative solutions and to make our voice heard to those who have the power to intervene substantially.

The awareness that the ecosystem is getting worse starting from the industrial revolution and the mass use of machines is nowadays well-established. Already at the beginning of the 90s, the researchers of some oil companies (like Shell and ExxonMobil) had found out that if they kept producing and consuming as they were (and still are) doing, we would have faced a catastrophe. In 1991, Shell researchers had even realized an informative video to explain climate change and had forecasted what has been happening in recent years, but the greed and irresponsibility of the managers of that period prevailed on common sense, and this research ended up being covered up.

Things have kept worsening, so much so that in August 2021 the UN has declared that we have reached the limit and that the consequences of climate change are now irreversible. But now firms have changed strategy: instead of covering up the truth, they exploit advertising to divert the public’s attention and make us think that the responsibility falls only on consumers. In fact, more and more companies now develop environmental commercials where they underline the importance of the actions consumers must do to reduce their environmental impact, hinting that everything can be solved in this way. Read, for instance, this description of a 2020 Coop commercial:

“The concept of the spot is very clear: each one of us is responsible for his/her choices and actions, and those have an effect not only on the individual but, day after day, on the earth ecosystem and, thus, on the entire collectivity.”

But it’s not that simple. Of course, each one of us is responsible for the world in which he/she lives, but is it really an effective strategy to leave in the hands of the individual consumer all this responsibility?

Recently, we are more and more conscious of the environment and the sustainability of our behaviour as consumers. Since primary school, we are taught to turn off the tap when we brush our teeth, to close the windows when the heating is on, to turn the lights off when we leave a room, and most classically to recycle. These are obviously all important measures, and yet something is missing. Every time I encounter a new start-up offering a sustainable version of products daily used to clean or to dress up, I have to face two great obstacles: my parents! I’m kidding, they are not the problem, rather they highlight the real problem. When I ask them if we can try ecological cloths, water-soluble dishwasher tablets or some other eco-friendly solutions, they answer that those things cost a lot more than what they usually buy. When I point out to them that we should not buy cold cuts in plastic boxes at the supermarket, they answer that if they had more time, they would gladly go to the butcher and find alternative behaviours to pollute less. And my parents are not the only ones with this view: from a survey carried out by the “Domani” editorial, it has emerged that if on the one hand 86% of Italians is in favour of transforming the economy in a “green” direction and around 95% thinks it’s wrong that sustainable products are more expensive than the alternative, on the other only 18% thinks that the State should compel firms to transform their production to diminish their environmental impact.

However, climate change is a global problem, and it is naive to think that every single person has the economic and time resources to choose the product which respects a whole lot of requirements, even more, if this product is decidedly more expensive than its more polluting competitors. In these last twenty years, the purchasing power of the average Italian employee has not increased by one bit, and we have faced one economic crisis after another, so close together that they resemble one huge and insurmountable crisis, causing a rise in the number of families that are poor or close to the poverty line. The individual consumer, who receive a low or intermittent salary, cannot afford to respect the environment.

Commercials insisting on the consumer’s responsibility to “do the right thing” do not use a good narrative, because these actions are not what makes the difference in a substantial way. It is not fair to use the marketing rhetoric and say that companies offer what consumers want, because this passes the buck entirely to consumers. Consumers buy what companies offer, and if they offer a cheap product whose price does not reflect a fair wage to its workers or whose production is polluting, it is almost certain that most consumers will still buy it because they cannot do otherwise. After all, the cheapest products in the supermarket are not required to state that “here we exploit workers” or “to produce this kilo of meat we waste a lot of water, buy from us and contribute to the destruction of the planet.”

A study published in the scientific journal Nature in 2019 has even demonstrated that quick and easy solutions, which are often offered by “public service announcements” financed by firms, are counterproductive since they “diminish the support for more substantial policies by providing a false hope that problems can be faced without considerable costs.” Indeed, the narrative that consumers’ actions are enough to make the difference is nothing but a huge placebo, which is sold to us as “prevention” and “responsible business” but is actually lowering the probability to really see an implementation of those concrete reforms that were already necessary forty years ago.

A further step is thus required. Appealing to ethics and a sense of civic duty will not convince oil companies to voluntarily forgo short-term profits from the extraction of fossil fuels. No matter how aware of the importance of fighting climate change, most managers will keep investing in profitable activities, as they are contractually required and financially incentivized to do. If no one penalizes this way of conducting business, which generates huge profits at the expense of the collectivity and downplays its environmental impact, managers will keep acting like that. Left alone, the market will not solve the growing inequality or climate change, rather it will react as it has always done: trying to protect profit at all costs, even by convincing us that there is nothing to change.

To fix the system, we need governments to change the rules of the game, and thus the players’ behaviour. Those consumers who can afford it do a great service to the community by buying sustainable products, but the rest of us needs an exogenous influence, it needs to be attracted to buying the right product. Only by incentivizing the purchase of sustainable products and disincentivizing the others, consumers could keep acting according to their possibilities while adopting a more sustainable behaviour.

Thus, the State must intervene on the subject, ideally by fixing a ceiling price for all the products considered respectful of the environment and further taxing the highly polluting ones, as to increase their production costs and thus the price to the consumer. Only in this way, by internalizing the negative externalities in the price of the final product, it is possible to modify the companies’ behaviour and force them to make their production sustainable. This is because, by lowering the profitability of those sectors and products, capitals, following profit, would automatically move to more eco-friendly (and now more profitable) activities.

I know, this sounds too simple, and you will ask, reader, why it has not been done yet. But to do all this, we need political leaders who are competent and impartial enough to focus on how to fix the system rather than on their careers. Furthermore, the problem is that the lobbies of the world’s most polluting companies are very strong, and they manage to obtain safe-conducts to keep doing what they do best: making profit by polluting. From what emerges in some studies by European environmentalist NGOs, the five largest oil companies (BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Total) have invested between 2010 and 2018 more than 251 million euros in pressuring the European Commission to keep receiving funding for natural gas, a hydrocarbon made by more than 90% of methane. Proof of this is the fact that they also managed to make the European Bank for Investment block the proposal of excluding all fossil-fuel-based energy sources from its investment programs.

But we should not despair: the first step to improve the situation is totally within our grasp, since political and social change always starts from public opinion. The rise in awareness about the environmental crisis has already led to great results, as politics and firms are becoming more and more interested in becoming (or at least appearing) eco-friendly to secure the public’s favour. But this is not enough, because we cannot close our eyes in front of the responsibility of companies on climate change or pretend that consumers alone can modify the market’s behaviour anymore. The citizens’ awareness of their role must not only involve their private behaviour (also as consumers) but also their political stance: we have a fundamental collective role in changing the narrative around climate change and in pressuring our representatives to act systemically to modify the behaviour of the big corporations, that pollute more than anyone else but precisely because of this have the capacity, if compelled, to make a huge difference in this race against time for our survival and that of the planet.

And what about you, reader? Does this brief analysis of ours convince you? Or do you think there are some elements we did not cover or views we did not consider? The topic is very complex, but we hope that this article can be food for thought to make you reflect on the topic and let us know by leaving a comment here, sending us an email with your reflections, or commenting on the related post on our social profiles.

Thank you for your attention,

Maria Chiara Bodda

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