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Originally Posted by powderjunkie
Disagree entirely. Almost every single purchase decision we make is more impactful than the single vote we cast every ~4 years. The market actually responds directly to our day-to-day decisions.
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No it doesn't.
Nobody ever wanted appliances that break in 5 years. Everybody wants appliances that they just buy and forget about, like the ones their parents might have. But that's not as profitable. That's why even Miele's don't last these days. 20 years ago, sure. These days, the "long lasting" brands last the same 3-5 years as everything else. Almost all appliances are also now deliberately made impossible or at least difficult to repair.
Nobody wants clothes to not last, but it's more profitable that they don't. Especially for women there are no lasting clothes available. It's basically all garbage synthetic materials, unless you have time to shop around for hippie clothes that you won't be able wear in work anyway because they look unprofessional.
Pure cotton jeans are rarely even made anymore, you have to specifically hunt for a pair. And that pair will still not last as long as the ones your dad used to buy. Same for shoes. Even sheets don't last. My mom has sheets that are 40 years old. The last sheets I bought lasted two years, and they weren't the cheapest kind.
Electric cars are not going to take over while we subsidize fossil fuels. Large scale dietary changes are not going to happen while we subsidize eating meat.
There is no way to vote with your wallet for "green electricity". It does not actually affect what new power plants are built, or speed up closing coal plants. As long as someone buys electricity from coal plants, those things are not going everywhere.
You can't vote with your wallet to plant trees. Not very practically anyway.
It's also a complete fantasy that voting with your wallet could tackle something like carbon emissions.
For that to work, you'd need basically everyone to change their spending habits, keep updating their knowledge level on carbon emissions to be aware of what are the low emission choices,
and you need everyone to keep doing this every day for the rest of their lives.
Or you could get 51% of the people to vote for major changes for a few years, and then you could have a government that puts in regulations which takes care of the same without everybody needing to constantly self-police their own spending habits.
What you suggest is so hard I call it a fantasy. Never going to happen.
What I'm suggesting is a much, much easier way of getting more done, faster and with much less effort needed from most people. It's much easier to get someone to vote for something than it is to get them to watch what they buy forever and ever. I know I would much rather have someone put in some regulation that would free me to buy what I want without having to think about my carbon footprint all the damned time, simply because of personal convenience.
The only thing "voting wíth your wallet" does affect is general opinion, which is important in eventually getting the votes in.
That's why everyone who cares needs to do it. It does not actually affect carbon emissions in a measurable way, but it does play it's part in the attempt of trying to get a majority of voters and politicians behind this thing for at least a while, until they get distracted by something like terrorism or refugees or American Idol.