She’s basically got a really good heart that’s trapped in the paradoxical labyrinth of liberal capitalism.
edit: Thank you for all these excellent responses.
Some leftists will use “no ethical consumption under capitalism” to justify heavy participation in this violence and not changing habits. They’re confusing insufficiency for worthlessness.
Inject this. Straight into my veins.
It's a smaller cohort than it used to be, but it def still exists and is infuriating.
dunno but I found this while looking around for something succinct on it:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-trouble-with-ethical-consumption/
Green Gone Wrong: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Eco-Capitalism by Heather Rogers might be a good one for her. i guess there's no more paperbacks available from verso but you might be able to find copies of it somewhere else
Since it's humanity's existential crisis and all talking about the environment is a good radicalization point. What is her line on 'what is to be done' about the environment; to what degree does she support government regulation for example? it may be useful to address and explain why certain ideas are insufficient or outright bad, like a carbon tax, or even the green new deal, and tie that in to why capitalism as a system is wholly inadequate to "solving" the environmental crisis, where the capitalist solution is increasingly looking like ecofascism. Also, hate to be a podcast person, but citations needed did some interesting episodes about the United States pivoting to address climate change as a "national security issue", and just a critique the liberal response to climate change in general - Episodes 121, 122, and the December 8 2020 news brief (Actually, Citations needed is just a good resource in general for going into the problems with liberal and technocratic shit.)
So for the capitalist mode of production itself, Das Kapital or the much shorter pamphlet "Wage Labour and Capital" are good theoretical works describing the nature of the capitalist system and why there' can't be ethical consumption under it. Just understanding basic concepts like Labor Theory of Value is helpful for understanding how, no matter what you do or how you dress it, capitalist commodity production is exploitative due to the necessity of capitalists paying their workers less than the full value of their labor to make a profit. Of course, modern capitalist exploitation is also tied up with imperialism, for which Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism is a a good read.
Some articles: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-07-11/climate-change-and-capitalism-a-political-marxist-view/
https://www.marxist.ca/article/why-there-is-no-ethical-consumption-under-capitalism
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/01/the-dilemma-of-ethical-consumption-how-much-are-your-ethics-worth-to-you (op ed but could be useful if she only accepts 'credible' news sources)
Thanks for doing the good work comrade!
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change
