I missed the Mayday related discussions of ‘anarchy’. Of course our esteemed colleague ignored centuries of political theory and fell back on cliché! And how about that ‘critical’ suggestion that the climate crisis (and other crises of capitalism) might be addressed through “consumer action, exercise of choice, along with both wide and targetted publicity, nudges, guilt induction”? This approach, of ‘behaviour change’ largely through consumer purchases, focusing on information provision and persuasion, is the dominant research and policy paradigm on ‘pro-environmental’ behaviour, and has demonstrably failed over the past three decades at least. The focus on consumer action has been linked to the denialism and obfuscation of fossil fuel interests in trying to distract from their own responsibility for climate change – the dealers blaming those they push the drug onto, a bit like the Christiania dealers that are apparently the emblem of Anarchism, rather than predatory capitalism! The alternatives – of tackling destructive capitalism through quotas, bans, rationing, systemic change, state investment, limits, are pushed away as inimical to ‘freedom of choice’ – which capitalism claims as its USP even as it denies and supresses any genuinely critical questioning of its own operation. But what do I know?

https://decarbon8.org.uk/behaviour-change-or-system-change-how-climate-action-is-getting-fudged/