First of all, why the scare quotes around "useful idiot consumers?" It was you who proudly posted, in support of your position, a section of an essay titled "The consumer – a useful idiot on behalf of imperialist energy policy." Do you not want to own it now?
You referred to "
any other useful idiot consumer," but since I had changed it from singular to plural, I could no longer use actual quotation marks, so I wrote 'useful idiot consumers'. It's what I do if something is
almost but not quite a quotation, i.e. not half as sinister as you imagine.
Notice that the essay that you refer to (and here is an
actual link to my post) is not called
The consumer – a useful idiot on behalf of imperialist energy policy. It's called
Climate Change (full title
Climate Change: Product of globalized capitalism and subject of debate between the states that organize it. What you thought was the title of the
article is just the title of the
paragraph from that article that I cited in my post.
The point of that paragraph is to show how the media helps industry turn consumers into useful idiots of capitalism by means of manipulative advertising and 'information'. The examples were from car manufacturers and airlines - aided and abetted by the nation state and the media. The second half of the quotation:
Anyone who wants to fly to Mallorca plants a tree, and because the short-term memory of the consumer is well known to be short, the national site custodians and corporate executives rush to aid this memory: One increases the price of plane tickets with a CO2 charge so that one doesn’t have to plant the tree any more ... The following balance comes out of the bottom line: 1. the major airlines continue to fly to Mallorca and produce 10 tons of CO2 per head; 2. the same result has now become more expensive for consumers; 3. humans are offered a sale of indulgences for the guilty conscience that they are given by the journalists, and indeed for consequences the little guy doesn’t cause, but the state and capital. And thereby a dirty trick is added to the stupidity. But nothing else should be expected of national capitalistic sites that want to reconcile ecology with the economy.
It may also require a certain level of
willing suspension of disbelief for the consumers to buy into those ideas, but I myself fell for their trick when I first noticed that a CO
2 surcharge had been added to the price of my plane ticket, and I thought: 'Well, OK. Good that there's a way to make air travel carbon neutral, I guess.'
So I include
myself in the group of consumers who have been turned into useful idiots. It's official! I, too, am
"a useful idiot on behalf of imperialist energy policy".
How could I
not be?! I never pretended that I have insight into every little detail of how the products I consume are produced and transported. On the contrary, I have no insight or even a way of obtaining that insight. The manufacturing and transportation companies are in charge of that, and - as the quotation shows - they are
very good at presenting their products as carbon-neutral, eco-friendly, non-toxic, animal-friendly etc. (For some reason, we never see advertising that says: 'No workers were harmed in the process of manufacturing and delivering this product to you!')
I'm pretty sure that if consumers consumed less, producers would produce less rather than just let excess production pile up endlessly. Also that if producers produced less of things consumers still intended to consume, consumers would experience consequences like "shortages" and "price spikes" which they would regard as adverse turns of events (ranging from annoyances to mass-casualty disasters, depending on the severity and the goods involved) that they would blame on the perceived causes of the shortages. If the cause were correctly perceived as government policies intentionally restricting production, they would correctly blame that government, and seek to alter or replace it to reverse those policies.
Apparently, you haven't noticed that producers have an ingenious way of making consumers consume less. In fact, it is their
business model: by lowering wages, which they always try to do, and by increasing prices whenever there's a shortage (an actual one, for whatever reason, not a quotation-mark
"shortage") of something. It's the reason why some people need to have three jobs to pay the rent and others just can't pay it.
Since you are so hell-bent on restricting production (instead of making production carbon neutral), you don't even see that. Instead, you imagine
"government policies intentionally restricting production," which are nowhere to be found ... unless you are thinking of government support to industry financed by raising taxes on ordinary people.
It's almost as though supply, demand, and governance weren't independent of one another, instead having some sort of relationship between them. I wonder whether anyone might have noticed such a relationship, or even studied and written about it, before we came along.
Just maybe, the impact of shortages caused by dramatic restrictions in industrial production could be mitigated by careful planning. There could be some kind of central committee, perhaps, that would allocate resources and set production quotas for each product of each segment of industry. Again this seems like such an obvious idea, that I have to wonder whether anyone has tried it out before, and if so, how well it worked out.
I don't really wonder how you came up with this idea, which doesn't really exist in the real world. If you are thinking of the Soviet Union, there were no attempts to restrict production. On the contrary, production output rose dramatically after the Russian revolution. China also doesn't seem to restrict production. On the contrary, the production of many goods sold to American consumes has moved to China. (And yet the per-capita 'carbon footprint' of Americans remains several times higher than that of the Chinese.) And if Cuba serves as one of your imaginary countries with
"some kind of central committee," there are also no attempts to restrict production in that country, but production is often restricted by the U.S. blockade. One example of that would be the production of oxygen for medical use during the worst (i.e. the pre-vaccination) stage of the pandemic. The U.S. blockade is a dramatic way of restricting Cuban production. One that costs lives.
At this point I know how your imagination works, and I can see that you continue in the world of fiction:
But, I hear someone in the back row cry out, no one said anything about producing less! How about if industry produced the same amount,ust locally and using less energy! Dream on, sweet summer child. I'm sure the Middle East would just positively thrive on locally grown organic crops, and the Internet in the U.S. would run fine on hardware made in waterwheel-powered New England cybersmithies.
So in spite of all the real-world
practical alternatives to fossil fuel mentioned again and again in this thread, you prefer to reinvent the (water)wheel to the actual alternatives to fossil-fuel appear to be unrealistic.
And then you move on to your dream scenario: a decrease in
"production and consumption", which is not only entirely unnecessary, cf.
No Miracles Needed, but also unavoidable, in your imaginary scenario where the only solution to anthropogenic global warming is sacrifice and austerity:
As best I or anyone can tell, production and consumption are going to decrease. The question is what forces will determine the changes. Corporate policies enacted by self-interested elites in boardrooms? Laws passed by self-interested elites in government? The decisions of a planning committee? The fortunes and cruelties of markets increasingly disrupted by resource shortages and climate disasters? Or voluntary changes by the consumers themselves? One and only one of those options give you, the individual [consumer], the power to adapt to the changes in accordance with your own preferences and priorities[/hilite].
[
FTFY]
The irony of your 'alternatives' is that you see no alternatives to sacrifice and austerity, here described as the
"power (!) to adapt," i.e.
voluntary self-inflicted sacrifice versus
enforced sacrifice. Not even in your
fantasy world, can you
imagine a scenario that combines consumption with carbon neutral production - even though the technology to accomplish just that already exists, is being implemented and has been being implemented for at least the past 20 years. (It actually started
as early as 1978, but it took more than 20 years, before the Danish industry and the state realized that it was something worth emulating.)
You present the imaginary two options: on the one hand, restrictions imposed on consumers by capital and state, i.e.
"corporate policies enacted by self-interested elites in boardrooms," "Laws passed by self-interested elites in government" and
"decisions of a planning committee," and on the other hand, consumers
volunteering to impose those restrictions on themselves instead of taking power away from those self-interested elites in boardrooms and in government and implementing CO
2-neutral ways of producing and distributing goods.
That is somehow unimaginable to you.
A funny story about one of those
"voluntary changes by the consumers themselves" 
just occurred to me:
Before Christmas, the company
100% Eco* promised to deliver, pick up and replant thousands of
climate-friendly Christmas trees.
They were going to continue their lives in a disused gravel pit south of
Sengeløse.
However, in the
Zealand village they haven't heard about this project. Now, 56 days after Christmas, several customers report that their Christmas tree haven't been picked up yet. And many of the trees are now in a warehouse in
Brøndby, with withered branches and covered in mold.
This is the first part of the story about the Christmas trees that were supposed to be sucking tons of CO
2 out of the atmosphere for the next several years.
Detektor: Juletræer skulle leve videre i naturen - nu visner de på et lager (DR.dk, Feb 18, 2020)
Dream on, sweet summer child, indeed!
*ETA: If anybody feels tempted to pre-order a Christmas tree from
100% Eco, I am sorry that I have to disappoint you. I googled it, and got this:
"No results found for "100% Eco".
Results for 100% Eco (without quotes)"
