Another Pointless Conversation

 “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. The world is doomed and climate change is going to kill us all,” he said, his words poorly enunciated between bites of his Happy Meal. We were at a debate tournament, the topic was covering whether the US should sign some foreign policy treaty on the law of the sea. So much time had been spent constructing elaborate cases for both sides of the topic, but roughly we ended up with profits on one side and stopping deep sea drilling on the other. After hours of arguing everywhere from “the United States will destroy the ocean with overfishing” all the way to “well actually, oil fracking isn’t that bad,” and back to “we can’t fight climate change without money!,”  we were left with the scraps of what truth we might actually hold. When you are forced to look at both sides, and not only look, but go between believing each side enough for an hour and change in order to win a round, you end up with not much personal preference left. To each point you can swoop in with a three-fold response, and to each of those responses you can deconstruct their fallacies. In the end, you’re never really sure what the causes are, but you can be sure of the impacts. You might not know how you get there, but you do know what it will cause.


Two near-yelling matches, several counts of public humiliation, and somehow a trophy later, we were sitting around eating cold scraps of lunch. We noticed how so many arguments about this treaty, which was basically an ocean zoning guide, had come back to climate change. In debate terms, climate change has great “impacts,” meaning, the results of the causal chain from affirming or negating the topic’s question. If you could prove signing or not signing could worsen or better climate change, yay! You have impending doom backing you up. But these chains are tricky, and there are so many trips and falls that you don’t always see. For example, if you stop ocean oil drilling, you might incentivize fracking in Alaska, which is worse because it could trigger an environmental catastrophe, and aided by a couple pieces of obscure evidence, you just might win the round. It is impossible to say what we do will make a difference in the face of this growing threat that seems to worsen with every CNN headline.


“It’s depressing. Debate feels so stupid sometimes. I’m just doing this to get into college, and it’s not like this actually helps fight climate change,” one of my teammates bemoaned.  


“Well, sure, there are things you can do. You can stop shopping at Shein. You can stop eating meat. It might not be big, but it’s something,” I offered. That’s when another chimed in with his repeated insistence of doom: There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. And here we were, spirling into another pointless conversation. I wish I knew just who coined this phrase so that I might have somewhere to target my ire, but perhaps it’s suiting that I don’t. It is so nebulously nihilistic – surely all consumption is not created equal?


The common response to the call for individual advocacy is to point to the hundred or so companies that have been ruining our environment with their political schemes and social propaganda. And then that the solution to our woes is to “hold them accountable.” No one really ever says how, though. Sure, someone will chime in with a “vote blue!” or with a “share social media campaigns,” but it seems as though this is a cycle that tramples over the shards of campaign promises and through the web of corporate propaganda, still ready to neglect meaningful individual accountability. Most of our issues are due to corporations. We can diminish individual change all we’d like. But we must acknowledge that individual change also includes more meaningful calls for political action. Arguably, not eating meat and limiting fast fashion purchases are easier approaches for most people in the US than effective political advocacy. Although no supply chain is without sin, we cannot fall victim to the mentality that all is doomed, for if we do, it means we have nothing we want to save. 


It is in brief conversations like these that climate change can even still exert its reach. The stress, the fear, the hopelessness are all impacts of climate change in their own right. The most we can do, is just for a moment, let the conversation die out, and do what we can in the morning. 

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