“When we are offered to “protect the climate with carbon neutral bananas”, “take a share in the responsibility towards climate change by drinking a climate friendly beer” or even “saving the world by buying a carbon neutral sausage”, these commodities appear as concrete subjects operating as the starting point of action towards climate change.” (Hasle).

But those are not actual actions, but rather passions we (maybe unintentionally) produce to prevent ourselves from confronting our lack of knowledge of climate change and the lack in our knowledge of the appropriate measures to be taken. The ignorance we try to protect ourselves from, has been produced by the very same “green consumption” as we believe to be the action that will save the planet. This is how cand.merc.(fil.) Line Hasle characterizes “green consumption” in her essay Discussing Climate Change with Marx and Spinoza. The rhetoric used around this “pro-ecological consumption”, she argues, hides our lack of power to take action in relation to climate change by making us believe that we take action by consuming. By bringing Spinoza and Marx into the picture, Hasle claims that the difficulty of understanding the complex affects of climate change makes us long for simplified modes of taking action, but in this constallation “abstract relations and concrete entities are confused”, so that we might believe that buying a carbon neutral sausage has the power to prevent climate change. Thereby green consumption actually ends up getting the opposite effect and be detrimental to the fight against climate change, by making us “[loose] sight of what really needs to be done in the midst of the green upheaval”.

So, does it make sense to buy green? To consume environmentally? Can I go to bed feeling good about myself because I have been driven my hybrid car, eaten vegetarian and washed my clothes with environmentally friendly soap in my energy-saving laundry machine? If not, how do I make sure, that I can sleep calm at night? How do we develop this new language and new “modes of thinking, being and acting that qualitatively can escape the logic of consumption”, that Hasle here suggests as necessary to take real action in the realm of climate change? How do we move out of the haven of ignorance produced in green consumption?