Power To The People! How Economic Choices Create Political Capital – CleanTechnica

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Lloyd Alter is one of my favorite online authors. With his focus on finding ways to reduce the amount of waste products we humans burden our earthly home with — carbon dioxide, methane, plastics, etc. — he reminds me of smarter version of myself. His Carbon Upfront Substack post for November 26, 2025 was especially pertinent. It puts our predilection for ever increasing consumption of stuff front and center as a primary factor in how we humans abuse the natural world.

It begins with the story of Heather Mitchell, a woman in Tucson, Arizona, who has a Samsung Galaxy smartphone that is six years old. “I love Samsung phones, but can not afford a new one right now. A new phone would be a luxury,” she told Kevin Williams, the dean of the business school at the University of Albany, recently.

For his part, Williams sees Mitchell’s decision not to buy a newer phone as an affront. “Lost productivity and inefficiency are the unintended consequences of people and businesses clinging to aging technology. While keeping devices longer may seem financially or environmentally responsible, the hidden cost is a quieter erosion of economic dynamism and competitiveness.” Holy heck. Who knew that those of us who decline to always have the newest new thing were so subversive?

In his 1960 book The Waste Makers, Vance Packard quoted marketing consultant Victor Lebow: “Our enormously productive economy… demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption…. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.” Hmmm….weren’t we just having this discussion yesterday in an article about biofuels?

Economist Robert Ayres wrote, “The economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services.”

Vaclav Smil said much the same thing in Energy and Civilization: A History. “To talk about energy and the economy is a tautology: every economic activity is fundamentally nothing but a conversion of one kind of energy to another, and monies are just a convenient (and often rather unrepresentative) proxy for valuing the energy flows.”

To which Alter adds his own take. “Basically, our economy is built on the conversion of fossil fuels into heat and carbon dioxide, with a helping of plastics on the side. There is a reason why COPs always fail, why Donald Trump kills wind and solar, and why even Mark Carney pushes pipelines; they know that fossil fuels ARE the economy.”

He suggests this is why the automobile became such a dominant force in US and Canadian society. “It generated so much more room for stuff, for consumption, creating a need for endless consumption of vehicles and the fuel to power them and the roads to run them on. It would be hard to imagine a system that turns more energy into stuff. It is why houses get bigger and cars turn into SUVs and pickup trucks: more metal, more gas, more stuff.

“It is why governments are loath to invest in public transit or alternatives to cars. A streetcar lasts 30 years and doesn’t add to the consumption of stuff; there is nothing in it for them. They want a booming economy, and that means growth, cars, fuel, development, and making stuff. Rule 1 is never inconvenience the drivers of cars; they are engines of consumption.”

Returning to Heather Mitchell and her smartphone, Alter writes, “An iPhone is a complicated mix of aluminum, carbon, silicon, cobalt, hydrogen, lithium, tantalum, vanadium, and gold. Materials come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Brazil, and China.”

According to metallurgist David Michaud, about 75 pounds of ore are mined to make one iPhone. Between manufacturing and shipping, 86% of the lifecycle carbon in each device is emitted before a customer purchases it, according to Apple. “That’s 68.8 kilograms, or about 150 pounds — twice as heavy as the ore mined to make the phone,” Michaud said.

Consumption & Political Power

Another person who I respect greatly is Heather Cox Richardson, the US historian who has a gift for connecting the events of today with those that took place in the US decades or even centuries before. In her Substack post today, she tells the story of a small group of women in the late 1800s who created a movement designed to interrupt the onslaught of commerce. By so doing, they also showed how consumers could organize to exert political power over the oligarchs at the top of the financial pinnacle.

One of those women was Florence Kelley, who said, “To live means to buy, to buy means to have power, to have power means to have responsibility.” In 1899, Josephine Lowell and Jane Addams founded the National Consumers League, and designated Florence Kelley at its leader. Richardson writes, the organization “worked to combat child labor and poor working conditions and, in an era when milk was commonly adulterated with chalk and formaldehyde and candies were decorated with lead paint, lobbied for government regulation of food and drugs.”

She points out that consumer activism has been reinvigorated today, as more than half of Americans in a recent poll said the would not buy a Tesla because of the disgraceful antics of Elon “Chainsaw” Musk in the last election and the decision by Disney controlled affiliates to reinstate Jimmy Kimmel after he had the audacity to critique the phony breast beating over the killing of Charlie Kirk.

As the US prepares to sail into yet another shopping frenzy known as Black Friday, new consumer advocates are focusing on the power of the buying public to expert their political influence on the corporations that are funding the new Versailles at Mar-A-Loco North.

The new group is called We Ain’t Buying It, which says on its website, “We aren’t just consumers; we’re community builders. We’re driving the change we want to see, and demanding respect.” The day after Thanksgiving is the start of the holiday shopping season, and like their predecessors of a century ago, today’s economic activists are focusing on the power of consumers to push back on the policies of the Trump administration and the corporations who are supporting him

Joy-Ann Reid, one of the organizers, said on Instagram, “Dear retailers who’ve decided you don’t like diversity, equity, and inclusion, or you really love ICE and you have no problem with them busting into your establishments to drag people away: Here’s the thing. We ain’t buying it. I mean, for real, for real, we ain’t buyin’ it!”

She added, “We’re gonna spend our money with businesses who actually respect our dollars, respect our communities, and respect our diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are going to buy from people who respect immigrants, who respect immigrants’ rights, and respect freedom and liberty. We are going to buy from establishments that respect our right to vote and our right to live in a free society. And if you ain’t that, we ain’t buying it. Let’s show them our power. Let’s show them what we can do together.”

Richardson notes that in the midterm election of 1890, politicians learned the power of women to affect the vote. When Republicans got hammered, their leaders blamed women — who were increasingly the ones who did the shopping for their families —  for urging their husbands to vote against the party that had forced through the McKinley Tariff which raised tariff rates and thereby increased consumer prices. House speaker Thomas Reed complained the party had been defeated by “the Shopping Woman.” Sounds like a precursor to the bile of Rush Limbaugh and his constant attack on “feminazis.”

They say that those who know not history are doomed to repeat it. Are there any lessons to be learned from the events of today, which feature a blizzard of tariffs that make everything Americans buy more expensive, and the election of 1890? Less than a year from now, we will have our answer.