ABSTRACT
While much of the climate change discourse has focused on how individuals can change daily behaviors to reduce their individual contributions to climate change via decreases in energy use, structural changes in our production systems are needed to enable citizen behavioral changes. For example, media campaigns encourage consumers to purchase compact fluorescent light bulbs and energy-efficient appliances. This individualistic discourse of consumer consumption is dependent on a market rationale that consumer demand for green goods will be met by supply. However, in the case of many energyefficient and green products these ‘perfect market conditions’ are never met (Goldstein 2006). In the case of energy-efficient appliances, the simple story of consumers demanding energy-efficient appliances and manufacturers meeting
this demand ignores a three-decade political battle to bring these ‘green’ products to the market for purchase. In fact, the apparent challenges in moving ‘market-ready’ and available technologies into the market without major policy changes has led Robert Socolow to fear that his well-cited paper on technological ‘wedges’ that could be used to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions (Pacala and Socolow 2004) may have made it seem too easy to address climate change (Struck 2011).
