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In Ecological Intelligence Daniel Goleman (American psychologist, author, and science journalist) makes the case that if the public were aware of the environmental, health and safety issues associated with the manufacture and use of consumer products, that they would purchase products that were less harmful. This would drive manufacturers to produce products that were better for the environment, leading to a virtuous cycle of improvement.

There are certainly historic examples of public pressure causing businesses to change their practices. The question is whether this can be broadly implemented for all manufacturing sectors based upon environmental considerations.

Personally, I’m skeptical. Some people will avoid products that they deem to be harmful to themselves (such as cigarettes), but the ‘environment� is an abstract concept for most. It’s also quite complicated to boil a product’s environmental impact down to a simple metric that the public can understand (Goleman provides several examples in the book, though none of them has caught on to any meaningful extent). Finally, there’s a large segment of the public that simply doesn’t care about the environment (about half of US citizens aren’t concerned about climate change for example).

Finally, I’ll just point out that Goleman’s solution relies on voluntary action by the public. I can’t think of a single example where voluntary action has solved any global problem ... ever. It has simply never worked in practice. A far better approach, with a proven track record of success is governmental regulation, though I suppose this would not make for a particularly compelling book.