Abstract. The European Commission’s Communication directed to consumers regarding the Green Transition does not emphasise their shared responsibility. Instead, the Commission puts the emphasis on empowering consumers to make green choices. However, introduced and planned legislative measures simultaneously limit consumers’ freedom of choice. In prior work, these authors prove that this situation creates a problematic mismatch between what the policy documents of the European Commission say and what the following legislations propose. This chapter aims to push the argument forward and argue that the Commission’s emphasis on empowerment blinds experts (such as consumer law scholars and stakeholders) to responsibility-focused measures.
Keywords. Consumer law – Green transition – empowerment – protection – responsibility – consumer policy – mismatch – blinding effect
Citation: De Almeida, Lucila, and Fabrizio Esposito. ‘The Blinding Effect of EU Consumer Policy Overshadows the Role of Consumer Law in Delivering the Green Transition’. In Routledge Handbook of Private Law and Sustainability, edited by Marta Santos Silva, Andrea Nicolussi, Christiane Wendehorst, Pablo Salvador Coderch, Marc Clément, and Fryderyk Zoll. Routledge, 2024. https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Private-Law-and-Sustainability/Silva-Nicolussi-Wendehorst-SalvadorCoderch-Clement-Zoll/p/book/9781032662008.
