Given the current conditions facing society, an increasingly large number of consumers have a goal to live a more sustainable life. While a large body of literature suggests that a goal-directed, environmentally friendly behavior will lead to future actions consistent with this goal, this dissertation investigates times when one environmentally friendly behavior leads to inconsistent future actions. Building from the moral licensing and goal hierarchy literature bases, it is predicted that when consumers perceive themselves to have made sufficient progress toward an endgoal of being sustainable, they are likely to focus attention on competing alternatives, leading to inconsistent behavior that is potentially harmful to the environment and others. It is further predicted that feelings of authentic pride serve as an underlying process behind this inconsistency, and that consumer impression management needs are an important factor in licensed behavior. The results of four studies investigating this inconsistent behavior are reported. Studies One and Two test and confirm the predictions that environmentally friendly marketplace behavior allows consumers to progress in a goal of living a more sustainable life, and that this relationship between product selection and goal progress is mediated by the perceived sustainability of the products chosen. Study Three finds that once consumers perceive themselves to have made progress toward their environmental goal, they experience increased levels of authentic pride, which indirectly facilitates future un-environmentally friendly behavior. Study Four finds that consumers who perform an environmentally friendly behavior in the presence of others experience increased levels of goal progress and are more likely to license future behavior than one who performs the same behavior in private. The theoretical contributions and practical implications of this research are discussed, along with directions for future research investigating the inconsistent relationship between past and future behavior.