The next president confronts a new reality in which climate will now be the ultimate threat multiplier to US security and prosperity.
The great American shopping spree rolls on, planetary consequences be damned. As we careen toward another presidential election, both parties are tripping over themselves to promise voters an endless buffet of cheap gas, ever-expanding homes, and guilt-free consumption. Meanwhile, the greatest threat to human civilization has become a political non-issue, banished to the kids’ table of campaign priorities.
How did we get here? Cast your mind back to 1980, when voters unceremoniously dismissed the first US president to recognize the dangers of climate change. Jimmy Carter’s unforgivable sin was he urged Americans to wear sweaters rather than burn oil and gas. His fatal flaw was that he did not understand that after a decade of economic malaise and political turmoil, the last thing Americans wanted to hear about were sweaters. Instead, they voted en masse for Ronald Reagan’s ‘morning in America’ optimism and supply-side tax cuts, unleashing a buying binge that continues unabated to this day.
American consumption since 1982 has turbocharged global warming
The numbers are staggering. US consumption of goods and services exploded from $1.7 trillion in 1982 to an expected $20 trillion in 2024. That is the equivalent of every American spending $57,000 for stuff every year. India, for example, has nearly five 5-times the population but spends $15 trillion less buying stuff every year.
This orgy of excess comes at a devastating environmental cost. America’s shopping obsession accelerated global warming at three times the rate prior to 1980.
American consumption = record global warming
Despite increasingly severe storms, droughts, and wildfires, climate change barely registers as an electoral issue. A recent Pew poll found that 80% of voters cite the economy and inflation as their top concerns. Climate change? Dead last.
Wretched excess
So perhaps it’s fitting that an obese, gluttonous mound of wretched excess who came to prominence in the Reagan era now has a good shot at re-election. Donald Trump has become the bloated, spray-tanned avatar of a postmodern American Gilded Age that voters seem hellbent on preserving, planet be damned.
But he is only half the problem. On the campaign trail, Democrats have all but capitulated on their hard-earned high ground of historic climate action. Fearing the wrath of the American voter, Joe Biden and now Kamala Harris went silent on climate change allowing Trump to fill the void with his “Drill, Baby, Drill” chorus.
What does our refusal to modify our wasteful ways say to the citizens of Vanuatu, who consume 50,000 times less than Americans, yet have seen climate-fueled super typhoons obliterate their economy three times in the past decade?
Witnessing Kamala Harris ticking off overseeing “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history” as an accomplishment was genuinely nauseating. Can you imagine FDR or Churchill extolling the virtues of Hitler, knowing full well the existential threat he posed?
This craven political cowardice will have far-reaching consequences. If Harris wins, she now lacks the mandate to accelerate the crucial transition away from fossil fuels. If she tries, Republicans will cry “flip-flop.” If Trump wins, he’ll seize the mandate to roll back climate action and protect Americans’ “God-given” right to take our Earth-destroying consumption to new levels.
Binge shopping: European consumption (red) compared to America (blue)
America’s climate-be-damned spending spree is being noticed particularly in Europe, where consumers spend at the same level Americans did when Reagan was president. Europeans are privately appalled by our wasteful ways and are determined to forge ahead with aggressive climate plans with regulatory teeth and penalties that US corporations and banks are fiercely opposing. China, meanwhile, is laughing its way to becoming the world’s first green superpower as its chief rival clings to its rusting fossil fuel infrastructure.
America is woefully unprepared for what climate change has in store for the country and the world.
US to the Global South: Drop dead
Worst of all is the middle finger the US raises to the Global South, which increasingly bears the brunt of climate-fueled weather extremes. What does our refusal to modify our wasteful ways say to the citizens of Vanuatu, who consume 50,000 times less than Americans, yet have seen climate-fueled super typhoons obliterate their economy three times in the past decade? And how does Ghana feel about American consumption as it staggers under a landslide of discarded fast fashion, mostly from the US?
See our shocking story on what happens to all your abandoned shirts, shoes and pants
As the election winds down, it turns out the real island of garbage isn’t Puerto Rico (as one comedian at a Trump rally recently sneered) — it’s the spending habits of Americans. This poses an enormous challenge for the next president, who will confront a new reality: climate change, already a third-rail political issue, is now becoming the ultimate threat multiplier to American future security and prosperity.
America’s uncertain future
Voters and the candidates have refused to acknowledge this politically inconvenient truth. Even before the first ballot had been cast Americans had decided no one was about to interfere with their “freedom” to consume despite the global consequences. What they don’t understand is that, like before Pearl Harbor, America is woefully unprepared for what climate change has in store for the country and the world. You did not hear it on the campaign trail, but we are already engulfed in an unfolding head-on collision with climate reality that will dramatically change our lives and put an end to an almost 200 year love affair with our self-proclaimed “Manifest Destiny” to spread the American way, whether others like it or not.
Featured image: John Gast, American Progress, 1872. Wikimedia.
