America Will be Remembered as the Country That Killed the Planet

Americans Don’t Know It, But America is the Reason We’re Boiling Alive on a Dying Planet

North America, on fire. Massive floods in Europe and Asia. Siberian permafrost melting. Even climate scientists are shocked by it all. It’s happening too fast and too ferociously. We appear to be crossing the threshold into runaway global warming now.

So whose fault is it? Who should fix it? Who can fix it?

Americans often ask me: “what can I do about all this?” — in that particularly weird, narcissistic, comic-book-hero way (I,” not “we,” as if, yeah, you can fix a whole planet). I’m here to answer that question, in a particularly distressing and uncomfortable way, at least for them.

Let me begin with a question.

What is America going to be remembered for? Americans are weaned on myths of exceptionalism. America’s the first democracy, the land of the free, history’s most important nation, and so on and so forth. It’s all nonsense. America wasn’t even remotely a democracy until 1971, when Jim Crow ended. Until then, it was the world’s largest apartheid state. Americans are hardly free — they can’t even quit their jobs over basic healthcare.

So what is America going to be remembered for? Just being a dysfunctional country that lapsed into fascism — like so many others, from Nazi Germany to modern-day Afghanistan? I suspect it’ll be something much, much darker than that.

America will probably be remembered as the country which killed the planet. Ushered in an age of runaway global warming. Led a civilisation to implode. Altered the balance of life as we know it on earth in utterly fatal ways.

You might think — as so many white American bros are going to — that I exaggerate. So go ahead and take a hard look at the chart above. It’s time to get acquainted with a deeply uncomfortable fact, at least for Americans. America’s the nation which has emitted the most carbon, by a very, very long way. It is single-handedly responsible for bringing the planet to boiling point like no other country in human history.

The US has emitted 410 gigatons of carbon since industrialization. By comparison, France has emitted less than 40. No industrialised nation comes close to the scale of the US’s carbon emissions by almost an order of magnitude, a whole decimal place. Even Germany’s under a hundred gigatons total.

Second place belongs to — as you might have guessed — China. China’s emitted about 220 gigatons — let’s call it half of America’s emissions, for simplicity’s sake — in total. But there’s a very big difference.

It’s not just that China’s emissions came long after America’s — though they did. The truth is much bleaker than that. China’s emissions happened because of America. America’s economy is, famously, 80% consumption, and just about 20% investment. That’s the highest rate of consumption in the world precisely because America designed the global economy for Americans to be able to consume in grotesque, almost obscene ways. Cheap stuff, piled high, at mega stores, which was all…

Made in China. China’s carbon emissions come from production, not from consumption. China is producing stuff to export to America. See the problem? It’s not that in some ultimate political or even moral sense China isn’t “responsible” for its own carbon emissions. Sure it is. Yet it’s also better seen as more or less a cog in America’s economic machine. Its carbon emissions are ultimately the product of lawn chairs and computers and toys that mostly Americans consume.

Whether or not you understand that — it’s not something you “agree” with, by the way, those are basic global economics — the fact remains.

America is the nation that has the world’s most cumulative carbon emissions by an incredibly long way. It’s twice the nation in second place, which is China.

History is going to hold someone responsible for destroying the planet, overheating it, killing off massive swathes of life on it. That someone is going to be America.

America is going to be remembered as the country which killed the planet. It is the nation most responsible for the single greatest catastrophe in human history, by a very, very long way.

And so it’s probably going to be history’s blackest name and greatest failure. People are going to say “Americans” one day the way we say “Nazis” today, probably — if global overheating keeps going at this incredible, stunning pace, by which the planet will be a set of Fire, Flood, and Plague Belts by about 2040, and by 2050, civilisation as we know it won’t be possible anymore.

I know that sounds extreme — to Americans. But the rest of the world is already beginning to think this way. Americans are notorious not just for overconsumption — but for indifference. Not just for being selfish and greedy — but for revelling in their stupidity, too. Take a simple example. Nearly every American can tell you about Britney Spears’ latest travails. I’d bet that not 5% of Americans could tell me how America’s the largest carbon emitter in history. I bet you didn’t know them before I told you.

Americans are kept ignorant of simple facts like these. They won’t teach American kids facts like this at school. College is a place run by fraternities for the sake of sexually preying on women, mostly. American media hasn’t made it a mission to inform its readers or viewers this fact, so far as I know. Americans are kept deliberately, purposefully ignorant.

They don’t feel guilt or shame about things like being responsible for killing the planet because they have no idea they did. Their society keeps them insulated from basic notions of decency, honor, truth, goodness, because the only point of life in America is to be a mindless consumer.

No wonder the world sees them as greedy, selfish idiots. What kind of nation is more obsessed with celebrity trivia and comic book movies instead of, well.

What would you do if a) you were going to be responsible for history’s greatest catastrophe and b) you didn’t want to be associated with that? Well, you’d probably try to make amends. Even reparations. You’d probably say something like: “My God! I…we…did that? It’s our job to fix it, too.”

In other words, your culpability would induce in you a sense of gravity, responsbility, a need to take ownership of the problem you’d made, and make things right.

What would that mean, in America’s case? Not just making itself green. But also the world. An America which really understood its responsibility and took it seriously — killing the planet — would also then want to bring it back to life. That means something like a Marshall Plan for the world. It means the greatest wave of investment in human history — in things like nourishing ecosystems, creating whole corps of people and agencies and institutions to do it, educating every child on the planet, protecting animals, giving indigenous folks power and money to keep the land healthy and safe, cleaning up the oceans, a Manhattan Project for clean, cheap energy, by 2030, or else. I could go on forever. You know what it means — it means reversing killing the planet, to what extent we can, while there’s time.

An honourable person, a person with a sense of guilt or shame — they try to make amends for the damage they’ve done. What do you if you’re the one who killed the planet? You damn well do something about it. That’s what an honourable America, a place with a sense of decency, would do. It’s not rocket science, as much as bros in the comments will try to make it so. It’s just common sense and basic morality.

Sadly for us, America isn’t that place. It can’t even pass a Green New Deal for itself. So what is it going to do for the world? The answer to that question is: nothing. That’s the reason we’re now crossing the threshold of runaway global warming. America is the world’s most powerful country, and for all realistic intents and purposes, it doesn’t care. It’s not exactly out there trying to make a carbon free world in ten years, or coordinating a massive wave of global investment in cheap energy, or creating whole new institutions and bodies to clean up the oceans and rivers. It’s just not. I know plenty of liberals would like America to be that country, but fantasy isn’t reality.

America’s not taking any responsibility, really, for what history is going to see as the single most obscene, grotesque, and reprehensible action a nation ever took. Ever. An action which makes World Wars pale in comparison and pandemics look like playthings. Killing the planet.

That leads me to a simple conclusion, which Americans will scowl at, or maybe howl at. But can they really tell me it’s not true?

America’s going to be remembered as the country which killed the planet. The society so greedy and selfish it consumed so much that the planet curled up in pain and died. The nation which overheated the planet we live on, and took no responsibility for it, made no amends for it.

One day, on a planet much hotter than this, where life has become a desperate, bitter struggle, people are going to spit the name “American,” and curse it. Maybe, my friend, looking around at a planet on fire, drowning in the flood, you already begin to understand why.

 

 

 

July 2021