Are Americans accountable to anyone?
I asked myself this question as I completed the Carbon Footprint calculator activity that was assigned to my graduate-level Sustainability course without critique or really any indication that the notion of an individual carbon footprint might be contested at all. My number came in at half of what the average American apparently emits in a year (16 tons), but still many times higher than the global average (4.7 tons), and exponentially higher than the average emissions of the poorest 50% of the global population (3.8 billion people/1.7 tons pp). Importantly, these number do not include military emissions, which are estimated to be 51 million tons/year for the US military: about 5.5% of ALL global emissions.
These numbers also do not account for carbon colonialism, which are all the emissions and pollution of our consumer lifestyles that have been outsourced to the nations of the global majority (sometimes called the “Global South”): these emissions are calculated into the carbon footprint of the global majority, which is a further distortion of our relative impact.
Our Western consumer lifestyles are fantastically wasteful and gushing with carbon emissions, and yet that’s still pretty small beans for the majority of us living paycheck to paycheck in the heart of the Empire: the richest 1% of the global population are responsible for as much emissions as 2/3 of humanity.
It is a well-worn American idiom – made real through lobbying – that we vote with our dollars. Billionaires are individuals just like us the story goes, innocently voting with their dollars in rational ways. Yes, they have a few more dollars and do in fact buy a lot of extra votes, but you are free to get yourself a few more dollars if you just worked harder…is a “billionaire” really an individual though? Can we hold a billionaire accountable for their externalities and excesses the same way that we hold an individual accountable for the crime of sleeping on a street? Can we restrict the freedom of a “billionaire” for poisoning a river the way we agree to have out freedom restricted for uttering the word GENOCIDE too loudly in public? The hyperindividualism of the US isn’t just an unfortunate side effect of technology speeding up or a vibrant competitive economy. It also serves to humanize the very billionaires whose existence is predicated on dehumanization.
Billionaires do not see us as humans. They see us as a raw material from which they can extract labor, creativity, profit, and tax dollars to pay for their wars.
Who are any of us accountable to? We wring our hands and lament this “fallen” state of our “consumer lifestyle” in the US, knowing full well that all the paper straws and carbon offsets aren’t going to change anything and that making more money only increases out footprint, even if it means we can finally buy shit that’s marketed as “green“. We of course would never step in the way of the personal liberty of another individual American. It would be positively authoritarian to even attempt to curb our individual emissions through policy: and we extend that grace to the billionaires, even though they are the ones who actually have the power to do something about carbon emissions at the scale needed.
The whole world suffers because of our lack of courage and moral clarity in the US.
I have read so many papers about climate change in the last year and I can confidently say that we – the tiny 4% of the world that make up the US and Israel or even the 10-15% that make up “the West” – are not going to do jack shit about our carbon emissions. Not as individuals and certainly not as alleged democratic subjects of the most powerful empire to ever exist. The whole world is going to suffer because we refuse to consume less AND we refuse to hold billionaires and their corporations accountable for their externalities. We refuse because the cost to our comfort is too high, our careers are too important, and deep down we believe that we are very very innocent.
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