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A firefighter watches as the Sheep Fire burns in Wrightwood, California last weekend © AP
George HW Bush infamously said: “The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” In terms of climate change, he was true to his vow. The most taboo word in US politics is “sacrifice”. This remains the case today come rain or shine, normal hurricane season or extreme, whether the west coast wildfires are out of control this year or not, and irrespective of the polar ice caps’ accelerating shrinkage.
America is happy to discuss anything — carbon capture, solar blocking, hydrogen fuel cells, new nuclear plants — as long as we do not jeopardise our lifestyles. That is the real third rail of US politics. Though 90 per cent will never realise it, no American should be robbed of the dream of having their 20,000-square-foot home, five cars in the front, air conditioning or heating on full blast day and night, and the right to throw away more food every week than the annual consumption of the median Indian family. No politician seeking job security would question America’s providential right to limitless consumption. In this respect, Bush was merely expressing Washington’s most enduring bipartisan consensus.
The problem is easily measurable for journalists like Rana and me. Though nothing can compare to global warming in the scale of threat to our species, a column on the subject invariably gets low traffic. That is partly because a global-level picture is inescapably abstract. Two-thirds of your readers will vanish at the first mention of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Swampians, of course, are an honourable exception, right? But it is also about our natural human aversion to gloom. We can discuss technological solutions until the cows die of heat stroke. But you cannot engage with this subject without spelling out the disastrous trends that are already under way.
Take the intensifying heat map in the Indian subcontinent, which in the past few years has consistently broken all records. An Indian friend of mine, Nikhil Dey, who works with Indian villagers in Rajasthan, told me the women are now striking to demand their work day begins at 5am, not 7am. The temperature rises to danger levels after that. This is the kind of ground-level shift that in different ways is affecting billions of people, including most of the world’s farmers. Drought is also a growing headache for farmers in the Midwest.
The world has missed two big opportunities. The first was the pandemic, which unleashed roughly $20tn of spending worldwide. Covid-19, as the excellent David Wallace-Wells wrote this week in the New York Times, was a crisis-equals-opportunity moment. If governments had directed some of that largesse to speeding up the move to the new energy economy, rather than propping up old jobs, it could have been a paradigm shift. That chance was missed. Barely one per cent of US coronavirus stimulus went to green initiatives, against a still modest 15 per cent of European Union spending. The second moment was Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — the perfect chance to drive home the point that we have to stop funding autocratic petrostates. Joe Biden’s forthcoming trip to Saudi Arabia is all I need to say about that. I understand Biden’s domestic imperative. If petrol costs more than $5 a gallon in America, the party in power will lose.
So what are we left with? Unlike a pandemic, we cannot wait until it’s too late before fighting global warming. Whatever the techno-optimists tell you, there is no fast-track vaccine that would miraculously banish the impact of climate change. Nor can we place our bets on John Kerry, who deserves a Nobel Prize for indefatigability but who keeps discovering that his job as US climate change envoy is not a priority. At 15.5mn tonnes in annual per capita emissions, America’s carbon pollution levels are triple those of France and Britain and eight times that of India. They are also three times the global average. If India, where large swaths of the country still lack electricity, were to double emissions, it would still consume just a fifth per capita as the average American.
So clearly America has to reduce its output. The good news is that it would be technically very easy to cut US emissions — America’s economy is laden with low-hanging fruit. The bad news is that US politics is moving in the opposite direction.