At the dawn of the 16th century, the Earth was cooling down.
This period of global cooling was most likely caused by volcanic eruptions, shifts in oceanic
currents, and orbital fluctuations.
European rivers froze and famines struck all over Asia.
But in the 1600s global temperatures dropped even further, and this time it was caused
by humans.
Specifically, it was driven by the settler-colonial violence that tore through the lives of millions
of people indigenous to what we now call North America.
The Great Dying.
A genocide that killed 90% of the estimated 60.5 million indigenous peoples on the continent.
The land-grabbing pursuits of American colonists killed 56 million people, with numbers possibly
even higher.
This genocide was so massive that it led to a decrease of global atomospheric carbon levels
by 3.5 parts per million, enough to lower temperatures across the world.
But this is just the start of the United States’ role in changing the climate.
The country has a long and dark legacy tied to climate change that continues to this day.
This is the story of how the United States caused and is still causing climate change.
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Polluting Within Its Borders When it comes to emissions, the United States
is the undisputed champ.
America is the largest historical emitter.
Its cumulative emissions are almost double the that of China’s, a fact which often
gets lost in comparisons of the two country’s current emissions rates.
Yes, China is emitting more right now, but keep in mind that a lot of Chinese industrial
pollution is driven by demand from the United States.
There are also more than 4 times as many people using energy in China than in the United States.
And because CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for up to 200 years, cumulative emissions
are a much more effective tool to understand who is driving climate change, and it’s
undeniably the United States.
Not only did the U.S. nurture the oil industry into existence with tax credits, technological
advancements, and ravenous capitalist consumption, but it’s done so again with the natural
gas industry in the early 2000s--helping lock-in a new form of fossil fuels for decades to
come with extensive pipeline construction and government subsidies.
In part this was to quench America’s insatiable thirst for fossil fuels and material goods.
The U.S. has one of the highest CO2 emissions rates per capita in the world.
A rate that is almost three times the global average.
The United States is the biggest producer and consumer of natural gas and oil, as well
as home to the second largest fleet of coal factories.
In short, the United States is responsible for an overwhelming share of cumulative emissions,
and is still sheltering fossil fuel industries that are at the root of the climate crisis.
Yes, the United States has now committed to a 50-52% reduction of carbon emissions by
2030, which is certainly ambitious, but according to Climate Action Tracker, this reduction
still falls almost 11 percentage points short of the emissions cuts needed to stay below
1.5 C of warming.
U.S. electricity consumption and overall emissions levels are dropping, but slowly.
It’s also the second biggest country in terms of renewable capacity, and infrastructure
for clean energy does seem to be growing, but again, it’s still too slow.
Considering the 40 plus years of relative inaction since expert climate scientists warned
of the threat of global warming, it’s hard to imagine the United States cutting their
emissions in half over the next 9 years.
Politicians like Democrat Joe Manchin, who are firmly in the pocket of Big Oil companies,
and the 130 members of congress who deny or doubt that the climate crisis even exists,
continue to resist any of the actions necessary to reverse course, especially any climate
action that might hinder a giant corporation’s ability to make money by exploiting workers
and natural resources.
In short, before it even reaches its tentacles across the world, the American empire is responsible
for far more than its fair share of emissions, and, like its refusal to recognize its violent
exploitation abroad as we will see shortly, the ruling class of the United States refuses
to recognize the harm caused by our use of fossil fuels as long as burning them is “good
for the economy,” as in, “good for shareholders and executives at major fossil fuel corporations.”
Military Imperialism: In order to fuel its excessive capitalist
need to produce and accumulate goods, the United States has built an empire.
One that stretches across the world in the form of nearly 800 military bases in 80 countries.
Every year, the federal government sets aside nearly half of its discretionary budget, some
$778 billion in 2020, for military spending.
Some in the U.S. view this gargantuan fighting force as a spreader “democracy” and as
the world’s police force.
In a way they’re right.
The U.S. military does act as the police of the world.
Because like the police, the U.S. military ruthlessly safeguards the interests of U.S.
capitalist multinationals and the state at the expense of the poor and people of color.
This is best exemplified in the slew of coups, wars, and military interventions that have
carved out American control of foreign oil fields.
From the U.S. backed Iranian coup, to the Carter Doctrine in the 1980s that explicitly
committed the United States to defend the oil fields of the Persian Gulf against external
threats, to the Gulf War, to the Iraq War, and to the two failed Venezuelan coups trying
to topple presidents nationalizing oil reserves, the list goes on.
Not only do these imperialist attacks secure and subsidize the future of oil use in a time
we need to be doing the exact opposite, but they also destabilize regions so that they
are even more vulnerable to the catastrophes made more extreme by the climate crisis.
Iraq has been experiencing this reality firsthand.
After almost 40 years of U.S.-fueled conflicts, the people and landscapes of Iraq are bruised.
Wetlands along the Tigris and Euphrates were purposely drained in the 1990s as a method
of retaliation against communities reliant on their biodiverse ecosystems.
So, by 2001, 90% of Iraqi marshlands disappeared.
Provisional governments that have failed to provide robust support to the Iraqi people,
decimated infrastructure and schools have all made recovering from a multi-decade war
much harder, but the climate crisis has just added more fuel to the fire.
Increased heat in Iraq means increased dust storms and less arable land.
“In Fao, arable land has decreased from 7.5 sq km to 3.75 sq km, while in Thi Qar
it has dropped from 100 sq km to just 12.5 sq km.”
Which means that Iraqi farmers who’ve tended to the land for generations are now being
forced to find some other means of subsistence.
In short, adapting to climate chaos is already difficult for those frontlines, but the U.S.
has made it even harder by selfishly scorching the region in fire and fury to protect their
oil interests.
So, in a cruel twist of the knife, the U.S. not only makes adapting to climate change
more difficult in the regions they exploit, but they are the very ones fueling the fires
of the climate crisis.
Indeed, the Department of Defense is the single largest consumer of oil in the world.
It has a bigger footprint than 140 countries.
But military violence isn’t the only tool the United States has used in its efforts
to control global markets.
Economic Imperialism Alongside the United States’ military exploits,
US-backed sanctions are wreaking havoc across the globe.
War and sanctions are the one-two punch of U.S. imperialism.
Together they work to bully any dissident or leftist governments from straying far from
the United States’ neoliberal agenda of material and labor exploitation of the Global
South to fuel the luxuries of the Global North.
“U.S.-backed economic sanctions impact nearly one-third of humanity in some 30 countries,”
and essentially work to starve countries into submission.
In a world now experiencing an increasing number of crises, this is unethical and unjust.
Guns and missiles might not be present, but sanctions still kill.
In Cuba, COVID-19 has been exacerbated by tightening of economic sanctions under the
Trump regimes, while in Yemen, under a U.S.-backed Saudi blockade, over 20 million people are
suffering from food insecurity, with 50,000 children dying of starvation in 2017.
This, in a country expected to experience more climate-change-driven droughts and heat-waves.
To compound the harm, the U.S. is reluctant to shelter refugees or migrants.
So, while the U.S. continues to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and heat up the
planet, it’s simultaneously tearing away the ability of countries on the frontlines
of climate chaos to deal with catastrophes and then closing its eyes to the consequences.
In order to truly face the climate crisis then, we must forge an anti-imperialist agenda.
Repair and Reparations At the 2009 Conference of Parties in Copenhagen,
otherwise known as COP 15, the world was on the brink of a preliminary form of a climate
agreement when Bolivia, Venezuela, Tuvalu, Sudan, and a few other countries refused to
sign on.
Their reason?
Imperialist powers like the U.S. and the European Union rejected the notion that they should
own up to their climate debt.
A term that calls for reparations for the hundreds of years of emissions and colonial
violence doled out by the Global North onto the Global South.
Despite backlash, Bolivia and its comrades were right.
Any effective climate agenda must incorporate the repair that comes with paying off the
climate debt.
The U.S. not only must end its imperialist interventions, but do the opposite and aid
countries in no-strings-attached funding of renewable and technological revolutions led
by the Global South as a means to escape reliance on fossil fuels.
But repairing the harm of centuries of American imperialism doesn’t stop there.
It also means significant demilitarization of the U.S. war machine, while simultaneously
sheltering the growing population of refugees fleeing the climate crisis.
Ultimately, the United States has been at the frontlines of digging the world into a
deep hole of climate chaos, so in order to repair the damage it's done, the U.S. not
only needs to stop digging, but turn its resources towards building a ladder so that we might
all escape the worst of climate catastrophe.
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