Ancient meme. Still applicable. Sigh.
I wanna talk, yet again, about climate change, and the pressing need for radical activism that has not gone away over the last decade. I’ll start by setting out my in-going assumptions, to wit:
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Consumer consumption drives climate change by producing massive greenhouse gas emissions. Every product produced, throughout its lifecycle, produces GHGs. This includes initial resource extraction, product manufacturing and transportation, use of the product (electricity, gas) and final disposal. Fast fashion, electronics, and food (especially meat and dairy) are major culprits. This demand for goods outpaces our paltry technological efforts to mitigate impacts. This means that consumption levels, not just population, are a key driver of climate change.
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Democrats are the good guys. We acknowledge the reality of global warming. We know that the climate is changing. More importantly, WE CARE. We’ve got the grit and the moxie needed to step up and take one last chance on forcing system change - or at least enough changes in important sectors to slow the upward trajectory of GHG emissions.
(Clears throat.)
I posted a piece here on May 27, 2015. That’s not a typo: it was 10 years ago. I called it That Sinking Feeling as a slightly off-kilter homage to the brilliant 1979 Bill Forsyth film of the same name. (Give it a watch if you haven’t already. It’s delightful.)
I’ll quote the whole thing below. Note: I’ve updated the copy slightly - by editing out references to the standings table in the English Premier League that year, for example - but I have had to change nothing else. Because since 2015, nothing has changed. If anything, hyper consumption has gotten worse.
Watching football replays last night with half an eye, I was suddenly struck by the ads unspooling before me.
Off-road vehicles: the top of the line model comes with a free winch!
Motor sports: can you say "pointless waste of fossil fuel?”
Riding lawn mowers: for suburban home lawns, not golf courses.
Huge, nearly industrial scale home air conditioning units, marketed by pushing the concept of personal comfort above all.
Luxury cars: immense heavy resource-gulping CO2-emitting monsters that by all rights ought to have gone the way of the dodos decades ago, but that have somehow crept back into the market and are shamelessly touted with no reference to their gas mileage - just by pandering to the apparently endless American (human?) need to feel like a member of the pampered leisure class.
Appliances: giant gleaming brushed steel monstrosities that grow larger and larger and larger every year, and clearly are no longer being replaced when they wear out, but rather when they are no longer "on trend" and don't fit in with the decor.
And lately on every channel I've been agog at all of the stuff we Americans consume that we simply do not need - that guzzle gas - that waste resources and the production and distribution of which pollute and lay waste to our environment.
It was a thunderclap moment. Of course I know that we live in a consumer society and that the levers of power are applied in large part to keep us compliantly consuming, shoveling our hard earned $7.25 an hour into the corporate maw. I learned that as Da’s knee when I was just a kid.
So the sudden she sinking feeling is not that any of this exists, but that all of it - the whole pleasure-principal driven, self-indulgent, mindless, wasteful, selfish consumer culture that surrounds and enfolds us and strangles us in its endlessly inventive tentacles - occupies a space so far below our conscious "this is bad for the environment" radar screen that it will ultimately prove impossible to get people to wake up and realize that WE DON'T NEED THIS STUFF. Or to make people even realize that there is a decision to be made about what our priorities are, and what stuff we need, and what stuff we don’t, and what we can eschew if we make the decision to do so.
If we don’t even ask the question, or have a conversation about the production and consumption and powering and disposal of it and how we can change the game IF WE KNOW WE MUST, then we’re stuck. And that, in a nutshell, was the sinking feeling.
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Flash forward a decade.
- The U.S. ride-on mower market size was valued at USD $3.55 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach USD $4.75 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 4.94%.
- According to GoodCarBadCar and Statista, SUV sales in the U.S. have seen continuous, significant growth since 2015, becoming the dominant vehicle type, rising from around 38% of sales in 2016 to over half by 2025.
- Data from the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM) tells us that the average U.S. refrigerator size grew by over 30% between 1980 and 2021. In 1980, the average fridge capacity was 19.6 cubic feet. By 2021, the average capacity had increased to 25.8 cubic feet.
- From the University of Washington’s Urban Freight Lab: “In 2021 Amazon shipped an estimated 7.7 billion packages globally. If each of these packages were a 1-foot square box and they were stacked on top of one another, the pile would be six times higher than the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Laid end to end, they would wrap around the Earth 62 times.” (Amazon is more difficult to quantify than some other players, given their switch from drop-shipping to shipping a higher percentage of the goods they sell themselves.)
Of course, there are more of us in the US since 2015. But US consumer goods consumption is generally outpacing population growth, which indicates an increase in per capita consumption.
For example, the US population grew by about 0.52% in 2025, while real consumer spending growth for goods was higher than that rate. This is true for both durable and nondurable goods. So not just more people - more people BUYING MORE STUFF.
I know this is unsustainable. You know this is unsustainable.
Barely-sentient human gargoyle Donald Trump surely does not - but the billionaire goblins who drive consumer consumption do understand. Hell, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are both desperately engaged in trying to get humans off this planet - either to colonize the Moon or Mars, or to plunder the Moon and the asteroid belt for resources.
Those guys - Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Page, Ellison, Thiel, Brin - could not possibly care less about the climate unless it immediately affects them. And where it does, they have all the money in the world to throw at their individual woes. While they’re all smart enough to understand the situation, they are driven only by greed and an urge for cultural and market domination. Their incalculable wealth derives from the continual increase in consumer spending. Why would they do anything other than what they are already doing?
They are in fact behaving rationally, for some value of rational. After all, it’s part of our evolutionary programming to want to survive - which means wanting more, even in the face of surplus, given that over the vast majority of our evolutionary history we were usually just a handful of grubs or a meagre harvest of nuts away from starvation.
But they have minds. They each possess the almost miraculous treasure of a pre-frontal cortex, and yet they are lumbering along on pure limbic energy, hooting “Sell sell sell! More more more! Make serfs consume! More Maseratis and yachts for me!”
Why do I belabor all of this, when you (since you are reading this) already know that human consumption and waste is outstripping Gaia’s capacity to support us?
Because I want to drive home that if there is a collapse, and I feel certain that there will be, IT WILL HAVE BEEN A CHOICE. A choice made not just by the oligarchs and autocrat-wannabes in the C Suites of the global economy, but also by educated consumers in the developed world who could not conceive of acting for the greater good — even if that greater good meant saving their own pathetic behinds.
Everyone will now jump in the comments to tell me how they recycle and conserve and bike to work, and that’s fine. Good on you! We all should be doing everything we can do on an individual level.
But there will also be commenters who are at pains to point out how I am deluded, and unrealistic, and am asking the impossible. Americans want their stuff, I will be told. The economy depends on growth, someone will lecture. And that’s fine as far as it goes.
The whole point of living at an inflection point in history is that “fine as far as it goes” is not enough. We are living at a time when humans are called upon - both morally and practically - to take action to save ourselves. And that “action” might include personal sacrifice.
I’m not going to chew over what “action” right now would look like. That’s a substantive discussion for another day. And I am not going to analyze how the science shows that a terrifying amount of warming is “baked in,” because that is not helpful. When you are in a crisis, every little bit helps.
What I am going to do is just point out the received wisdom that no campaign can fail if roughly 3.5% of the population shows up (not just to one demonstration — but voting and other ongoing active participation).
If I can do ANYTHING to prompt people to show up and demand last ditch climate action, I’ll feel like I didn’t give up without a fight.
I worked with figures presented at Ballotpedia to get a rough estimate of the number of folks who might join a movement to make one last push on the climate.
The article linked above “provides details about the number of registered voters by partisan affiliations in states that allow voters to register by party and report those totals publicly.” So… this isn’t everybody, but my rough estimate includes all of voters who were able to self-identify as a Democrat, and roughly half of those who self-identified as Independent, for a grand total of 61 million people.
If 3.5% of that group turned out to campaign for lowered emissions (in whatever form that would take), that would be 2 million, one hundred and thirty-five thousand people.
If 3.5% of that group took personal responsibility for boycotting excess stuff, opted out of a big chunk of their consumer behavior, and committed to de-growth (in whatever form that would take) it would be historic and unprecedented.
I bet we could put on quite a demonstration. I bet we could move the needle in local and state elections. I bet we could scare the bejesus out of the greedy, selfish idiots in power. We could boycott the hell out of Amazon, Walmart, and other mega-retailers. We could flood statehouses. We could disrupt town halls. We could march on the White House and sit peacefully on the sidewalk and NOT BUDGE until someone came out and at least TALKED TO US ABOUT THIS.
We could make a stand on the bedrock principle that this Earth is our only home, and it has been despoiled for long enough. We’ve been a huge of the problem, sure, but now we’re digging in our heels, saying NO, and demanding action on a global scale.
Nothing like this has been attempted in all of human history, but the time is now. If just 3.5 measly percent of us ROSE UP, we could make a fucking difference.
And now for the let-down after what I hope was a pretty rousing cry for action.
Do we want this? Do we want to throw our bodies on the barriers, and be the sand in the gears of modern predatory capitalism? I don’t think that we do.
Even my beloved Peter Kalmus, NASA climate scientist, obvious mensch, and guiding light of the “climate change movement” has pulled in his horns. Greta Thunberg has moved on and is being astonishingly brave in the service of another cause. Just Stop Oil declared a qualified “mission accomplished” in early 2025, because their core demand - halting new UK oil and gas licenses - became government policy under the Labour government. They might be back. It looks like another group may be emerging from the husk of Just Stop Oil. But for now it appears that they have noped out of the global mission. Other voices (you might know some of them) have stepped back, believing that despite tipping points being passed the mess and horror and hoo-roar of modern life cannot be slowed enough to even buy us a little time.
And let me be clear. It does not seem that there is any way back from more and worsening disasters as the globe heats. Current warming is proving difficult enough to deal with - and to afford.
But that there are options left - opportunities for us to bend the emissions curve down and spare some of our fellow travellers the worst of the climate change horrors coming our way, slack in the system where we could easily pare down without feeling much of a pinch, and crucially - mitigation efforts that governments could put into place that WE ARE NOT DEMANDING - is just endlessly, horrifyingly sad.
