President Joe Biden addressed the United Nations General Assembly on September 21 with a warning that the climate crisis is fast approaching a “point of no return,” and a promise that the United States would rally the world to action. “We will lead not just with the example of our power but, God willing, with the power of our example,” he said.
Why is the United States so far behind Europe when it comes to addressing global warming?
But the United States has not been a leader when it comes to saving the planet. Yahoo News recently published a report titled “Why the U.S. Lags Behind Europe on Climate Goals by 10 or 15 years,” which documents how the United States has not only failed to lead the world on the climate crisis but has actually been the main culprit blocking timely collective action to head off a global existential crisis.
The world’s youth are dismayed by older generations’ failures to tackle the climate crisis. A new survey of 10,000 people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five in ten countries around the globe found that three-quarters are afraid of what the future will bring (and 40 percent said the climate crisis makes them hesitant to have children).
The United States, France, Finland, and the United Kingdom were among some of the countries surveyed. Young people in the United States have even more reason to feel betrayed than their youth counterparts in other countries. For example, European Union member states started fulfilling their climate commitments under the Kyoto Protocol in the 1990s and now get 38 percent of their electricity from renewable sources, while renewables provide only 20 percent of electric power in the United States.
Since 1990, the baseline year for emissions reductions under the Kyoto Protocol, Europe has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 24 percent, while the United States has failed to cut them at all, spewing out 2 percent more than it did in 1990.
The idea that human activity is responsible for climate change was understood decades ago and is less controversial in Europe. But in the United States, politicians and news media have blindly or cynically parroted fraudulent, self-serving disinformation campaigns by ExxonMobil and other vested interests.
Why is the United States so far behind Europe when it comes to addressing global warming? Why do only 60 percent of Europeans own cars, compared to 90 percent of Americans? And why does each U.S. car owner clock double the annual mileage that European drivers do? Why does the United States not have modern, energy-efficient, widely accessible public transportation, as Europe does?
One answer is the enormous amount of money the United States spends on its military. Since 2001, the United States has allocated $15 trillion (in FY2022 dollars) to its military budget, outspending its twenty closest military competitors combined.
The United States spends far more of its GDP on the military than any of the other twenty-nine NATO countries—3.7 percent in 2020 compared to a 1.77 percent average for all other member countries. Meanwhile, our government’s underinvestment in everything else—from the lack of universal health care to levels of child poverty that would be unacceptable in other wealthy countries—is the inevitable result of these skewed priorities.
Federal infrastructure and “social” spending in 2021 have amounted to only about 30 percent of the U.S. military budget. The infrastructure package that Congress is debating is desperately needed, but the proposed $3.5 trillion is spread over ten years and is not enough.
On climate change, the infrastructure bill includes only $10 billion per year for conversion to green energy, an important but small step that will not reverse our current course toward a catastrophic future. Investments in a Green New Deal must be bookended by corresponding reductions in the military budget if we are to correct our government’s perverted and destructive priorities in any lasting way. This means standing up to the weapons industry and military contractors, which the Biden Administration has so far failed to do.
The United States must go to the U.N. Climate Summit in Glasgow in November ready to sign on to the kind of radical steps that the United Nations and other countries are calling for.
The reality of the United States’ twenty-year arms race with itself makes complete nonsense of the administration’s claims that the recent arms build-up by China now requires the United States to spend even more. China spends only one-third of what the United States spends, and what is driving China’s increased military spending is its need to defend itself against the ever-growing U.S. war machine and its “pivot to Asia.”
President Biden told the U.N. General Assembly that “as we close this period of relentless war, we’re opening a new era of relentless diplomacy.” But his exclusive new military alliance with the United Kingdom and Australia, and his request for a further increase in military spending to escalate the dangerous arms race with China that the United States started in the first place, reveal just how far Biden must go to live up to his own rhetoric.
The United States must go to the U.N. Climate Summit in Glasgow in November ready to sign on to the kind of radical steps that the United Nations and other countries are calling for. It must make a real commitment to leaving fossil fuels in the ground, quickly convert to a net-zero renewable energy economy, and help other countries do the same. As U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres says, the summit in Glasgow “must be the turning point” in the climate crisis.
That will require the United States to seriously reduce the military budget and commit to peaceful, practical diplomacy with China and Russia.
Genuinely moving on from our self-inflicted military failures, and the militarism that led to them, would free up the United States to enact programs that address the real existential crisis our planet faces—a crisis against which warships, bombs, and missiles are worse than useless.