Alfredo Toro Hardy writes: Mark Hertsgaard has explained how, after WWII, General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone secretly acquired the bus and trolley bus systems that operated around the US (The Eagle’s Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World, London, Bloomsbury, 2003).

Why?

So they could take them out of business and eliminate any competition for motorcars.

Also after 1956, a massive project of motorway building began in that country, as well as the implementation of suburbs as the natural living space for the American middle classes. The individual vehicle was then consolidated as the irreplaceable option for transportation.

Hertsgaard said that between 1969 and 1995 the percentage growth in the number of automobiles in America was six times higher than that of the world population. Today, the US has 204 million cars for a population of 300 million, and that number equals 37% of the total amount of vehicles in the planet. 24 million of those cars are the ones called suburban which represent the greediest petrol consumer in the world (The Independent, October 11, 2006).

However, cars are only one of the many evidences of the American consumer habits.

The US has an economic system designed to propitiate consumption in every way and at every level. No wonder two thirds of its economic activity revolves around this area, which consequently implies a system based on credit. Four billion credit cards are issued annually by American banks, meaning an average of fifteen for every man, women and child (Hertsgaard).

If this rhythm were to decrease, not only the US but also the whole world would enter a recession. It is, thus, a wheel with a running speed that could only stop at the risk of a global economic crisis.

The results are in plain sight...

According to Hertsgaard, with only 5% of the world population, the US is responsible for almost 25% of global pollution. The numbers published on the cover of the above-mentioned edition of The Independent can show this more clearly.

The US produces 19.8 metric tonnes per capita of carbon dioxide per year, compared to 1.8 from the developing world ... it produces 5 pounds a day of debris per person, compared to 3 pounds in Europe and 0.9 / 1.3 pounds in the developing world. The US consumes 678 pounds of paper per person annually, compared to the world total 1.151 pounds and 441 pounds in the developing countries.

By 2001 it consumed 7,921 kilograms of petrol annually per capita compared to 828 in the developing world.

But the problem is not only the environmental footprint left by the US, but the contagious nature of its way of life. Every society around the developed world becomes more like the US each day and every emerging economy aspires to reach its living standards. The cult to consumption has transformed into the genuine contagious infection of our times.

According to The Economist, in its edition of  September 16, 2006, emerging economies represented more than half of the world GDP in 2005. The larger among those, headed by China and India, are growing unstoppably. According to the magazine, when Great Britain and the United States got industrialized in the XIX century, it took them fifty years to duplicate the real income per person. China has reached this goal in only nine years. Even more so, that country has set to move 800 million people from the countryside to the city in the next fifteen years (“China’s 11th Five Year Plan”, China Brief, April 30, 2006).

What will happen when those who reach a life of prosperity wish to copy the American model?

Numbers speak for themselves. China consumed 9% of the world’s energy at the beginning of this decade and it will consume 20% in 2010. A percentage increase of 11 points in less than ten years (Jonathan Story, China, the Race to the Market, London, Prentice Hall, 2003). According to Lester Brown, Director of “The Earth Policy Institute” of Washington D.C., if the current Chinese consumption rates multiply by its population growth levels, by 2031 that country will have 1.1 billion cars, more than the 800 million vehicles in the world today (Andrew Buncombe, “Supersize Nation”, The Independent, October 11, 2006). Mark Hertsgaard said that by 2020 China would have surpassed the US as the main producer of greenhouse gases.

Its unstoppable race will just then be really beginning.

In the meantime, this fragile and irreplaceable planet is overflowing its environmental capabilities. According to The Economist (September 9, 2006), by the end of this century global temperatures would have risen 1.4 and 5.5°C. A recent study by NASA shows the global warming evidenced during the past three decades is the highest in the current interglacial period, which has had an approximate longevity of 12,000 years (Philip Stephens, “The Inconvenient Truth that Threatens to Change Everithing”, Financial Times, October 6, 2006).

All things considered, if the six billion inhabitants of this world were able to reproduce the American way of life, we would need three additional planets with similar characteristics to ours, to supply raw materials and accommodate all the pollution that would be produced.

Until this happens, we can only hope austerity and common sense can regain some space.