The article talks a lot about about USian individual consumption rates but trying to ctrl+F ‘find in page’ shows zero hits for “Military”. Considering the US military is the largest single consumer of hydrocarbons and single largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases in the world (more than the total emissions of 100 countries combined), as a globalized imperial behemoth with no compare today or in history; seems an important thing to leave out. But likely a legacy of the Department of “Defense” lobbying heavily to exclude militaries from international metrics and protocols, and laundering their own reports. I don’t doubt they’ve continued to do this for other major studies used as primary sources in climate articles.

It is interesting to me how this pushing the blame from the military and corporations onto the “higher-income consumers” who have high footprint as individuals, seems very indicative of the ways liberalism’s incapability to handle capitalism’s contradictions inevitably inflames the fascist political base of petty-bourgeois. Hence the reactionary rhetoric which comes out in dialectical response from exactly this article’s conclusions: how the government and [bourgeois] “environmentalists” are ‘targeting the middle class.’ and ‘declaring war on the middle class’ etc. Leaving the multinationals and imperial military untouched.

The “middle-class,” of course, being a fake class — an income bracket wearing groucho glasses and calling itself a class so it can act as a wedge to to obscure the dualistic and antagonistic class relations in capitalist society between the PROPERTIED and UNPROPERTIED, and the contradictions and conflicts therein. The “middle class” is like the myth of ‘upward mobility under capitalism’ distilled into a propaganda phrase. It is false consciousness personified as the propertyless middle-management overseer-and-pain-sponge standing between the capitalist (who the state works for) and the broad masses of the low-bracket or no-bracket workers.

This is obviously complicated by imperial and colonial relations, but none of that changes the focus on “high-income consumers” and their individual actions being a liberal half-truth obscuring the real causes of multinational industry overgrowth and side-stepping the need to demilitarize the US and NATO (Which is itself the US empire and its vassals, all wearing groucho glasses).