This week, a staff member at Treehugger admitted to buying an SUV.

Actually it’s a Honda CRV, also known as a “crossover”. Crossovers are roomier, have higher seating and high ground-clearance while maintaining car-type handling, ride and economy. The Honda CRV has models that offer AWD, GPS, and all the luxury features a driver could want, though the basic model offers only guided traction control, an MP3 jack, cruise control and anti-lock brakes (ABS). Overall mileage is a paltry 23 miles per gallon (city/highway). My 1990 Ford does as well. Reasons behind the purchase, according to the author, include roominess (needed for a family of three) and a “feeling of safety”, even though tests have shown SUVs are no safer than a car.

I find it hard to fault the buyer on an individual basis. While buying groceries yesterday, I did my own brief survey. During one hour of driving time, over roughly one mile of suburban streets, I calculated that three out of four vehicles were SUVs of some variety, and two out of four were less than two years old. Let’s face it, we Americans have been ruined by affluence. Asking us to cut back now that gas is almost $4 and carbon dioxide emissions stand at 387 parts per million (compared to the pre-industrial average of 280 ppm) is like asking a binging alcoholic to forego that last drink. We know we should. In fact, we must, but we can’t. Or we think we can’t, because the idea of experiencing a little hardship, sacrifice or even pain is so foreign to us we are afraid to try. We want the party to continue, and see no reason why it shouldn’t. We have this air of personal entitlement, which is a direct result of having too much for too long with scarcely any effort.

The U.S., the world’s largest emissions producer during all the last century, in 2007 released a whopping 19.993 percent of global emissions. This, with less than five percent of the world’s population. Burn, baby, burn. We are drunk on our own prosperity, and even now – with the axe of greed, miscalculation and hedge fund/housing felling our economy – we can’t stop guzzling. What will it take to stop us?

Let me paint you a picture. The year is 2025. The American Southwest is a virtual desert as a result of global warming, but its population keeps rising because the cost of home heating is unaffordable in the northern tier of states except to those few who have money, really good jobs or a private woodlot.

In Canada, where the Athabascan Tar Sands are mostly memory, the canny Canadians have been kept afloat by their entrenched nuclear and hydroelectric power industries, and an early 21st century switch to alternatives like wind. First NAFTA, and then the North American Union, has reduced the U.S. to a service economy model, and most jobs pay $20 an hour, but bread costs $7 a loaf because warming has devastated wheat crops from Australia to the American Midwest. Gas is a luxury at $17 a gallon, and abandoned vehicles litter roadsides and yards – except for the few that have been converted to solar or fuel-cell power (two industries that never quite took off before the crash). Bikes are a common form of transportation, walking even more so. Public transportation is available but pricey, and the new Maglev commuter trains the government promised in 2020 haven’t arrived because R&D costs are so high. People dress in layers to defeat the winter winds. Some even wash their clothes by hand because of the unmanageable cost of electricity, and bathe – in sequence – from the same tub of cooling water weekly, just as the pioneers once did. As always, you can tell the poorest by their smell, but there are a lot more smelly people than a decade ago. Food is grown locally, and is expensive – no more long-haulers carrying fruit from California, or supermarket shelves stocked with goodies like oranges and pineapples.

The few small farmers who survived 20th century agribusiness consolidation use mules to harvest. In Arizona, precious “gray water” from sinks and bathing is hoarded in 50-gallon drums and used to water the few fruiting trees and garden vegetables that can be encouraged out of the mercury-laden soil. Most people eat corn, or cornmeal, and most of the seed is GM contaminated. A new and virulent blight threatens even this subsistence food. A typical meal consists of corn tortillas, beans, a smattering of chopped onion and homemade salsa from tomato and pepper plants. Some people have even learned to eat cacti – which taste like green beans, lizards (similar to chicken), the roots of cattails, and various wild fruits and nuts. Meat, except the occasional wild game, is a luxury reserved to the well-off. People make cactus beer, tequila and other (occasionally lethal) alcoholic brews to take the edge off their hunger and their despair. Other changes are less noticeable, and people are too weary to care. Flowers don’t emit fragrance anymore because soil pollutants inhibit plant pheromone production. Honeybees are virtually extinct, and even wild bees are struggling. Grass, always wasteful in terms of water, is nonexistent except for native grasses, and these are harvested by the poorest. Trees, always sparse in this arid region, are never truly green, even in spring. Photosynthesis is failing as a result of pollution, persistent drought and a perilously thin ozone layer.

Sunlight is blue instead of golden. All water has to be treated before drinking, and the chemicals are expensive and foul-tasting. The more inventive have developed solar stills. Many children are thin, most men grim, and the average female – after the age of 25 – looks worn around the edges. Life is hard, and even simple diseases become epidemic as a result of immune systems compromised by increasing solar radiation and poor nutrition. People die, many without even rudimentary medical care, sometimes alone and undiscovered.

Back to today. This is where we’re going if we can’t curb our energy binging. SUVs are nice, but we don’t need them. We need healthy children, and a healthy earth. We need one another. We need a future. We need to get over ourselves, and our attitude of entitlement. No man is an island and, in case you hadn’t noticed, this island is sinking.