If you add up all the energy America uses in a year — to produce electricity and also to perform the many tasks that have yet to be electrified, like driving and flying and making concrete — and you divide that by the total number of Americans, the result is per-capita consumption.

The figure comes to about eighty thousand kilowatt hours. Toss in the energy used to manufacture the goods imported into the U.S., and the number rises to almost a hundred thousand kilowatt hours. To put this in terms of power, Americans are consuming roughly eleven thousand watts every moment of every day. A string of incandescent Christmas lights uses about forty watts. It’s as if each of us had two hundred and seventy-five of these strings draped around our homes, burning 24/7.

Owing to this every-day-is-Christmas level of consumption, annual emissions in the U.S. run to sixteen metric tons of CO2 per person. Americans don’t have the world’s highest per-capita emissions — that dubious honor goes to Kuwaitis and Qataris —but we’re up there. Per-capita consumption in Thailand and Argentina runs to around two and a half thousand watts and emissions to around four tons. Ugandans and Ethiopians use a hundred watts and emit a tenth of a ton. Somalis consume a mere thirty watts and emit just ninety pounds.

This means that an American household of four is responsible for the same emissions as sixteen Argentineans, six hundred Ugandans, or a Somali village of sixteen hundred.

These figures rarely feature in conversations about climate change in the U.S.; they were hardly mentioned, for instance, in the debate over the Inflation Reduction Act. But to the world’s low-consuming countries the inequities are impossible to ignore. They represent yet another way the Global North has exploited the Global South; call it atmospheric imperialism.

“These disparities chart the rise of developed countries at the expense of others,” Mohamed Adow, the director of Power Shift Africa, a Nairobi-based think tank, has written. “The history of climate change is one of compounding injustices.”