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The American Dream Wasn’t Built for Climate Change
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
To Sierra Isley, the American Dream brings to mind a home ringed by a white picket fence. “The house in the suburbs is just what you’re taught growing up,” the 26-year-old said. “You know, that’s what you see on TV.” What she wanted for her life was a bit different from that picket-fence ideal, but she still saw the prospect of buying her first house two years ago as a chance to live out what she called “that big dream that everybody has as a kid.”
Isley and her girlfriend, Jamie, were moving from Philadelphia to Asheville, North Carolina, and found a home they liked, a three-bedroom brick house with lots of natural light and a big tree out front. With some help from their parents, they put down a deposit and got their offer accepted. But when they went to sign the closing papers, a complication got in the way: The house had a huge lien on it. After consulting with lawyers, they decided to break the contract and hunt for an apartment to rent in Asheville.
It was a blessing in disguise. One month later, while Sierra and Jamie were still unpacking boxes and building furniture, the remnants of Hurricane Helene turned Asheville into a disaster zone. The basement of their apartment flooded, but they were luckier than some of their neighbors, whose homes had been destroyed.
Owning a home has long been seen as a cornerstone of the American Dream—a way to build wealth that you could use one day to pay for your children’s education and fund your retirement. That arrangement was always more precarious than it was made out to be. But as fires and floods damage homes and drive up insurance rates, pouring your life savings into a house has become riskier than ever. In a report called “Property Prices in Peril,” the firm First Street projected last year that climate risks could knock nearly $1.5 trillion off the value of American homes by 2055. For some people, the sociologist Rebecca Elliott wrote, “the American dream of homeownership may become a nightmare.”
Americans are beginning to grasp the threat that climate change poses to their aspirations. According to exclusive polling for Grist from the think tank Data for Progress, 58 percent of likely U.S. voters believe that climate change will hinder their ability to achieve the American Dream over the next 20 years, including 42 percent of Republicans. The survey suggests that people are worried that climate change will increase the cost of living, and such widespread concern very likely played a role in the major gains for Democrats last Tuesday.
The irony is that fossil fuels have long been promoted as necessary ingredients for the American “way of life.” Starting a century ago, oil and gas companies led extensive campaigns to tie their products to comfort and prosperity, a narrative that has been repeatedly deployed by politicians and oil industry executives to thwart climate action. President Donald Trump’s administration has often said that efforts to rein in fossil fuels threaten the American Dream. Earlier this year, when the administration scrapped Biden-era rules to cut emissions from cars, along with the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate climate change, it touted the effort as “restoring the American Dream.”
But the fossil-fueled American Dream is in the process of destroying itself. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal, oil, and gas have ushered in a new period of precarity, undermining the promise that each generation can expect a better life than the last. Scientific reports warn that climate change “imperil[s] the quality of life” for communities in the United States, disrupting livelihoods and cultural traditions.
Either Americans decide to reimagine what makes up the American Dream and abandon that oil-soaked version of prosperity, or climate change will dismantle it for them.
The memories of living through Hurricane Helene are still fresh in Isley’s m