>The rhetorical tactic of blaming corporations
>evades the fact that driving to work all alone, or living in 3000 sq
>ft houses, or a whole lot of other things are just not sustainable.
>You can blame Exxon all you like but daily life has to change.
I think the simple answer to why Americans live that way is because they can or, better, could. The question of whether they should is only beginning to get any traction.
In his early movies, the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar has recurring scenes of people living in small spaces and having to move furniture out of the way to get from one side of a room to another. Before he made movies Almodovar worked several years as a telephone company rep and his job took him inside people's houses a lot during the spike in consumerism that predated Franco's death and really took off in the years afterward. He said he saw people all the time living in these small spaces jammed to the brim with new stuff.
My point is that in Spain so much infrastructure predated modern consumerism there did not exist the same "conditions of possibility" as in the U.S., where there was empty space galore to be filled with urban sprawl, wide roads and big cars.
What was created out of those circumstances is going to take a lot of undoing.