A whole lot of Americans want to have big houses and big cars these days. Forget about the days of compacts and Cape Cod starters. America has become a super-sized society. (That also applies to waist lines.) And the side effects are now being felt.

Big houses and big cars use up a lot of fuel, especially since a lot of those big houses are built in places where you can’t get anywhere without a car. And the car of choice for those places is a pickup or a big SUV. So, the USA is using a whole lot of fuel to heat and cool its houses and to get its citizens to work and play. The average American uses 3 times the energy (in oil kg equivalents) as the average world citizen, and about 10% more than the average for Germany, Britain and France. Unfortunately, we are now feeling a variety of side effects from this addiction to bigness.

It has been pretty well documented that heavy fossil fuel consumption is pushing the earth’s climate system towards a tipping point, i.e. global warming. And it’s fairly clear that high energy prices supported by American demand help Middle Eastern kingdoms to support terrorism, through direct and indirect means (e.g., funding groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and building new fundamentalist “madrassas” which instill the young with anti-western values and attitudes). And now we find out that high energy prices are bringing Russia back as a hostile military threat. This article discusses the variety of new weapon systems that Russia is starting (including nuclear missiles, bombers, aircraft carriers, and anti-missile systems). The bear is back, after falling into second-rate status after the demise of the Soviet Union. And it’s all because of all the revenues that the Russians are earning from oil and gas sales (hey, there’s a Lukoil filling station right up the block from me!).

And now the US economy is in a bit of a spin because of the wacky ways that financial entrepreneurs found to slake America’s appetite for easy credit, the stuff that makes all the big houses and big cars possible. The stock market has fallen around 10%, mortgage rates are going up, and loans are being refused to worthy borrowers because the mortgage default rate was creeping up from 10%, and reached a tipping point at around 14%. Now the “secondary market” which provides the money needed to make loans has gone into a panic, and a big sector of the American economy is in real trouble (including housing developers, realtors, construction companies, construction suppliers, home improvement retail – think Home Depot – appliances, moving vans, furniture makers, lumber companies, etc.). Let’s hope that the Federal Reserve can stop the bleeding with rate cuts.

But the bottom line is that Jimmy Carter was right. America is going to have to stop living the fat life, and start thinking about how to live reasonably and moderately, within its means. The furies are gathering, but perhaps there is still time, if people would just start heeding the warning signs.