Politics & Power Quote by Jerry Brown

Brown’s line lands like a polite bomb: a plainspoken governor pointing at the imperial assumption hiding in your lunch. “Obvious” is doing rhetorical heavy lifting. He’s not inviting a debate; he’s framing denial as a kind of willful illiteracy. If it’s obvious, then the people who keep selling “growth” and “aspiration” as limitless aren’t merely optimistic - they’re evasive.

The phrase “American diet” is less about burgers than about a system: industrial agriculture, cheap calories, high meat consumption, long supply chains, fossil-fueled refrigeration and transport, corn-syrup economics, and a culture trained to read abundance as entitlement. Brown compresses all of that into five words, then flips the usual story of American exceptionalism. Instead of “the world wants to live like us,” he’s saying “the planet can’t afford for everyone to live like us.” It’s an indictment without moralizing, which is why it works: it’s delivered as common sense, not sermon.

Context matters. Brown, a climate-forward Democrat with a taste for austerity and systems thinking, often talked as if governance meant physics: limits, tradeoffs, consequences. This line fits that worldview and needles both parties - the right’s allergy to regulation and the center-left’s reluctance to tell voters that sustainability might require less, not just cleaner.

The subtext is politically risky but clear: climate policy isn’t only about power plants and tailpipes; it’s about appetite, identity, and the uncomfortable truth that “developed” has been synonymous with “resource-intensive.”