Faced with a government chiefly preoccupied by environmental deregulation, citizens and local governments across the US are increasingly resorting to the judiciary in an effort to respond to the challenges brought by environmental disruptions. While climate change litigation has become a worldwide phenomenon in the past half-decade, the number of cases has particularly soared in the US This paper examines two types of climate change cases, proposing to read them as political manifestoes. The first one a series of claims filed by cities and counties, and the second a lawsuit brought by twenty-one youths. In order to convince judges, but also citizen voters at large, of the merits of their claim, both types of lawsuit mobilize what are deemed constitutive traits of US national identity and its political and economic ethos. As a result, and while undergirded by environmentalist principles, the rhetoric of these cases fosters a national culture of unsustainability, or a system fueled by a growing ecological debt. This study contends that a change in the dominant reading of US national identity is required for the country to transition toward a sustainable mode of existence.