It feels that Europe is so far ahead the US in matters of environmental sustainability. Why is that? Is it more dense than the US, so they need to be more careful with resources?
I've poked around on this topic here and there when bored and never found many good explanations for why this is the case. Probably a million weird little reasons, historical, economic, cultural. IMO the country is just too damn big to try to claim a single cultural identity, and it's resulted in absurd caricatures of polarized political identity, fostered as well by a two party system where it's basically impossible to be represented well per your values. In the USA you can't vote for someone that's promoting reducing government spending without also voting for someone that's attacking trans people's right to exist, or at least in the same party as such a person. Or someone that's trying to take away your wife's healthcare rights. Same way you can't vote for reducing oil dependence without also voting for, idk, taking everyone's guns away.
Just as an example: >=16cm thermal insulation + heat pump or solar thermal energy + double or triple pane windows have been standard for new single family homes since at least 2005 in Austria.
The other thing is that we used up most of "our" fossil energy reserves decades ago and what we want to burn today requires imports, which requires a reasonably stable world economy, a reasonably strong geopolitical position and ... well ... even the last conservative governments have woken up, that those assumptions may not be true any longer
If you are going to stay in one place for a long time, renewable solutions to problems like hot water and residential electricity are worth the investment, but with the migratory nature of the US worker, it's often cheaper for a household to pay for fuel for 5~ years rather than invest in a renewable solution that they will never reap the monetary benefits from.
From what I've experienced since moving from the US to Europe in 2022, it's a lot more common for people to stay in the same houses for an extended period of time. Especially here where I live in the Netherlands, you can commute to work almost anywhere in the country in about 2 hours by car. This allows people to keep the family home.