Update 12/29/07 - See Theodore Dalrymple's comment at the end of this post.
--
Reporting on a Michigan State Study, a Breakpoint article summarizes:
Researchers there found that divorce “exacts a serious toll on the environment.” How? It boosts “the energy and water consumption of those who used to live together.”
Why this should be the case is not hard to understand: Divorce turns what used to be one household into two. The efficient use of resources, including money, that comes naturally to families living under the same roof no longer applies. In its place are two of just about everything. The researchers calculated that, as the result of divorce, an additional 38 million rooms had to be heated and lighted.
The impact of this divorce-induced consumption is not trivial, they say. The researchers calculated that if divorced couples had stayed married, the “United States would have saved 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 BILLION gallons of water”—and that’s in 2005 alone.
That is approximately as much electricity as American households use in three weeks and nearly as much water as all of American industry uses in an entire year.
Clearly, the study’s authors were right when they said that after blaming “industries for environmental problems,” it is time to look at the impact of households. But if you are expecting environmental groups to emphasize or even mention getting and staying married as a way to “save the planet,” well, you are mistaken. (more)
For Further Reading and Information
Roberto Rivera, “Do It for Mom!” The Point, 5 December 2007.
“A Really Inconvenient Truth: Divorce Is Not Green,” Michigan State University press release, 10 December 2007.
Juliet Eilperin, “Divorce Found to Harm the Environment with Higher Energy, Water Use,” Washington Post, 4 December 2007, A02.
Gregory Rodriguez, “Greenness Is Next to Godliness,” Los Angeles Times, 10 December 2007.
Meghan Daum, “Save the World: Stay Married,” Los Angeles Times, 8 December 2007.
See this table showing the “Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2000” and this table and the “Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2000—Total Water Use.” Also see “End-Use Consumption of Electricity 2001.”
BreakPoint Commentary No. 071211, “Fruitless Folly: Voluntary Self-Extinction.”
BreakPoint Commentary No. 071102, “Just Do It: Good Stewardship and Global Warming.”
Regis Nicoll, “The New World Religion: Environmentalism and the Western World,” BreakPoint Online, 31 January 2005.
Update 12/29/07 - Theodore Dalrymple comments:
A small item in the British Medical Journal recently caught my eye. It was a brief digest of a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the environmental impact of divorce. Researchers from Michigan found that people in divorced households spent 46 and 56 percent more on electricity and water, respectively, than did people in married households. This outcome is not all that surprising: marriage involves (among many other things, of course) economies of scale.
One of the interesting questions that this little piece of research poses is whether the environmentalist lobby will now throw itself behind the cause of family values. Will it, for example, push for the tightening of divorce laws, and for financial penalties—in the form, say, of higher taxes—to be imposed on those who insist upon divorcing, and therefore upon using 46 percent more electricity and 52 percent more water per person than married couples who stay together? Will environmentalists march down the streets with banners reading SAVE THE PLANET: STAY WITH THE HUSBAND YOU HATE?
For myself, I doubt it. Yet these figures, if true, are certainly suggestive. The fact that there will be no demonstrations against environmentally destructive divorcees, who probably emit as much extra carbon dioxide as the average SUV, suggests that the desire to save the planet is not nearly as powerful as the desire to destroy a way of life.