Divorce is Bad for the Planet

"Oh, I wish that we could stop this D-I-V-O-R-C-E." Mother Nature probably agrees with Tammy Wynette. According to a recent Michigan State University study, divorce is taking a major toll on the environment.

Some of the findings:

* In the United States alone in 2005, divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved had household size remained the same as that of married households. Thirty-eight million extra rooms were needed with associated costs for heating and lighting.

* In the United States and 11 other countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico and South Africa between 1998 and 2002, if divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been 7.4 million fewer households in these countries.

* The numbers of divorced households in these countries ranged from 40,000 in Costa Rica to almost 16 million in the United States around 2000.

* The number of rooms per person in divorced households was 33 percent to 95 percent greater than in married households.

But the researchers also point out that divorce is just part of the picture: In the U.S., multigenerational households have become less common over the past few decades. What's more, single people are putting off getting married, and hence living alone for longer. Seems like the only bright side about sky-high rent, then, is that it might actually make some cities greener (since fewer people can afford to live alone).

Comments

Does this mean Friends of the Earth will start offering marriage guidance?

Posted by: weee recycling on 12/05/07 at 2:47 PM Respond

Ha ha...divorce is a miniscule factor. The major factor is our corporate enforced reliance on oil (don't vote for the corporate cronies and we'll get a better world). Deregulation is handing them our earth and a good bottom line until the goose that laid the eggs is DEAD. That be us...the peons, upon whose back the corporate profits grow.

Posted by: Evergreen on 12/05/07 at 5:17 PM Respond

I agree with evergreen...while every little bit helps, and divorce contributes to a lot of other problems besides global warming, it's our completely corrupted gov't giving in to the greed of corporate America and allowing further de-regulation--from how much pollution they can pump out, to how little they have to give to the people who do the work. The biggest crooks to ever exist live in the White House right now..Their greed is, to me, unfathomable (sic?). I mean, don't they even care about their own children, and grand-children, and the world in which they will be living? I find it hard to be positive about anything anymore, things are so bad. Yet most Americans just keep shopping, and if you mention any of the horrible things that are going on, they either think you're crazy--'cause they didn't hear about it on Fox News--or they think, there's nothing to be done about it. I swing from rage to despair and back again. I write and call my senators..but without much hope. Look at all the promises the Democrats made before the midterm elections. Well, we got them control of Congress, and now they've done things like legalize Bush's warrantless domestic spying, after it had been struck down by the Supreme Court as un-Constitutional. We live in a strange world, where people are fascinated by other humans because they've been in front of a camera a few hundred times, or have put out a few records...this whole fantasy will come to an end when everything starts falling apart. The rich think they can isolate themselves from the coming chaos, but they are wrong. We have been living far above our means for so long, with an unbacked, "fiat" currency..and it's all going to come tumbling down because we were too lazy, too busy shopping, too busy watching mind-numbing T.V. programs, to stop these evil( it's the only word I can think of to describe them)bas****s. I think we have less than 5 years before it's too late, and we begin to feel the kind of suffering our way of life has made most of the rest of the world with very familiar.

Posted by: Alan on 12/06/07 at 5:13 AM Respond

Oh good gravy. Can't you do better than that?!? There are some couples who are best divorced and FOR the children's sake too. Better they be divorced than one of them kill the other in their sleep. And I KNOW, I HAVE BEEN THERE!!! (Those idiot researchers must be working for the rich corporation people! After all, they've never been accused of being intelligent, sensitive, spiritual people!)

Posted by: Nancy on 12/09/07 at 11:14 PM Respond

If more people would be gay(try it you might like it), then we would have less population and less pollution. The problem is all the Red Necks in the Red States (middle America) who are having lots of children. People on the left coast and the Atlantic, are doing their part to have 0-1 child.

Posted by: Lars, the Viking on 12/12/07 at 12:54 PM Respond