Posted on 01/01/2008 7:51:22 PM PST by Hank Kerchief
Separation Anxiety Divorcees are bad for the environment. Do environmentalists care?
27 December 2007
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.
The amount of heartburn that my ex-wife gave me, plus the amount of beer I drank because of her, more than offsets my additional electricty use.
Power tools use electricity.
I don’t get it. just why exactly do divorced people use more electricity and water? on what??
I don’t believe this study at all.
Paging Al Gore & the Nobel Prize Committee ...
Just guessing, but if there are two households where there was one, you have two furnaces instead of one, two refrigerators, more air conditioners, more lawns to water . . . you get the idea. Things that once were shared that now have to be duplicated.
And the same applies to single adults in general. In short, 95 percent of the environmentalist movement, being never-married or divorced, is the biggest group of resource hogs on the planet.
ahhhhh....got it. thanks!
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