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But I have a STRONG feeling that the last thing I would care about in the midst of going through a very emotional time would be the *GREEN* impact of my marriage ending.
Divorce Found to Harm The Environment With Higher Energy, Water Use
“Hopefully this will inform people about the environmental impact of divorce,” Liu said in an interview yesterday. “For a long time we’ve blamed industries for environmental problems. One thing we’ve ignored is the household.”
Lester Brown, president of the D.C.-based Earth Policy Institute, said the study’s finding made sense, but it is hard to craft public policies to address the problem of the increasing number of households in the United States and elsewhere.
“I’m not sure how to get around this,” Brown said. “Shifting to more energy-efficient appliances is the answer, not trying to prevent divorce or trying to make divorce more difficult.”
“There’s strong evidence, which emerges clearly in this paper, that merging what otherwise would be separate households will reduce energy and other resource needs,” Cavanagh wrote in an e-mail. “The best advice to those who are miserable together is not, however, to avoid divorce for the sake of the environment, but to find someone else as quickly as possible.”
The study does deliver a warning to men and women headed down the aisle, Brown said. “It would suggest we should be a little more careful when one’s marrying to make sure the marriage is going to last, but that would be counter to the trend we’ve seen in recent decades, at least in this country,” he said.
I could say so many things. So.Many.Things.
Ladies and Gentlemen? For the sake of the environment, shack up! Now! Go!!! Don’t necessarily stay in a horrible marriage but for the love of God, find someone…anyone as quickly as possible! No need for Pre Canna classes pop in Al Gore, buy a few fancy light bulbs go forth and multiply!
I think (and I know I am now saying many things…) But I think that this study totally ignores the fact that people, individual people are the ones responsible for their energy consumption in the long run. Of course two people in one household could save on energy consumption. But they could also use twice as much.
My co-habitatitng self now feels like taking an extra long shower and specifically NOT unplugging the coffee maker and the bean grinder before going to work now, just to be a piss pot.
