Save the Polar Bears: Don’t Divorce

From the desk of The Brussels Journal on Fri, 2007-12-14 10:51

A quote from the National Science Foundation, 4 December 2007

A really inconvenient truth: divorce increases the environmental footprint of families [...] A novel study that links divorce with the environment shows that a global trend of soaring divorce rates has created more households with fewer people, that, in turn, take up more space and gobble up more energy and water. [...] A remedy to counter the statistics: Fall back in love. Cohabitation means less urban sprawl and softens the environmental hit. [...]

Housing units, even if they have few people in them, require resources to construct them and the units take up space and require fuel to heat and cool them. Within a unit, a refrigerator uses roughly the same amount of energy whether it belongs to a family of four or a family of two. [...]

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. [...]

To track what happens when divorced people returned to married life, the study compared married households with households that had weathered marriage, divorce and remarriage. The results: The environmental footprint shrunk back to that of consistently married households. [...]

The research, Liu said, shows that environmental policy is more complex than one single solution. Governments across the world may need to start factoring in divorce when examining environmental policy, Liu said.

"Solutions are beyond a single idea," Liu said. "Consider the production of biofuel. Biofuel is made from plants, which also require water and space. We're showing divorce has significant competition for that water and space. On the other hand, more divorce demands more energy. This creates a challenging dilemma and requires more creative solutions."

Where is my global warming when I need it?

Submitted by One_of_the_last_few_Patriots_left on Fri, 2007-12-14 19:40.

Where the hell is my effing global warming when I need it?? Here in New England where I live, the entire past month has been about 15 degrees lower than average for this time of year. The price of heating oil is killing me!
And political "geniuses" like Al Gore are going to make everything beautiful if only we give them total Soviet style control over our economies? Meanwhile, the EU-SSR beaurocrats shove their treaty ( constitution ) down the throats of voters who previously rejected it.
The LUST for POWER is universal!

One_of_the_last_few_Patriots_left

Nothing new

Submitted by atheling on Fri, 2007-12-14 19:34.

I remember a conversation with a friend regarding this very issue 7 years ago... broken homes create a greater need for housing, and drives up the cost of living.

It will be interesting to see how the Left, whose darling is the environment, will juggle these findings and reconcile them with their immoral stand on marriage.

The new religion

Submitted by Frank Lee on Fri, 2007-12-14 18:06.

This is further proof that global warming hysteria has become a religion.  Whereas moral scolds on the right used to tell people they couldn't get a divorce because it would harm their children (and displease God, please Satan, cause the baby Jesus to suffer, or whatever), moral scolds on the left now tell people they shouldn't get a divorce because it harms the environment (and displeases Gaia or whatever they are calling the Earth god).  This is not to say that divorce doesn't in fact hurt children (obviously it does) or doesn't increase one's carbon footprint (that makes sense).  But it does suggest that humans have a natural instinct to be bossy, and that the new moral hysterics are just the old moral hysterics in New Age guise.  Sin brings Armageddon in everyone's mind eventually.  This is fascinating stuff.  I just hope the Europeans don't succeed in forcing the Americans into some idiotic Kyoto II treaty, right when temperatures are leveling off.