Worried About Global Warming? Don’t Get Divorced!
Dec 6 at 8:08pm by Aileen
Researchers Jianguo “Jack” Liu and Eunice Yu at Michigan State University have published data in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science demonstrating that getting divorced isn’t a ‘Green’ thing to do.
Soaring global divorce rates – even in places with strict religious policies against it – are driving urban sprawl and increasing consumption of resources like water and fuel for electricity.
Liu and Yu started with the obvious – when a couple divorces they require two housing units instead of one, even if the children share time at each. These require resources to construct and they take up space. They require fuel to heat and cool. The story in Science Daily, A Really Inconvenient Truth, notes that a refrigerator uses roughly the same amount of energy whether it belongs to one person or to a family. Among the findings when they started digging deeper:
• In the US in 2005 divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved if the households were still combined by marriage. 38 million extra rooms came with additional costs in heating and lighting.
• Averaging 12 countries’ (including the US) divorces between 1998 and 2002, a total of 7.4 million ‘new’ households were established that would not have been established if those couples had remained married.
• The number of divorced households in the US in 2000 was almost 16 million.
To measure what happens when divorced people remarried, the study compared remarried households with stable marriage households, finding that the environmental footprint of remarried couples goes back to that of stable marriage households.
So. The statistical remedy for people who want to do their part against global warming but can’t manage to stay married? Fall back in love. Even serial monogamy saves resources!
Links:
A Really Inconvenient Truth: Divorce Is Not Green
PNAS: Environmental impacts of divorce
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