Theodore Dalrymple
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.