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Americans' Carbon Footprints Twice as Big as Others
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, April 29, 2008 (ENS) - Whether you live in a mansion or you are homeless on the street, whether you enjoy eating only raw fruits and vegetables or you must have filet mignon, whether you are a jet-setter or a home-bound retiree - anyone who lives in the United States contributes more than twice as much greenhouse gas to the atmosphere as the per capita global average.
A class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, studied the carbon emissions of Americans in a wide variety of lifestyles - from the homeless to multimillionaires, from Buddhist monks to soccer moms - and compared them to those of other nations.
They found that in the United States, even people with the lowest energy usage account for, on average, more than double the global per-capita carbon emission. Those emissions rise steeply from that minimum as people's income increases.