MIT Tracks the Carbon Footprints of Americans

"Going green" seems to be the trendy slogan these days in the United States with companies and individuals making both economic and lifestyle changes that reduce the impact on the environment. As such, we've seen an increase in mass media coverage with celebrities setting public example such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus -- who recently spoke on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno about her active environmentally friendly lifestyle. Despite the slowly increasing awareness and lifestyle changes of the American public, how much exactly does the different American lifestyles contribute to environmental impact? A recent study at MIT decided to tackle the tall order of tracking the environmental impact, specifically carbon footprints, of the different American lifestyles. As it's well known that the United States is the leading country in carbon emissions; so it is no surprise that even the lowest energy using American still contributes significantly more than the global average. A recent Eureka Alert article discusses the situation in the United States:

An MIT class has estimated 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. The somewhat disquieting bottom line is that in the United States, even the people with the lowest usage of energy are still producing, on average, more than double the global per-capita average. And those emissions rise steeply from that minimum as people's income increases: The class estimated Bill Gates' impact as about 10,000 times the average.

With the increasing trendiness in the United States of going green, and as an American myself, it is certainly food for thought that still shows the disparity of lifestyles in a global context, regardless of environmental awareness. [Source]

Written by: AJ Papa

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