[OKC] From Slate's Green Lantern: Man vs. Woman vs. Planet

[Miles, Karen]

Man vs. Woman vs. Planet


Who's worse for the environment: Me or my girlfriend?

By Nina Shen Rastogi
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2010, at 6:54 AM ET 
________________________________

Lantern, help me settle a bet with my girlfriend. Who's greener, men or
women? She says women, because they're not so car-obsessed, but I say
guys, because we shop so much less. So who's right? 
Sociologists would probably call this one for your lady friend: There's
a long history of research that indicates women are the greener
gender-at least when it comes to their attitudes and preferences. Since
the 1980s, most studies have found that women are somewhat more likely
to express concern about environmental issues than men are, particularly
when the issues are local and threaten people's health and safety. A 
recent analysis <http://www.springerlink.com/index/llq15510m374583q.pdf>
(PDF) of Gallup Poll data from 2001 to 2008 also found that women take
climate change more seriously: They were more likely to say they worried
about global warming "a great deal," that they believed it would
threaten their way of life during their lifetimes, and that the news
media underestimates the seriousness of the problem. 
But before my sisters start doing a victory lap, note that women only
outpaced men by six to nine percentage points on any given Gallup
question. Plus, greater concern doesn't necessarily translate into
greater knowledge: Another recent survey found that American men and
women were equally (and woefully) misguided about the amount of energy
used or saved by various activities
<http://www.pnas.org/content/107/37/16054.full> . 
So women might have greener hearts-but which gender is eco-friendlier in
practice? There have been fewer studies on that topic, but they too give
a slight edge to women, largely based on driving habits. When Norwegian
researchers examined the data from a 10-country OECD survey on
environmental behavior
<http://www.oecd.org/document/39/0,3343,en_2649_34331_35145204_1_1_1_1,0
0.html> , for example, they found that gender didn't have a strong
effect on the number of measures a person took to save energy and water
or on their recycling habits. Single and married men, however, did drive
much more than their female counterparts. (The same case is true for
Americans
<http://www.bts.gov/programs/national_household_travel_survey/daily_trav
el.htmlhttp:/www.bts.gov/programs/national_household_travel_survey/daily
_travel.html> .) In married households, though, men may be shuttling
their wives around, making those allocations more complicated.
Swedish researchers recently corroborated
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2009.08.010>  these findings by
analyzing household expenditures in four European countries-how many
Euros each gender spent on everything from gasoline and electricity to
food and clothing-and how those expenditures contribute to energy use.
They found that single men used more energy than single women in Greece
and Sweden, while gender had a statistically insignificant effect in
Norway and Germany. 
Men used more energy in part because they spent more money overall, but
their buying patterns mattered, too. Again, transportation was key. Men
consistently used much more energy than women did on vehicles and
fuel-between 23 and 32 gigajoules more per year. (Total energy
consumption ranged from 105 gigajoules for Swedish women to 313
gigajoules for Norwegian men.) In the categories where women outspent
men (like food, hygiene, and health), the differences in energy
consumption were much smaller-five gigajoules or fewer per category. In
an expanded report <http://www2.foi.se/rapp/foir2800.pdf>  (PDF), the
researchers calculated that single men in Sweden were each responsible
for about 2.2 metric tons more carbon dioxide emissions than their
single Swedish sisters. That's about as much as the average American car
emits in five months
<http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/calculator.html> . 
The Lantern was curious to see if the same patterns applied to American
men and women, so she enlisted the help of Christopher Weber
<http://www.ce.cmu.edu/people/faculty/weber.html> , an adjunct professor
at Carnegie Mellon who specializes in this kind of economic-based
environmental analysis. Weber ran some quick-and-dirty spreadsheet
calculations, using spending data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics'
most recent Consumer Expenditure Survey
<http://www.bls.gov/cex/tables.htm>  and greenhouse gas figures from
Carnegie Mellon's 2002 Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment model
<http://www.eiolca.net/> . 
The final result: 
For the final result, go to the Article URL at 
http://www.slate.com/id/2274276/
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sustainableokc.org/pipermail/okc-sustainableokc.org/attachments/20101118/83847e8e/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 2310 bytes
Desc: image001.gif
URL: <http://lists.sustainableokc.org/pipermail/okc-sustainableokc.org/attachments/20101118/83847e8e/attachment.gif>