Lord knows we men are to blame for most things -- but global warming?
Yes -- according to a major new report (PDF) by Gerd Johnsson-Latham for the Environment Advisory Council of the Environment Ministry of ... wait for it ... Sweden. The report's focus:
What we know about the extent to which women globally live in a more sustainable way than men, leave a smaller ecological footprint and cause less climate change.
Ouch! Don't look at me -- I telecommute; my wife takes the car.
If gender equality is in fact a prerequisite for sustainable development, it's definitely be time to buy property on high ground. Fortunately, the theory is debunked by a best-selling nonfiction book: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.
This is fatal to Gerd's theory. After all, which of those two planets is cold -- and which is "a 900-degree inferno" with a "runaway greenhouse effect," to quote a 2002 NASA study?
The defense rests.
Ask Umbra’s video advice on composting
This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!
You never get a second chance to make No Impact—oh wait, yes you do
Comments
View as Threaded
PolluteLessDotCom Posted 4:51 am
26 Nov 2007
The way women and men live GLOBALLY is very different from what happens in North America, where women have more say and the right to live close to the life standard of men. I would not be surprised to find numbers that show close to equal greenhouse gas emissions by men and women in the USA and CA.
This distribution of power is different in many other places and many millions of women may simply be FORCED to live simply and therefor much more sustainably.
Poor people (or powerless people for that matter) pollute less.
Karsten
--
http://www.polluteless.com
Practical Advice to Pollute Less
Permalink
Colin Wright Posted 7:24 am
26 Nov 2007
I'd recommend anyone seriously interested in public or policy planning to give this study a review. There are many gems, including this one, which may partally explain the environmental movement's aversion to public transit in favor of "sexy" cars:
Women, on the other hand, use public transport - bus and rail travel - to a greater extent; they also travel by air, but then largely on charter trips for holidays. Given the above, women are more favourably inclined towards and more dependent on pub-lic transport than men. (Swedish National Road Administration)
Men, on the other hand, prefer cars, and what Swedish researcher Merritt Polk calls `automobility'. As Polk points out, this has significant disadvantages to society in that automobility is a highly resource-intensive mode of travel and a less sustainable way of solving the problem of how to transport people and goods from A to B
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 5:03 pm
26 Nov 2007
Also intuitively, any men who argue with arguments of serious practicality that society ought to move itself around principally by private vehicles, not by public transportation, are not to be believed. What is really going on in their heads is, "I am hooked on driving my car, I love that feeling of power and freedom that it gives me, and I would feel totally unmanned if I could not drive it anymore."
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
Permalink
spaceshaper Posted 12:47 am
27 Nov 2007
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
Permalink
eriqa Posted 5:57 am
27 Nov 2007
The differences between income levels and countries of residence toweringly, vastly outweigh any gender differences. Powerful people use more energy and most of the powerful people in the world are now men. Reversing this so that more powerful people were women would be an advance from a feminist perspective but what on earth does it have to do with climate change? Are we getting back to some 1980s style "essentialist feminism" where women are supposed to be warm fuzzy earth mothers incapable of doing anything to hurt the planet?
Second, what practical action could anyone possibly take as a result of this report? Abort baby boys to stop climate change? Making energy consumption more equal within poor families might benefit women but the poor family's total consumption would still be the same - powers of ten less than that of rich families.
Increasing gender equity is a worthy goal but it's a streeeetch to say that it will do much to reduce global energy consumption!
Permalink
Colin Wright Posted 4:36 pm
27 Nov 2007
A man should be aggressive and powerful and driving a car helps one to feel that way.
A man should be adventuresome and daring, and a car provides opportunities for such behavior.
A man should be sexually active, and a car provides practical op-portunities for this and also symbolizes potency.
A man should be financially successful, and a car can prove it.
A man should be able to provide protection and comfort for his woman, and a car protects against climate and physical work.
A man should be the respected leader of his family, and with the father behind the wheel, he is obviously the leader...
A man should be skillful and knowledgeable in technical matters, and working on the car increases his technical competence.
Eriga, you might want to actually take a look at the report before criticizing it.
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 11:55 pm
27 Nov 2007
More later, perhaps, on why I fell out of my chair when I came to the third one, as well as on what we may be pleased to call the "Amazon Option," i.e. aborting or drowning the baby boys, of which Eriqa reminds us.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
Permalink
atreyger Posted 1:00 am
28 Nov 2007
P.S. the last excerpt is hysterical.
Permalink
caniscandida Posted 8:08 pm
29 Nov 2007
"The plezhua's entoyaly moyne, Oy'm shua. So let's gedatta this joint, like pronto, ya know?, and let's not walk eetha, OK?, these heels ah killin me, like fo' real!, ya know?, so let's go in yua cah! Yeah, yua cah! Whuh? -- You do got a cah, don'cha? Don'cha?!"
And so it goes ...
Anyway, it is indeed true, as I wrote earlier, that while considering the third precept in Colin's box, and while imagining the many ways in which "a car provides practical opportunities" for fulfilling that precept, I fell to the floor in a faint.
What happened, I think, was something like this: I was doing a kind of random search, as it were, of associations of men, sexuality and vehicles of any kind, the better to understand the precept; and as soon as one popped into my head, I would review it, very quickly, then pop it out again and move on if it did not seem promising. And in that way I went through such images as Tom Cruise, on his fighter jet's wing, and wearing his George W. Bush jumper, in "Top Gun"; Errol Flynn being flogged on a sailing ship in "Against All Flags"; and Keir Dullea communicating soulfully with his good buddy with the lips, Gary Lockwood, believing they were all alone in the spaceship's capsule, in "2001."
But then I hit on something bizarre, even a little grotesque, and I stalled there: the image of a college lad at a beach resort during Spring Break, in a Jeep, the kind with no doors and a very high seat, himself wearing shorts, a muscle shirt and a baseball cap turned backwards, driving slowly, craftily seeming to watch the road ahead of him, but really checking out the various wayfaring people on foot, in search of someone promising. Does this make sense?, I asked myself. How is this vehicle giving the lad a "practical opportunity" to be sexually active? It is far too small to offer anything like a comfortable place of dalliance; and it is far too open, so that the activities of its passengers would be exposed to the observation and scrutiny of non-participants.
This problem perplexed me for ever so long, until finally, as I reflected on that last point, it dawned on me: That is important! You can see inside! The Jeep is no more than a stage set, a display, a platform, a prop! It is not the place of opportunity itself; but it is, as it were, the altar of sacrifice from which the lad is snatched and borne away to the place of opportunity, wherever that might be! Rather like Fay Wray being snatched away by King Kong from atop the islanders' gate! How subtle! How brilliant! How romantic!
And with that, having made that observation, I found it too much for me, and swooned; I fell to the floor, as if as dead as a broken-jawed dinosaur.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
Permalink