Harmful Lifestyles Threaten the Environment.
After blow drying and stiffening their hair with hair spray, Americans jump into their sports utility vehicles and head off to work with their air conditioner blasting, looking forward to sitting in an air-conditioned office all day. This is just a small part of American's unthinking lifestyle that impacts our environment minute-by-minute everyday. The lifestyle of most Americans is detrimental to our environment. Americans use and abuse what the earth has to give, taking its natural resources and leaving in their place pollution. Just a few examples of how Americans contribute to distroying the environment include the greenhouse effect, over consumption of natural resources, and pollution of the water and air. .
According to the U.S. Electric Utility Environmental Statistics, the United States Greenhouse gas emissions generally follow trends in U.S. energy consumption. In 1999, for example, some 82 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions consisted of carbon dioxide released by the combustion of energy fuels "coal, petroleum, and natural gas. In recent years, national energy consumption, like emissions, has grown relatively slowly, with year-to-year fluctuations in the growth rate of energy consumption largely caused by variations in weather patterns, business cycles, fuel use for electricity generation, and domestic and international energy markets. Americans don't want to live without their everyday luxuries and they refuse to give up driving their big, gas burning vehicles, let alone turning off the air conditioner in their cars and offices when it is hot. .
In The Press Democrats Sunday edition of 11-12-00, there was an article about how President Clinton was calling for a new federal regulation, limiting power plants' emissions of carbon dioxide. A fact that caught my eye in this article was that the United States is by far the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide.