Polygamy would at least quadruple enviromental benefits!

Did he ponder restablishing slavery in order to fix the economic downturn as well?

Right?

Conservatism solves other environmental problems. If large numbers of Americans home-schooled, then all the energy which public schools consume, the land schools occupy, and the buses which congest our street could be shrunk, or even cleared. There are an estimated 130,000 public schools in America — each a vast carbon footprint. Conservatives would replace these polluting education factories with “Green” cottage-industry home-schooling, no?

Does it ever cross their mind that instead of homeschooling kids and raise them to be semi-literate bible-thumping morons (and does it even need mentioning that all those nice qualities go hand in hand with being completely environmentally illiterate), the better way to lower the carbon footprint of schools would be for kids to walk to them or use mass transit rather than ride buses? As they do in most of the rest of the world…

1. It’s absolute BS that single people consume more than married people. After all, married people tend to produce these things called kids which in turn leads to doubling, tripling, etc. depending on how many of them they have, of the total consumption of the household. In addition, single people tend to go to expensive vacations 10,000 miles from home less frequently than couples

2. But all of that is completely irrelevant. Let’s for the sake of the argument assume that a married couple consumes 50% of what they would consume individually. That would cut their per capita consumption by half but only for those who wouldn’t otherwise marry (and you can adjust this on a per year-spent-not-married basis, whatever). In the best case you will lower the total consumption by a few tens of of percents, which gain will be wiped out by economic growth in a few years. While what is need is end of economic growth and reduction of the total consumption roughly by a factor of 100 which is to come from reduction of the population by a factor of 20 and of per capita consumption by a factor of 5 (again, very rough estimates, and only for the US). Try getting “conservative values” to agree with such a change….

We have gone over before, but it is worth repeating – doing less than 1% of what needs to be done to solve our global sustainability crisis is pretty much equivalent to BAU.

I have never seen a family that “reached affluence” sufficient for just one spouse to work. If you need to work at all, your spouse does too. I’ve seen people *born rich* who managed to have just one member of the workforce.

About half of my coworkers are the sole workers in their families. Some of those are because of divorce or separation, but many are because it is more convenient for one spouse not to work. In my family, I have ‘reached affluence’ sufficient that my wife doesn’t have to work. She’s been attending college instead, just in case anything happens to me. I was not *born rich* and I never got anything from my parents except bad credit when they fraudulently used my name to get loans while they were living on welfare.

Now granted, I’m not a conservative, I’m a independen. I don’t want a world, however, where everyone is expected to live 1950s cookie cutter lives. I want a world where everyone can live for their own fulfillment and not off of other people.