I know nothing about how stringently science was applied to this study. However I think the author was exposing a personal bias in their commentary. Tree hugger has a young single ethos, partially because many of the people involved in the environmental movement are young, and I appreciate and enjoy that. However many committed 'Tree huggers" are older, and even .....Gasp...... married with children.

Just because a study had something positive to say about marriage and consumption does not mean it is flawed science.

Isn't it possible that divorced people are searching for satisfaction, and attempting to use consumer good as one path to fulfillment? Is it possible that married families are spendind their money on lessons, PTA, and food for their children and do not have the budget for additional discretionary consumer purchases? Perhaps they are spending time volunteering, doing homework, working, and generally caring for the family unit, and thus not consuming. Perhaps they are happy with the emotional interconnectedness of their life, and thus do not feel the need to consume more! I have 5 people in my extended family living in under 2000 sf, I don't think anyone would consider that a Mansion! I feel lucky to have all the space I have and feel no need for more. I know people raising three kids in apartments half the size of mine, They seem happy, although they do seem to consume a lot...... of books.

I think this author was exposing a much more invidious bias in their writing that the study was purported to be supporting.

=== author's response follows ===
You make a fair point.

Not wanting to counter your point, I do wish to bring up a few personal factoids: 2,100 ft2 house, 5 persons under one roof, married 20+ years, in my 50's.
One must evaluate the "functional unit" over the product life cycle to arrive at a fair comparison: e.g. the apartment will exist regardless of how long a divorced person rents there; marital status changes over time; and the definition of "family unit" also comes into play. Factor all that in and control for personal wealth and an entirely different picture emerges I would wager.

"Sharing resources makes them last longer."

If that's all that came of that study, it was a pretty pointless one. Perhaps if it examined whether divorce causes people to shun future social activities and relationships, extending the solo lifestyle and consuming the most per person for a longer period. Or if it examined divorcee consumerism: Do divorcees buy and waste more of everything out of a lack of responsibility, do they have less due to a smaller personal budget, or do they abandon sensible spending and practical living only?

And do divorcees live as long? Because, if they don't, they are clearly not using as much in resources as those who live longer.

I think this study simply drew a bland conclusion, sort of like examining heavy traffic and concluding that "it's because there are a lot of cars on the road."

I'm not sure that I follow the author's response to the comment above. Or, for that matter, the points made in the post above.

The linked article makes no mention of McMansions or divorced men living in three-to-a-unit. Why attribute facts to the research? Just because they conveniently support your position that the research is bogus? And your implicit conclusion is that, from a resource consumption perspective, divorce is better than staying married? Huh?

Sharing resources is good, yes? Intact families generally share resources, yes? Divorced families generally don't share resources, correct?

Ha! When I first read the title of this post, I thought it was about divorce rates going up as couples' consumption increased. Buy a big house, start living luxuriously...be at higher risk for divorce. Oh well.

This is a "Magic Bullet" story. Extremists love to plant these stories so because they hope to create conflict among their rhetorical opponents by making them fight over priorities. The problem is, they can't do this without conceding the importance of environmentalism and conservation.

All moderates have to do is show that divorce doesn't necessarily have the ramifications the story indicates, OR show that they're insignificant when compared to the benefits that liberal divorce laws bestow.

Easy divorce allows parents to remove their children from the home of an abusive spouse, improving their own and their children's mental health, and consequently their future. Easy divorce therefore contributes to a better balanced community with healthier citizens. Considering that an abused child not removed from a bad matrimonial situation is far more likely to become a destructive force in society, the benefits clearly outweigh the risks.

After all, an abused child who grows up into an abusive adult will prepetuate domestic violence in the future, and will more likely lack the moral compass that leads them to commit antisocial acts like crime, substance abuse, and pollution and waste.

Another way to deal with magic bullets is to attack the assumptions the argument makes. One assumption this argument makes is that single households will not naturally agglomerate under economic pressure ANYWAY. Do you remember a show called The Odd Couple, when two divorced men lived together? This is a common living arrangement, as are "mixed families" where two divorced persons with families marry and share a household. (This exists in my own family and works very nicely!)

Clearly, some hack academic who works for extremists was hoping to curry favor with their boss by concocting this "magic bullet", but they should have saved their time. After all, moderates can concoct far more plausible and helpful (and accurate) synergies. To wit:

-Open space leads to more exercise, thus cutting childhood obesity.

-Higher taxes lead to better education, boosting the economy in the long run by improving the work force.

-Parents with smaller families devote more time to each child, leading to more achievement and an improved economy.

I'm sure extremists wouldn't like such "studies" aimed at them!

I suggest that rhetorical double-dipping like this be ignored by Treehugger editors in future. There's enough REAL news out there

I didn't get through to read the science behind the report but one quote ...

"Even in areas with declining population size, we still see a dramatic increase in the number of households," Liu told LiveScience

I would think that each household added that electricity,water etc was consumed to build (capital cost) then live in it (overhead). This is assuming apples to apples. If a married couple living in a single house when divorced now live in two single houses....and a married couple living in an apartment when divorced live in two apartments.

Now this "problem" is negated when looking at just math....

If you have a 3 person house hold...and even if there is a divorce and people split....if the housholds rebalanced to 3 people each then then divorce is not a "major" Factor. It seems more of a cultural-materialism factor.

Take into consideration....a single person never married living in a home by themselves....This is a wealthier nation tendency and If I am not mistaken...Divorce increases with the wealth of the country. Hence China with an increase per capita income and increase divorce rate. Many people said that prior to higher rates of job availably they could not afford to live on their own and not get married...and spouses now can afford to leave the other spouse because they can afford to. Well... at least according to the documentary on the increasing divorce rate in China on PBS.

Was Wealth vs. non wealth taken into consideration?

As I write this comment, the above study has gotten some pretty widespread coverage in the mainstream media, and I'm sorry to say that I found much of it considerably more thoughtful than the Treehugger story was.

I'm shocked, frankly, at the level of skepticism with which this study was greeted at Treehugger. The author and several commenters have questioned either the motives or the methods of the researchers, apparently without having fully read the coverage of the study, much less the study itself. It DID take into account many of the factors that John and other commenters wondered about (wealth, remarriage, etc.) and what's more, it seemed to me to draw conclusions that weren't even particularly surprising.
Anonymous: "Academic hack working for extremists"? Come on, this was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, not by Focus on the Family.

I'm going to reach here, and guess that much of the negative reaction at TH is based on our typical attitude to studies like these. Many stories at Treehugger are about how the results of study X should inform our PERSONAL choices, or the personal choices we want to encourage others to make. To read this study from that perspective would be silly: Nobody's going to stay in a bad marriage for the sake of the environment. But this is a study of the effects of broad social trends, not a values judgment of personal choices. Assuming for a moment that the study's conclusions are valid, there are all sorts of potential policy responses to this information, which don't require buying into the whole 'family values' agenda. Or promoting wasteful lifestyles over frugal ones.

Yes, there are many other social trends that deserve this kind of study, which might provide more meaningful and actionable results. (The decline of the multigenerational family home seems like a biggie.) And yes, raising a family is much more carbon-intensive than staying single. But writing this off as "'science' we don't need" is terribly unfair.

Full disclosure: I'm married with 2 kids, living in a house, and I have a really hard time imagining how a divorce wouldn't send our family's collective carbon footprint way up for years.

If cynicism about the motivation of the original researchers number-crunching is not justified, no one can dispute the that its important to be skeptical of the bloggers and who emphasize a story which, by their own defensive admissions, is largely irrelevant to the wider discussion of global climate change.

If a cause of global climate change is too many single-family dwellings and too many roads placing them too far out, why is the increment by which divorce increases the number of said dwellings more important than the overabundance of such dwellings in the first place? I'm confident that developers' tax breaks, road building subsidies, government bonding programs, and the availability of cheap land and materials are each FAR more important contributing factors to the oversupply of housing.than divorce is.

In any event, the role of sex education, birth control, RU-486 and abortion are far more important inhibitors of global climate change than divorce is a theoretical irritant. This has been abundantly clear since the 60s.

Rob: Excellent points all, particularly your last paragraph. This study isn't a particularly important piece of the climate puzzle, but it's still important to understand the many links between social trends and resource consumption --even the links that can easily be misappropriated by conservative idealogues.

Most important its to look for the benefit of the children. Definitively the divorce is a difficult process for all the members of the family and the children are always the the most affected.