For a single-person household earning less than $10,000, living in California, the annual carbon footprint is about 16 tons of greenhouse gasses. But for a couple earning $90,000 living in the Bay Area, it's about 57 tons annually.
So this confirms what us normal folks have suspected all along: you cannot Buy More Stuff your way out of resource consumption. You can employ this method to assuage guilt (over what, I don't know) and impress your friends but numbers is numbers. Do people really think covering their walls and floors with VOC free paint and sustainably harvested bamboo is going to make their houses not unnecessarily large?
Ah well. And to the less well-off, with your dramatically reduced levels of consumption and consumerism, revel in the fact that you're the true eco-warriors.
