[lotsofpulp]

> The only realistic and honest way to assess overall impact is put a number on your total consumption. There are a million ways that can be skewed, but averages don't vary as much as you think - as an overall reality check, if you make and spend your $50K salary every year, that is going to be the order of magnitude of your environmental impact. Mostly, someone who consumes $500K worth of stuff is going to have 10x the impact, and someone who consumes $5K will have 1/10th the impact. How you spend it is second order.

I’d like to think it was this easy, but I don’t believe it is. A Manhattan apartment costs a million dollars or more, but that person can use public transport to get around. Someone in Arkansas lives in a suburb of Little Rock and drives 30 miles to work one way every day in a pickup truck they don’t need and uses fuel costing $1 per gallon or less. And their house cost $200k.

I wouldn’t be able to say the person in Manhattan is causing an order more environmental impact, especially when our world doesn’t price in externalities of fuel use at all for most of the population.

[perl4ever]

Well, I wrote "consumption" for a reason. It's arguable that Manhattan real estate is valuable largely due to the land value, and land is an asset that isn't really consumed.

Externalities are a cop-out. There are always externalities, but they're just used as an excuse for special pleading. If you average a large amount of consumption, the amount of oil per dollar, and the externalities of burning it, are going to be fairly consistent. The type of consumption is dwarfed by the amount of consumption; that's the claim I'm making. It's not that the "environmental choice" isn't better all else being equal, but it doesn't make up for hardly any consumption as a percentage. If you're not saving significant money as a percentage with your choices, you're not improving your lifestyle significantly.