How weird are we?

I originally intended for this week's post to be about some more possible climate solutions that I've heard about in the past few weeks. (No doubt I'll cover these eventually, but just as a teaser, they include artificial trees that absorb carbon, small-scale nuclear reactors, carbon-negative concrete, advances in solar panel and wind turbine blade recycling, new battery technologies, and ultrawhite paint that makes surfaces absorb much less heat.) But yesterday morning, as I was hanging out the laundry, it occurred to me that there was another topic I'd rather discuss: Just how weird are we?

I don't know if ours is the only house on our block that has a clothesline in the back yard, but as far as I've ever been able to tell, we're the only people who actually use one. So for over ten years, our neighbors have been watching me hang our laundry on the line and have, quite possibly, been wondering why these weirdos take the time to hang their clothes when they could, duh, use this amazing modern device called a dryer that can get them dry in a fraction of the time, with much less work. And on top of that, if they're observant, they may have been wondering as well about some of the specific items in our wash that can be observed fluttering from the line. Handkerchiefs? Who in the world still uses cloth handkerchiefs when we have disposable tissues now? And rags? Bits of old socks and T-shirts that are clearly no longer wearable garments, yet these weirdos for some reason not only hang on to them, but apparently take the trouble to keep washing them over and over? What's up with that?

Thoughts like these have run through my mind on laundry day before, but this time they particularly resonated because of an article I'd been reading just before going out to hang the wash. It was a piece in the New York Times about how Uruguay is managing, practically alone among the nations of the world, to combine prosperity with sustainability. (Their population is overwhelmingly urban, and their electricity is 98 percent renewable.) It's an interesting read, but one thing that really stuck with me is the way the author opened the piece. As a contrast to what life is like in Uruguay, he outlines the lifestyle of a "typical American household," which according to him includes:

• A house of around 2,200 square feet
• Yearly energy use of 11,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity and 37,000 cubic feet of natural gas
• Six or seven plane flights every year
• Two cars, at least one of them an SUV
• At least one child
  
• A total of 25,000 miles of driving each year ("most of which you barely register anymore, as you listen to Joe Rogan or Bad Bunny")
• A couple of trips to Target each month for "six or seven things: double-sided tape, an extra toothbrush, an inflatable mattress"
• A carbon footprint of 25 tons per person
  

As I read those paragraphs, my jaw was, if not literally hanging open, certainly feeling a bit wobbly. I knew our ecofrugal household was a bit atypical, but are we really that far out of the mainstream of American life?

Our house is, in theory, a three-bedroom measuring just 936 square feet, although the finished basement expands the usable living space to more like 1,400 or 1,500 square feet. Our yearly energy use is 2,113 kilowatt-hours of electricity (all from renewable sources) and about 404 therms of natural gas. (That apparently works out to 40,390 cubic feet, so we're actually a little above average there.) The last time I went anywhere on a plane was for my grandmother's funeral 11 years ago. We have one car, which we drive about 11,000 miles per year (and we've never listened to either Joe Rogan or Bad Bunny, ever). We do go to Target occasionally, but more like a few times a year than a couple of times a month. And while estimates of our household carbon footprint vary widely, they're all between 4.5 and 12 tons per person per year — nowhere close to 25.

So, if the Times article is right about what a "typical" American lifestyle looks like, then we are indeed pretty far out of the mainstream. But is it? The author doesn't cite any sources for any of the statistics in his opening paragraphs, so can we be sure they're right?

Digging around on my own, I found that the true picture is a little more complicated than the author's figures suggest. Take housing, for instance. The article says says a typical American family has a 2,200-square-foot house in a "middle-class suburb." And Census data confirms that the average new, single-family house built in 2021 measured 2,273 square feet. But there's a problem with this statistic — two problems, in fact. First of all, not all homes are single-family houses, and second, not all homes are newly built. And anyone who lives in an apartment, or a townhome, or an older house like ours, almost certainly has less than 2,273 square feet of space.

For more accurate figures, I went to the 2021 American Housing Survey and ran a search based on square footage. And after a few minutes with a calculator, I worked out that the average reported home size (at least among households that did report it) was around 1,440 square feet. Pretty close, in fact, to the size of ours with the basement included. So as far as housing goes, we're not actually out of the mainstream at all.

Now, not all the statistics were this far off base. For instance, the Energy Information Administration says average household electricity consumption in 2020 was 10,715 kWh, close enough to 11,000 for government work. The average number of cars per U.S. household, according to Statista, is 1.88, which rounds off to two. And SUVs and other trucks do indeed account for most new car sales.

But some of the other figures were pretty farfetched. Gallup says that in 2021, 62% of Americans did not travel by air at all, and 23% made only one or two trips. (These numbers were a little lower than they had been before the pandemic, but even when Gallup asked the same question in 2015, only 10% of Americans said they had flown five or more times in the past year.) A majority of US households have no children living at home. And the average U.S. driver put 12,724 miles on their car in 2020 (down from 14,263 in 2019, but that's still far less than 25,000). So on balance, it seems like our ecofrugal lifestyle is actually closer to the norm than the "typical" American lifestyle described in the Times article.

As for line-drying laundry, it was hard to find statistics on that. The best bit of data I could find was from a 2009 Pew poll, which found that roughly two-thirds of Americans consider a clothes dryer a necessity. That puts us line-dryers in the minority, certainly, but not such a small minority as all that. Using handkerchiefs appears to be a bit farther out of the mainstream; based on this Reddit thread, the general consensus seems to be that they're gross and unhygienic (though based on my prior research, paper tissues aren't really any better). But hankies do still have their staunch defenders. And as for the use of cloth rags in place of paper towels, an informal survey by Family Handyman found that respondents actually prefer cloth dish towels by nearly two to one.

The bottom line? Being ecofrugal may be a little bit weird in 21st-century USA, but it's not that weird. And if Forbes and the Good News Network are to be believed, it's getting more normal all the time.

Now, if you'll excuse me, a bunch of those socks I just washed yesterday need darning.