Saving the Planet

In Sarah's blog today, she linked to this quiz. This quiz tells you how many "Earth's" would be needed to support your living habits if everyone in the world lived like you. This was quite depressing. Not because if everyone lived like me, we'd need more than 6 planets. I mean I was expecting that - I live very very comfortably. Not that even when I was in college and much more environmentally friendly (took public transportation, lived in an apartment) I still needed almost 5 planets. What was depressing was what I had to do to get the answer to come out to be 1 planet. Here is the best solution I found.

Living in the USA, Houston (> 1,000,000 weather like Atlanta)
27 years old, Female
Become vegitarian
Eat all local food
Produce less garbage
Find 2 people to live with Gavin and I
Move to an apartment with under 1000 sq. feet
Not have electricity
Never use personal vehicles, public transportation, or fly
=1.0 planets

You cannot get to 1 planet with electricity. Now I have to ask, how are we ever going to live within our means if we have to give up electricity? I think most people that have ever lived with electricity consider it to be a basic necessity and wouldn't give it up for anything. So, either the quiz is wrong, we're screwed and we're going to kill the planet, or so many people are living in absolute squalor that the average works out. The last one may be true, but it is just as depressing as the one that says we're all going to die.