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I really get tired of people pulling out this distorted reasoning to bash the U.S. On an energy use per person measure, we are really no worse than Canada or Australia and not much different than Germany. We are a VERY large country--both in population and geography and as you say we are affluent. Those factors conspire to push the energy use (and emissions) up, but if you take the size of countries and how much of their energy accounting gets disguised because of imports and exports (Switzerland is a prime example) where the energy consumed that promotes an economy and living standard ends up on someone else's 'tab', then the U.S. is not at all out of line with Western Europe and other developed regions (even Japan were the factor of 10 in population density is very important to energy efficiency). Yes there is _some_ waste and _some_ areas where a more conservative life style could maintain a high living standard at lower energy usage, but any detailed plan to do such will have difficulty in producing much more than a 25% reduction. Again, while this is certainly a worthwhile goal, it will do little to help the global picture if China and India don't seriously control their emissions. The developed nations cannot cut back enough to allow a big increase in fossil use by the emerging nations. We need new energy technologies to mitigate this.
The United States is about 6 percent of the world population but produces I
believe at least a third of world's green house gas emission. It's true this
is partially a reflection of our affluence but it is also a reflection of
our wastefulness and general indifference to the impact our daily chooses make
on the environment. There is a lot of low lying fruit in terms of energy
conservation we could do that would be wise even if Global warming didn't exist.