Americans, who make up about 5 percent of the world's population, are responsible for 45 percent of the world's carbon emissions from cars and light trucks.
The generation, born in the years between the end of World War II and the early 1960s, has driven every major automotive buying trend since the late 1970s, when baby boomers began to gravitate away from Detroit's large V-8s towards boxy imports built by Toyota and Honda.
In the 1980s, they dissed station wagons in favor of minivans.
As their wealth grew during the decade, they moved up to gas guzzling sport-utility vehicles to carry their growing families, their shopping bags and their boats.
And now they are taking on global warming.
"I'm almost 50 years old," Joe Morra, a government attorney who lives in Rockville, Md. said. "I was raised at the tail end of the 1950s, when environmental activism was born. Concern for the environment has been instilled in me my whole life. I recycle. I plant trees. I am a member of the Wildlife Fund. I view owning a car as a necessary evil."
"The environment is meshing more and more with economic issues themselves," Madelyn Hochstein, a trends analyst at DYG, a social and marketing research firm of Danbury, Conn. said. Boomers "see these environmental issues as part of the problem, not some separate thing to focus on."
Excerpts from washingtonpost.com 02/25/07
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