In the comments to Amy’s post this morning on Israel Bayer’s call for the city to abandon the Sit/Lie Ordinance, Blog Town reader Lyle had this response: “believe me, i’m as liberal as they come, but i think something’s wrong when the issue of the day for portland’s liberal community is supporting someone’s right to be lazy.”

Oh, Lyle, Lyle, Lyle. Don’t you realize that laziness is the only thing that will save the planet? That if we all slacked off a bit more (or a lot more), we could drastically reduce the speed of global climate change?

This is what I’m talking about. Last December, the Center for Economic and Policy Research released a study, co-authored by David Rosnick and Mark Weisbrot, called “Are Shorter Work Hours Good For The Environment?: A Comparison of U.S. and European Energy Consumption” (pdf).

People in most European countries—in fact, people in most industrialized countries across the globe, with the exceptions of Greece and Turkey—work fewer hours per year than Americans, although they’re not necessarily less productive (I’m no economist, so you can look at the numbers in the report yourself). But if Europeans started working as many hours as their American counterparts? Those countries would then consume 30 percent more energy than they currently do, and the resulting carbon emissions could increase global temperatures by two to four degrees Fahrenheit by 2050. See ya, polar bears!

But on the flip side, if Americans all started working less than we currently do, if we started working the same hours as people in, say, France (an average of 388 hours less per year, but with higher hourly productivity than America), we could drastically reduce our energy consumption, our carbon emissions, and our contribution to rising global temperatures.

So when I take the rest of this afternoon off to go play frisbee in the park, it’s not because I’m lazy—it’s because I care about the planet. I care about keeping the world safe for the children of the next generation—specifically my bosses’ children. I’m doing this for them.