Our cars have more pollution controls on them than our parents' cars did. (Given that we are about 20 years older than you, I suspect, this would make sense.) Our commuter car has a much smaller engine and is much more lightweight than the cars our parents drove.
That being said, when both my husband and I were growing up, the average house size was much smaller with subsequent less house size related consumption. House size expanded dramatically as we moved through our adult years. We followed the trend to some extent but we never went HUGE. Daily commutes got longer as well; we found ourselves commuting much further than our parents typically commuted when we were very young, with two people commuting daily rather than one.
When I was very young we lived in a small bungalow in a small town. We knew everyone in town and much of the extended family lived in the same community. Day care was pretty much non-existent. "The babysitter" was a relative just down the street. It was possible to walk to the store, to the movies, to dinner, out for ice cream, to school, to the dr., to church. People tended to drive more as they grew into middle age and as their families grew- it was easier to get a station wagon full of kids back and forth to where ever than to try to walk them. It was easier to bring home a week's worth of groceries in a car. People still walked, however- we all walked a lot.
My generation was probably the leading edge of the suburban revolution. My parents sold the smaller home in the small, walkable town in which we lived and moved to a much larger (not huge by today's standards but twice as large as the house we left) house in what was the first of the 'burbs. My father's daily commute then became as long as any commute that my husband and I have ever had. There were no amenities nor necessities within walking distance. Everything required a car trip.
Gas was cheap when they bought that house in a neighborhood that was in one of the first outlier neighborhoods, off of a rural route and surrounded by farms. (It was pretty.) Gas was unbelievably cheap by today's standards. A few years earlier we'd driven across country, with gas prices across the country ranging from (please don't quote me, it was a long time ago) from around 35 cents/gallon on the east coast to about 20 cents/gallon in the oil producing states in the Midwest and west. Not too long after we moved into the house in the outlying neighborhood, the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 hit. Gas was rationed and gas prices went up. I remember odd and even gasoline days for license plates ending in odd and even numbers.
The cost of the daily commute hit the family budget enough to notice it, as I recall.
Looking back on the price of fuel through the lens of the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, it's fairly amazing to me that gas prices stayed as low as they did for as long as they did.
At any rate, we (my husband and I) saw the writing on the wall just prior to the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007/2008. We were about done with the 'burbs for ourselves anyway. We had a nice house but, like my parents before me, we were in an outlier community and everything required a car trip. There was nothing in the area within walking distance. In addition to the cost and time associated with the commute, we were all surprisingly bored.
The kids had pretty much flown the nest, so my husband and I sold that suburban house in 2006 and bought a much smaller house in town that is as old as we are, literally. We've moved back into our parents' house, for all practical purposes- the little bungalow. Everything is within walking/biking distance. My husband rides public transit to work, which is now within a blessed few miles of the house. We have a small vegetable garden and a clothesline and we use both regularly. We've insulated the attic much better than it ever was in the history of this house to conserve on energy to heat and cool the house. Oil was cheap when my parents' generation was building houses. Insulation wasn't what it is today. It was cheaper to buy heating oil than to buy a bunch of insulation. I'm not even sure that insulated windows existed then (but they did have storm windows.)
My husband and I are back to walking to the store, and when we do drive for errands or if my husband drives to work, it's a much shorter commute.
There are some areas of our life that are energy intensive. Those are conscious choices that we have made for specific reasons. We manage those energy consumers as conscientiously and as conservatively as possible. We try to keep the energy intensive activities/consumption to the bare minimum and still get the return on our investment and the use of the property that we've acquired.
I grew up with clothes drying on the line, ours and everyone else's. Then everybody started using clothes dryers. And then EVERYBODY started using clothes dryers like THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO DRY LAUNDRY. Then I became aware that there were people who'd never, ever seen a clothesline, and considered it a sign of poverty, shame or lack of good taste to hang clothes on the line. ???? I've never quite understood that... if you don't want people to see your underwear, really, hang your underwear on the interior lines, or at least behind the towels.
I lived without a clothesline for the eight years that we lived in a neighborhood with covenants and I hated every minute of it.
Now I'm back to having a clothesline and life makes sense.
So, yes and no- but mostly yes.
