You can reduce your carbon footprint by orders of magnitude more by not having children, or having fewer children, but I don't see as many people advocating for voluntary sterilization (or even just abstaining from childbearing). Most people believe it's their deity-given right (and often imperative) to keep reproducing, even if our environment suffers as a result.
I point this out to suggest that at the end of the day all of this is emotional and is largely driven by how we were socialized and raised from a very young age. It's often difficult to get people to agree with rational arguments when those arguments contradict a lifetime of programming.
Having said all that, I've found that the environmental argument is the only one that gives me pause around my meat consumption.
Yeah, that struck me as odd too. The biggest thing anyone can do to reduce their future carbon footprint is usually to have fewer or no children.
That's a pretty big thing to ask, though, as children are pretty central to most people's lives.
It's an interesting point, though: is it better long term for environmentally-conscious people to have fewer or more children? If they have fewer, then most of the children born will be to parents who are not environmentally-conscious, and will likely grow up without an ethos of reducing their consumption, which will negatively affect public policy. But if environmentally-conscious people have more children, they will add to the drain on the planet, but raise kids who hopefully will grow up to influence public policy in the direction of less consumption. Not sure which choice will be a net benefit, but I suspect the kind of person who would make their child-bearing choices primarily on the basis of environmental impact is uncommon enough that it wouldn't make much of a difference either way.
There's also the argument that wanting to reproduce is a natural human urge, and you're asking people to go against a very key biological instinct.
We haven't done all we can to protect the environment. We haven't even tried that hard. It might be easier to reduce our personal impact to 10% than try to reduce the world's population by the same level.
Reproducing is our biological imperative, but I am still surprised how blasphemous is to people to mention having fewer children. It's a taboo and people hate you for it just for mentioning it.
There's much better ways of solving climate change, but fewer people on planet Earth would help.
There is a Catch-22 in choosing to breed less, in order to be responsible. You are choosing to limit your genes, and in many respects limit your impact on our culture. Irresponsibility continues to breed, while responsibility doesn't. I absolutely agree that our CO2 emissions would be much lower with fewer people, but choosing yourself to have fewer children is not the answer. A lot of the world is choosing to have children at an older age, and this almost always means less children. A better strategy is to try to get more people from all cultures to share this trait (not forcefully, of course).
Besides, having children is extremely bad regarding climate change. I personally find the argument a bit hilarious, but hey: Never forget that virtue signaling can also reduce the amount of children!
That's ridiculous, having fewer babies does nothing to help us fight climate change, and proposing that shows a horribly muddled view of the problem.
The maximum climate effect from reducing having babies would mean no children for, say, the next 20 years. What does that do to reduce emissions to negative by 2050? Nothing! The very best it could possibly do is reduce emissions a tiny bit. It does not solve the problem, and it handicaps the workforce right when we need more people producing the tech to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, in all the multitude of ways we need reconfigure our economy to be carbon negative.
Tech is the only only only way out, unless you advocating for the premature deaths of billions and a return to nomadic lifestyles. Suggesting having fewer babies as a solution is just completely unserious.
The other major fallacy is that more goods and services requires more carbon emissions. That's just BS. In general, goods require a lot more carbon at the moment, but that's absolutely not a requirement, it's only because we are pulling geological carbon out of the ground and dumping it into the atmosphere to capture stored energy. We have newer, better tech to capture energy from the sun and wind and store it, that does not require any emissions.
Meat, similarly, is a red herring for those of us in the US. It's nothing compared to out driving, nothing at all. But brining up meat sure does rile up people to think that they aren't willing to make any changes.
We have the tech, and I agree that the problems are political for their deployment, but solar wind and storage will be far more economically efficient when deployed.
That's a very naive worldview. I'll skip the first part of what you said and focus on this though:
>The most important thing to remember with climate change is that there's no downside to being less wasteful.
It doesn't matter if you shower less or use the AC less or use an electric car, all that pales in comparison to you not existing in the first place. So the easiest way to solve the entire issue is not having more children. I feel like this is such a big choice with huge downsides for most people that it doesn't even get talked about that often.
The thing is that, after you decide to not have kids, time keeps up it's inexorable march. The earth has a carrying capacity for humans. We haven't hit it yet. But we will. This is the one absolute of life: species expand in population until there's no more niche left to occupy.
So after you decide not to have children, other people will have children. Eventually, their descendents will take up the space in the earth's carrying capacity that your descendants would have taken up. There is nothing you can do to stop this. So the best strategy is to change the proportion of people who have an environmentalist bent. Children are an effective way to accomplish that.
Why? We are told that having a child is the most environmentally damaging decision one could make [1,2,3,4]. And the developed world already has sub-replacement fertility - for about half a century now. But that counts for nothing?
I remember reading somewhere that one the greenest thing you can do is have less children. I cannot find it now but iirc, if every one on the planet had one less child, climate crisis would be averted in so many years/decades. It makes sense that intuitive level but would love to verify details.
Your comment makes me wonder if it is indeed about “save the planet” without scarifying “growth” is what most people care about.
The most pro-environment thing a person can do is to not have kids. There are way too many people given the level of consumption that people desire. Something has to give and it eventually a price will be paid unless world's population decreases to a reasonable level.
Right, I overstated the implication. More people deciding not to have children does not lead to extinction. It's just that when people say things like "not having kids is good for environment" it comes off as a moral prescription that ought to apply to everyone, and hence those who violate it are the bad guys (selfishly acting to harm the environment). And yet if sustainability -- rather than self-extinction -- is the goal, we need a mix of both types of people.
Am I wrong to interpret it like that?
The ones who insist on having children as an ultimate virtue, I find them to be just as wrong.
Either choice is fine, and the moral objections to either one are unreasonable.
I discredit all such talk as unrealistic and meaningless. People will have kids if they want kids, and if they don't want kids, they'll use that to say they're saving the environment. Same with eating meat, going on vacations, etc.
None of that is going to solve the problem anyway.
The idea is complete nonsense. Even with absolute worst case climate change scenarios, the average person will have a quality of life vastly above basically anyone in the past. Especially during the Middle Ages when plague was killing people in the street. Yet those people still had families and children.
This is a cultural phenomenon, not a rational one, and has more to do with the West’s lack of a coherent worldview in our post-Christian age. It’s a problem of nihilism.
The “interesting” part is that this, like all scenarios, has evolutionary consequences. People that don’t buy into the climate change = I don’t want kids narrative will out-reproduce and out last those that do. The future isn’t a small society of rationalist childfree vegans, it’s comprised of people that have a lot of kids.
What have you personally done to change that? To reduce your ecological impact? To improve the world.
There's an old saying that if you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem. You don't think raising a child under the auspices of being environmentally aware, and that their influence would extend beyond yours is a good thing? That if you and your partner only have one child, you are generationally reducing the population while allowing your views to seed and grow.
There is so much negativity in the world... kind of lines up with the article title itself, and is more of the same problem than the solution. Even then, you aren't helping the world by actively not having children.
If you don't have children because you're worried about the environmental impact then the world will be overrun with people who don't share your views on sustainability.
I point this out to suggest that at the end of the day all of this is emotional and is largely driven by how we were socialized and raised from a very young age. It's often difficult to get people to agree with rational arguments when those arguments contradict a lifetime of programming.
Having said all that, I've found that the environmental argument is the only one that gives me pause around my meat consumption.
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