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Global SwarmingIs it time for Americans to start cutting our baby emissions?

By Daniel Engber
Posted Monday, Sept. 10, 2007, at 4:49 PM ET

Daniel Engber was online Sept. 13 to chat with readers about this article. Read the transcript.

(Continued from page 1)

What about the global picture—do we know how much population growth will contribute to climate change over the next 100 years? According to U.N. projections, the world population is likely to increase by 2.5 billion people—to a total of 9.2 billion—by the year 2050. That won't necessarily drive an equivalent percent increase in CO2 emissions, since most of the growth will be confined to the developing world, where per capita emissions are at their lowest. But we can also expect to see significant growth in the United States, where individuals do the most damage to the environment.

Overall, the increase in population over the next century won't matter quite as much for climate change as the increase in global wealth, but it's still important. In general, a country's per-capita emissions rise as it becomes more prosperous, while its fertility rate declines. In other words, fewer babies are born, but each one emits more CO2. (That's why the economic boom in China will create a massive increase in greenhouse gas emissions even if its population remains stable.) In fact, the birth of every additional child in the developed world can have a major impact on the cost of keeping global warming in check. According to studies published over the last decade, this amounts to as much as $10,000 to $20,000 per baby. Policies that promote family planning—in the United States or elsewhere—might well be more efficient than other means to reduce CO2 emissions, like a Kyoto-inspired carbon tax.

Despite these findings, Earth-advocacy groups almost never raise the issue of family size, focusing instead on lifestyle choices with more modest environmental rewards. When a group of population-control advocates tried to take control of the Sierra Club in 2004, their anti-immigration policies were decried as racist and they were voted down. (Most of the population growth in the United States comes from immigrants, who are likely to broaden their carbon footprint once they've arrived.) Even the academics on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have shied away from direct references to population and global warming.

They have good reason to be squeamish. The anti-life implications of Weisman's book are likely to alienate some moderates, as well as any social conservatives who might otherwise be drifting green. There's already been a strong Christian backlash against the GOP defectors of the "Creation Care" movement, with their solar-powered churches and prayers over global warming. Right-wing religious groups accuse the evangelical environmentalists of being in league with tree-hugging abortionists.

Worries over population growth also give fodder to the climate-change skeptics, who are quick to reminisce over the ill-fated doomsday projections of Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb. Published in 1968 (just six years after Rachel Carson's Silent Spring), the book cited hockey-stick reproduction rates since the Industrial Revolution to predict an imminent global catastrophe. But dramatic improvements in agricultural technology provided enough food to forestall the crisis, and Ehrlich and his fellow Malthusians were discredited. To bring up overpopulation once again—now in the context of global warming rather than food shortages—invites the same counterargument: Science and innovation will save the day.

As a global solution for climate change, Weisman's depopulation plan may not have much of a chance. ("I knew in advance that I would touch some people's sensitive spots by bringing up the population issue," Weisman told Washington Post readers in an online chat, "but I did so because it's been missing too long from the discussion.") But that's no reason to neglect birth rates from the personal calculus of living green. With the rise of consumer-driven environmentalism, it may be that the McKibben moment has finally arrived. Whether it's eating vegetarian or wearing organic eye shadow, we're all shopping for absolution. We know that babies add more to global warming than anything else in our home. Isn't it time to cut back?

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Daniel Engber is an associate editor at Slate. He can be reached at .
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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Remarks from the Fray:

If the green movement is, at heart, nothing more than a sheer conservationist piety, a desire to protect innocent nature at the expense of the best of human value, then it has already lost the fight. The joys of the family, to my mind, ought to be enlisted as a powerful tool for the fight for sustainable ecology.

To suggest that one ought to worry about the eco-ethics of one's progeny is to admit to the discussion an ugly and joyless consideration. To be asked to stand upon the brink of parenthood and calculate the carbon emissions of one's progeny reveals a coldness at the core of the war on global warming.

The problem with this kind of reasoning is not that it is illogical, but that it is merely logical. Such thinking cuts the heart out of any powerful movement for change by replacing deep, human value with consequentialist calculations.

Suggesting that the best way to protect mother earth is to refrain from becoming a mother (or at least to refrain from increasing one's flock of children), then one wonders why exactly we are working to protect the planet?

A desire for a world without humanity seems to carry with it a marked disdain for human life, and human worth. If humans are really the excrescence at the end of an evolutionary digestive tract, then reducing our numbers makes sense. Perhaps the planet is better off without us. But undercutting human value then calls into question our own responsibility for the planet. Are we then moral agents with a unique role, or something else, a poor thing the world would be better off without? And if so, what moral role we play in protecting the planet?

The traditional Christian virtue of stewardship, represents a more full-bodied approach to nature/creation, as humans are not merely to absent themselves from interference, but carefully interweave themselves into creation's ecology. The goal of "creation stewardship" is to live in harmony with creation, and if this is possible, multiply voices for this harmony. The intrinsic value of creation calls us to protect it, but this does not over-ride, but fits together with, the value of humans as responsible actors in the world, with a unique role to play. That procreation is not only a right, but also a joy, as well as a strong motivation for ecological care, follows from a sense of divine purpose.

If the green movement wants to motivate humans to eco-action, then it will need to enlist our most meaningful human roles, not fight against them.

--ptallon

(To reply, click here.)

If the science of global warming is correct, and the predicted catastrophe happens (sea levels rise, ice age, famine, massive migration, etc, etc), then population control will take care of itself. And most likely, those with more resources are more likely to survive, an anti-Idiocracy.

There's no need for ill-informed policies with their unintended consequences. It's time to face the facts that global warming is going to happen, and there's nothing we can do about it. Inconsequential changes in energy efficiency aside, it would take massive reductions in the global economy to significantly decrease the rate of carbon emissions, not even reducing it. This economic destruction would leave billions more in poverty and facing starvation.

Our only hope is technology.

--QED

(To reply, click here.)

How strange that a few billion years of evolution on the planet Earth have culminated in the species at the top of the food chain being seemingly genetically predisposed to believe that the universe, or at least the planet, would be better off without it.

So we've passed from ancient religions that warned of man's inherent evil nature and imminent destruction (often with seeming relish), to an environmentalism that warned of man's imminent destruction (taking most of the rest of the planet with us), and now move on to a worship of nature--a nature that we define as: everything except us. Of course, only man could invent an environmentalism that imagines a better world if he had never existed and which suggests that he contemplate voluntary extinction. (Apparently, if humans hadn't also evolved irony, the smartest of us would have all committed suicide by now anyway.)

Seems natural selection managed consciousness only in a life form that could help the process further along--by being its eraser.

So, if we haven't managed to demonstrate that we are born into sin, we continue to prove that we are definitely born into guilt. It's OK though. Since, we can only have acquired our guilt through the process of natural selection, we obviously need it in order to survive.

--not_abel

(To reply, click here.)

(9/11)

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