There is coming a point (it has already passed, in my opinion), where we can no longer justify our purpose for existence as "creating more humans."
When people implicitly say that bringing children in the world is necessarily a net-negative on climate, they're implying that their lifestyle is necessarily net-carbon-positive and that they just refuse to do enough to make their own lifestyle net-carbon-negative. Yet it IS possible to do so. I'm reminded of this Indian fellow who planted an entire forest pretty much by himself (although surely his wife/family also helped enable him to accomplish that goal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7i3QlMvsZs
...there are so many decisions one can make to cut one's carbon emissions to near zero. And some decisions can even make one's carbon emissions negative (some startups at Y Combinator, even... although there are more proven methods as well).
The most powerful thing as a parent is that you can help pass on your values to your children. Teach them (through example) how to live a low or negative carbon lifestyle and teach them the value of the environment and why the Earth must be protected. Plant trees. Make intentional decisions with lifestyle (mode of travel, living arrangements, diet) that lower carbon emissions, and explain these things to your children starting at a young age.
Because the world will NEED people with those values in the future if climate change will ever be addressed and eventually reversed without a collapse of human civilization. Because if everyone with a positive view of the environment and the need to fight climate change does not pass on that worldview to their children, BUT those who deny climate change and do not value the environment pass on their worldview to their children, then that is clearly not going to work out for those who value the environment.
For instance, pay people to plant (native) trees and restore ecosystems (or do it yourself). About $15/month could offset your entire carbon footprint and bring it negative: https://mossy.earth/
If you don't buy that argument for forest restoration counting ($15/ton of CO2), then you could also try some of the more expensive methods like sustainable biochar sequestration ($300/ton CO2). Even the super expensive options for offsetting CO2 are no more than a car lease payment at the individual level (and cheaper, of course, if you reduce your direct emissions as well).
We have too many people on the planet. Carbon emissions is only one of the many huge environmental problems we have. Creating new consumers to the planet is clearly the most devastating act for the environment what individual people can do.
The number of people that can inhabit the planet without destroying the environment is highly dependent on individual choices and (maybe even more) government policy. Government policy is determined by voting power, which is in turn determined by the values of people weighted by population. So absolutely it matters if the pro-environment folk advocate removing (to some degree) their own voice from future populations of voters while anti-environment folk do not.
The most devastating act that individual people can do is to not pass on positive, lasting values to the next generation. Because you're not going to stop anti-environment people from passing down negative values by doing so; you'll in fact be amplifying their stance. We must heal the Earth.
The world doesn't even need human or dinosaur. It will work just fine.
And I feel like that's obvious enough that this objection that you and others raise has to be willful, disingenuous misinterpretation, just to be disagreeable or something.
I don't have any statistics that can either confirm or dispute that assertion. But I will gladly ban SUV and Cruise s in favor of whatever climate impact children can have.
What a sad perspective. I know many people who contribute massively to the environment. Maybe you need to choose a different, pro-environment lifestyle? Plant some trees. It's possible to live carbon negative and pass on those values to your children.
So in your view, humans are weeds. Do you think it's time to get out the weedkiller?
“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” said Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions.
“Agriculture is a sector that spans all the multitude of environmental problems,” he said. “Really it is animal products that are responsible for so much of this. Avoiding consumption of animal products delivers far better environmental benefits than trying to purchase sustainable meat and dairy.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
[0]: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541
If pro-environment people do not have children to pass their values to but anti-environment people do, then clearly there won't be much support for climate action in the future.
Climate action is still a very long road. Yes, we probably already have nearly 1.5C baked in, but our children and grandchildren will still have a massive role in the future of the environment.
Another great reason not to have kids. They are going to be left to deal with the consequences of the 1.5C. Including war, famine, and the likely re-emergence of various fascist and totalitarian ideologies due to the crisis. Why would you choose to put people you love through that?
If only the fascists and pro-totalitarians pass on their values to future generations, then you're right there is little hope. But that's what we're discussing! I believe we have a responsibility to ensure that ISN'T the future.
If you have Choice A which actively makes things worse and Choice B which doesn't make things worse then Choice A is the "good" choice as it is the one that causes the least harm. Driving a 50cc scooter instead of a car doesn't actively help carbon emissions, in fact it still puts out carbon, but it any reasonable person would say that switching from a car to a scooter helps the environment. Splitting hairs over whether doing less harm counts as "helping" isn't very productive.
Have kids and don't do that. If the "good guys" aren't having kids then we'll be fucked. I assure you the "bad guys" are having loads of kids and they don't care one iota about climate change....
True, but doesn't being good involve not being actively bad?
The viewpoint that really puts humanity as separate from nature is the one that assumes that the planet can support an unlimited quantity of humans without obliterating nature in the process. How many people do you think the earth can support? 10 billion? 15 billion? At some point we're going to hit a wall. But, thanks to technology, long before we hit that wall most of the plants and animals we take for granted today will be gone.
If we want to preserve a fraction of the biodiversity we have today, at some point soon the human population of the planet will have to stop growing. People who don't have kids are making the rational, forward-looking choice as far as I'm concerned.
The true but unpleasant situation is that, on average, people on HN should be having more kids while those in developing countries should have fewer.
You not having a kid is very unlikely to be a net positive for humanity if you live in a developed country with a large, stable income.
Exactly backwards if you look at the resource consumption and carbon footprint per capita in SF vs. that in developing countries[1]. iPhones and Ubers and Bird scooters are expensive. Not just in monetary terms but in terms of generating tons of carbon emissions during production, operation, and disposal/recycling.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
/sarcasm
People who don't have kids because they are worried about climate change are doing a big disservice because they are ensuring that all the folks who don't give a rusty rats ass about climate change eventually outnumber them.
Your argument applies equally to "having a child" and "letting some person live."
It's not as big of a jump as you think. If climate change is such an urgent issue that anti-natalism should be on the agenda, perhaps it's a big enough crisis to motivate a re-evaluation of some old ideas about the sanctity of individual human lives.
Seems like all-or-nothing thinking to me.
You say this flippantly, but if we don't eventually reverse the trends, this will happen. It will be camouflaged in the garb of warfare against the "enemy", as it always is.
We're on a path that is going to significantly lessen the carrying capacity of the planet (on the human timescales we care about). It's implicit and unavoidable barring a wholescale change in power structures and probably human attitudes in general.
It's not a good thing but it is inevitable at this point.
[0]: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541
Unfortunately modern environmentalism is a cult with its own armageddon. And WWF actively displacing native hunter gatherer people to "save the wildlife". What is the point of preserving environment if there are no people in it?
In fact shrinking population is the worst thing for the environment that can happen now, because at this point we have already activated the natural process of arctic melting and releasing CO2, and even if half of people were magically removed there wouldn't be a huge difference.
On the other hand the new science and technology depend on large number of people ready to pay for them. Things like starlink, new CPUs, would be impossible with smaller population. But if the population was larger, we would already have floating cities increasing carbon capture in sea, desalination plants irrigating large parts of sahara, system of balloons, solar updraft towers and satellites controlling the local climate.
If you are from a rich country, not having children is doubly bad, because you have all the resources to give these kids better education. The world would have been a much better place if people from western countries were immigrating to the rest of the world bringing their money and their knowledge of how to build a better society, but instead of that the rich countries are making easy for smart and entrepreneurial people to immigrate there leaving us perpetually underdeveloped. (When most of the people who were exposed to western values, and had good education immigrate, there is not enough power remaining to fight with those who want to build medieval dictatorship).
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.
And it's very easy to fix your problem. Just move to a small town.
HN doesn't have an unwritten rule about expressing emotions, and the person you're responding to didn't dodge any question. Given that the submission is about happiness, it's very much on topic to discuss children and happiness.
What do we need to develop/implement in order to support a population of 10B? 100B? 1T?? At some point, routine space travel needs to come into play. 100x-to-100000x improvement in the efficiency of our energy capture/storage/distribution technology. Terraforming or other world-modification technology. At 10-100 trillion population, interstellar travel and communication. At 100+ trillion population, we need to invent stuff that isn’t even in science fiction yet.
I find all this agonizing over how to keep this tiny ball of mud habitable to be... less than ambitious.
I find your comment, and your subsequent replies, exemplifies the headline of the submission quite well:
>The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness
Two comments. First, within evolution (true, a brutal and inhumane theory), the point of life is exactly to survive and reproduce. It is literally unnatural to deliberately choose to not have children (unless you don't believe in evolution).
Second, I presume that you don't mean for this to be taken to the point of nobody having children, that is, to the extinction of the human race. I get the impression that some eco-types think that would be a good thing; I deeply disagree.
Something's being natural or unnatural has no bearing on whether it is right or wrong. I assume that when the OP says "we can no longer justify" they are making a moral claim, which means that saying it's "unnatural" to not reproduce is failing to be relevant.
Also note that my argument was trying to argue within someone else's viewpoint, and it's not a viewpoint that I agree with.
Plus there's an assumption we won't figure out climate change. Why assume that kid will be as bad for the environment as you?
First, having a child does not require you to travel more, get a bigger house, keep it warmer or cooler, buy non-second-hand clothes or do anything else with a significant carbon footprint beyond grocery shopping (which admittedly has a nontrivial footprint). It's not until adulthood that they'll really start to have a full fledged carbon footprint of their own.
Second, social animals that we are, a person's net total impact on the carbon footprints of others can be much larger than that person's individual, "direct" footprint. Raise your kid the right way and their footprint could, in a very real sense, be negative.
Third, there are some indications that the point in the future where we either solve climate change or fail catastrophically is near enough that it may have past before your kid reaches that damaging, adult phase.
Your kid would live to see the impacts of climate change, though. If we as a society would just put a price on carbon emissions and reimburse the externalized costs through a fee & dividend system, even that would not be a problem (in theory) because your kid would be compensated financially for any climate-change-induced hardship.
I also wonder if we’re no longer properly teaching evolution in school. There are a lot of key concepts people are missing.
Don't try to make out like your choice to have a child is because you want to 'spread happiness'.
It's a biological imperative to perpetuate your genetic code and is the single most selfish and egotistical thing you can do with your life.
Don't delude yourself that it is anything different than any other species procreating.
Society is entirely composed of people who were given birth to. I don’t see how the very foundation of humanity (and all life on earth) could be viewed as “selfish”. You’re literally sustaining the human race.
While true, that's not the reason people reproduce.
Most people are only truly concerned with their own offspring and their own bloodline.
That everybody in the world is primarily focused on their own legacy but just happens to contribute to the numbers of our species as a whole is an evolutionary mechanic, not a human one.
And I wasn't so much casting a moral judgement on the selfishness of the act. I was just pointing it out as a selfish act as in, it is done primarily for you and your genes whether you realise or not. You are no different than any other mammal in this regard.
(I'm referring to the collective 'you' here, not you specifically.)
That's just life and evolution. I'm not admonishing anyone for it, but I can't accept the idea that having children is somehow an altruistic act done to spread the concept of happiness when the rest of the natural world and mounds of empirical data on the study of evolution and biology screams otherwise.
That makes no sense whatsoever.
You are a mammal. You will mate and reproduce to ensure the survival of your own genes. Those are your instinctual drives. This also strokes the ego if you're successful. You get to see little versions of the your own genetics populating the world.
Some of us choose not to participate in this willingly, others will delude themselves into thinking they are somehow separate from the rest of nature in terms of their biological drives.
> Having children bestows the incomparable gift of life on other people (your children). Bestowing that gift is the part of having children that makes someone happy. It's not a self centered happiness; the day-to-day of raising children is frequently miserable.
They're not saying they're making the world a better place, they're saying that the person they gave birth to would be happy to be alive and that happiness gives joy to the parent (in addition to satisfying base survival needs I suppose).
> Some of us choose not to participate in this willingly, others will delude themselves into thinking they are somehow separate from the rest of nature in terms of their biological drives.
I don't see anyone deluding themselves other than the people who think not having children is a moral position to take. It's a valid personal choice but nothing more.
That's debatable, honestly. You can't possibly know the child will be happy to be alive or will live a life without suffering, it's a gamble.
Most people alive on Earth today I would wager experience suffering more than they do happiness.
> happiness gives joy to the parent
Not denying that, but you can't deny that that is a selfish thing, wanting to bestow joy to yourself.
Don't wince in disgust at the word 'selfish'. People do selfish things all the time for mere survival. Again, I wouldn't admonish anyone for it.
> I don't see anyone deluding themselves other than the people who think not having children is a moral position to take
I never said anything of the sort.
It's only selfish if you disregard other people and/or hurt them in the process of enjoying yourself. There's nothing selfish about bestowing joy on yourself if it's also a net positive for everyone else.
I don't think your use of the world "selfish" in this debate (with me or the other commenters) has helped your argument. It implies something negative where having children is going to be viewed subjectively and objectively positive by most people. Maybe a better term would be satisfying? That covers that the individual parent benefits but also doesn't imply that having children is hurting others.
I certainly wouldn't say satisfying, because you are deliberately ignoring any negative impacts of having children and focusing only on the positives. You say so yourself above.
I don't know if you agree that there can sometimes be negative consequences but you're opting not to speak of them to spare the feelings of parents (perhaps including yourself) or whether you genuinely believe that child birth has no negative consequences on other people or society, ever.
I'd say that's debatable at best. It depends entirely on where you live and what the impact of that child is on society and the environment.
A child's immense carbon footprint throughout life is a good example of how a child being born can be detrimental to the ecosystems we all depend on. That will remain true until (if we ever do) find a way to reduce our carbon footprints to zero or negative and in my opinion, is a reason to limit the number of children you have.
Two kids seems like a good compromise. More than that and you are adding to the problem. 'Be fruitful and multiply' does not serve our species as a mantra as well as it once did.
It really hasn't, it has merely been updated, and yet people like yourself deliberately ignore the revisions and always focus on the obsolete original argument from the 1700's.
The only thing that has been debunked was Malthus prediction that human populations grow exponentially whereas the food production grows at an arithmetic rate. That hasn't proven true because we produce more than enough food for everyone (yet people are still hungry), but population it still continues to grow in a way we cannot accommodate even now for a variety of reasons.
Besides, the main thing people disliked about Malthus's initial prediction was not that it simply suggested limiting population growth (although the religious types certainly balked at this), but rather what his predictions implied in terms of future solutions to the problem; i.e. euthanasia, eugenics and mandatory sterilisations.
They are the main reasons people don't like to entertain the idea of population control, which is fair enough; but they are ideological arguments against population control, not practical ones.
I'd suggest reading more about this though, because I think you've just picked up on the 'Malthus was debunked' soundbite that people like to repeat ad nauseaum without really understanding the debate around it and how it has evolved into the modern era.
The peak population numbers provided by the UN that supposedly 'debunked' this theory have been repeatedly updated and revised because they don't hold. Even the idea of a 'peak' population is one that is not univerally accepted as it only factors in prosperity among developed nations leading to lower birth rates. It does nothing to account for the mantra many religions have of 'be fruitful and multiply'.
The religious are going to be primary drivers of population growth going forward while secular societies are those that are falling below replacement rates for births.
It was originally supposed to peak at 9 billion. Then it was revised to 11 billion. Then 13 billion. Now it sits somewhere around 15 billion because the models used to estimate the peak population numbers are imperfect and do not take into account all variables.
Besides, Malthusianism has nothing to do with the point of my post, which is that we are slowly poisoning the ecosystems we depend on because we consume and waste too much.
That is an entirely separate issue to raw population numbers and is an issue of poor waste management, over-consumption spurred by a an addiction to perpetual growth (in capitalist terms) and ineffective logistics.
The main problem isn't how many people we have, that's just an amplifier of other problems. The main problem we have is one of greed and apathy and an insistence on infinite growth on a planet with finite resources.
You've changed the topic of conversation into something else to avoid addressing my point.
Some info:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/01/09/thom...
https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-26-2-t...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43735423?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
You said:
> There's a lot more to life than minimizing carbon footprint in the immediate term.
Which is a profoundly selfish (yes, selfish, I'll stand by that) sentiment given the shit state our global ecosystems are in as a direct result of our wasteful, greedy culture and highly self-centred, amoral economic model.
If you gave a single shit about the future of the species (as well as other species) instead of just your own DNA you would be trying to minimise your footprint every day.
A relevant quote from National Geographic:
The number of people does matter, of course.
But how people consume resources matters a lot more. Some of us leave much bigger footprints than others. The central challenge for the future of people and the planet is how to raise more of us out of poverty—the slum dwellers in Delhi, the subsistence farmers in Rwanda—while reducing the impact each of us has on the planet.
The population question has not been answered, it has merely evolved and expanded. Anyone suggesting otherwise is deliberately trying to shut down debate.
The first world is going to be in an actual crisis (not a theoretical future one) if we don't increase the reproduction rate. Look at what is happening in Japan with massive labor shortages, too many elderly to take care of, broken economy...
> The central challenge for the future of people and the planet is how to raise more of us out of poverty—the slum dwellers in Delhi, the subsistence farmers in Rwanda—while reducing the impact each of us has on the planet.
The central challenge to every individual is to survive and reproduce. People know this at a very intrinsic level. Before you can worry about people halfway across the world, you need to be able to eat, put a roof over your head, have children (if you want them -- most do) and support them.
Humanity is not a centrally planned, intelligently designed organism. It's emergent behavior from individuals following their genetic will to participate in evolution.
And, aside from that, you're just plain wrong.
Convincing argument.
What's yours, beyond a sense of disgust at the suggestion that you are still just an animal; and a desire to be seen as a paragon of virtue because you had sex and made little versions of yourself?