Don't give up on having kids because of climate change

Having kids has always been a leap of faith. Does anyone think it's "scarier" to have kids now than it was during the Depression, WW2, AIDS epidemic, Cold War, post-9/11, etc?

If your philosophy includes not having kids, then your philosophy will go away on its own in a few decades. Whatever the world will look like 20-50 years from now, it will exclude those people and ideas who opted out of life.

On one hand, it's those people's problems. On the other hand, as someone living in the West, I am very much "in the same boat" with these people. I suspect the danger to our the kids 20-50 years from now will be consequences of demographic decline much more than climate change.

This feels sinister. Why is the idea that the best thing you can do for the future is to die out so popular? If you wanted to destroy a people/country/humanity, you'd work hard to spread the idea of not having kids. So who's doing this?

I would agree though that likely climate change is used as a virtue signal for people whom already decided to not have children for other reasons.

Such as economical ones. It's expensive to raise children but more importantly, the quality of life of those children is in strong decline, economically speaking.

High debt. Low job security. Low and stagnant wages. Unaffordable housing. Needing to compete with the entire world. High speed of change. Political instability. Accelerating inequality.

I imagine these to be important reasons. The general feeling that younger generations have it worse, with things getting ever worse, and never better. We lost our humanity, our economic system is beyond repair.

Kids aren’t in my present life plan (I’m too young atm) but I can already see that the biggest barrier to kids in my future right now is just the extreme wealth inequality and rising costs of having children. Compound that with an inevitable climate migration that will shift the balance of wealth in the USA, and you’re likely to see greater difficulties for new middle-income families (who are, as the author notes, still among the most privileged on the planet).

Furthermore, the real effects of climate change that our children are likely to have great difficulties with, in my mind, are ecological destruction and the eradication of micro-ecosystems leading to global calamity with food. I feel, without much evidence to support it, that we’re likely to see a spectrum of symptoms that lead to targeted devastation and mass-death of various species. It’s not any one of those things, it’s everything all at once.

Now, I love the argument that this all is not a reason to not bring in kids because we will need bright, young minds to dream and live futures that we won’t get to have. And that gives me hope, which is something we should all allow ourselves to have.

> But it won’t cause the collapse of civilization. It won’t kill everyone.

The author seems to think that as long as everything isn't completely leveled, nobody should be shy about bringing children into the world. I disagree. The middle is being excluded here.

> Life in the First World will continue, with worse weather and maybe a weaker economy, but more or less the same as always.

Not in my part of the first world. Everything has changed for the worse, and all signs point to more extreme problems in the future.

> One way to think of this is to notice that we’ve already gotten about 25-30% of the global warming we’re likely to see by 2100.

Which is terrifying.

From a selfish angle (since that seems to be the natural state of humans), you will be able to waste more while in aggregate doing less damage to the environment. Even as someone who tries to care about not destroying the environment too badly, that sounds pretty awesome.

Carbon removal is allegedly 1000$/Tons and prototype work for 500$/tons (i did not check this, i'll trust him). And then he add "There seems to be a Moore’s Law for this kind of thing, and when people calculate it out it looks like it’s going to get cheaper pretty quickly". Yeah, no, sorry, this is a weird take. It's like saying we have Moore's law for Carnot machines when our 10% efficient motor went to 20% efficiency and then 40%. Yes, looked like moore's law. But we do have physic constraints, and i think our best gas plant have a theorical efficiency of 55 to 60% max, and ICE motors are still around 30%, even for the best cars. When it's only size constraints, we can make Moore's law last for a while, but energetic and chemical constraints, you can have one or two breakthrough - and we had that historically- but you can't plot those breakthrough on a notebook chart.

Agree with some of his other points, also i guess the main reason not to have kids is economical.

But please, don't talk about climate drift solutions if you don't have studied the question. Physic is hard. I should know i failed and had to settle as a software engineer :)

I guess it makes more sense when you realize the poll was mostly late teens and young adults. People who are yet to experience life as "adults" know it, and are citing idealistic reasons, rather than more realistic ones.

1. climate change is an existential threat to humanity

2. having one or more children is a good thing

If you believe one, you need to yield on the other. The article yields on (1) to support (2).

The thing is that (2) faces headwinds that have nothing to do with climate, namely economics. It's insanely expensive to have children. Not just the actual out-of-pocket, but also the opportunity costs, not to mention the emotional toll if the marriage becomes unstable.

Then there's the toll on children raised by people other than their parents due to the horrendous economics of both parents being at work.

So in this sense, the climate crisis as broadly defined, has a finite amount of room to run. Economics acts to cap births in developed economies. The rest of the world eventually catches up. Before you know it having a couple of kids has become a status symbol.

If you have a child, the first thing you want is that the child is safe and healthy.

And you start to think what can you do better and what should change in the world so that your kid/baby has it better.

So in the end, if just 50% of the scenarios of climate change are true, you will change your behavior.

It's the same with eating candy or other unhealthy stuff. You will stop eating it because you want to show your kid/baby what is healthier for her/him.

So I would say we need more kids in the world if we want to have a better future.

This logic is suspect -- the problem is that the effects aren't linear with respect to temperature increase. I agree we'll get through it as a species, and generally agree with the title, but we have no idea what the costs will be.

I made an admittedly somewhat selfish choice, but one that I knew I would be satisfied with, to pursue a specific set of life goals and to avoid things which would impede or redirect me from those goals. While it's certainly true that many people throughout history have had children and mostly ignored them, I could never do that. If I did somehow end up having children, I would want to be a good parent and actively involved in their lives and their education, which would mean giving up on my other life goals. So, I decided I would not have children.

Many of my friends have children, and many others do not. These things come up in conversation and the same kind of thinking seems to dominate, and we are all the same generation (Xennials/older Millennials). Everybody made their choice off the basis of what their goals in life were, with the next most important factor generally being economics. Nobody was concerned with whether climate change presented an existential crisis that they wouldn't want to bring children into... we're humans after all, and we rely on getting better over time as each generation discovers new knowledge built on top of the past.

Given all that, I feel like this article is an argument against a straw man.

There’s always a reason for people with a negative outlook to choose not to have kids.

And that’s fine as parenting is an extremely personal choice.

It gets a bit annoying with use of the word “breeder” and stupid articles lauding #childfree and whatnot. But that’s easy for me to avoid along with other social media stupidity.

I don’t think these are rational decisions so I stopped trying to discuss with rational bases (eg, people are creative and produce more than they consume).

Kidding aside, people don't have kids in developed world because it is costly to create a child that would operate in a competitive urban environment with high home prices, nurseries, healthcare, unstable job market, pandemics and cut throat competition. No body wants to bring kids just to see themselves and their kids struggle, millennials can barely offered a house.

Modern day leaders and thinkers don't seem to offer a sensible pragmatic solution to the major issues facing humanity.

This is really all about a crisis of confidence in political leadership at its core. Its also pretty rational and the correct thing to do is to address that leadership deficit rather than trying to convince people they're thinking about it wrong.

That's the is-ought fallacy. That people did it before doesn't make it fine. Or survivorship bias - you were lucky, but that doesn't negate the risk.

> If you’re not one of [antinatalists], I think the quality-of-life argument for not having kids now is pretty weak.

Again, what about those who think now, as well as under some, not even all conditions?

> that’s not really the relevant timeframe for actually stabilizing the climate, given that we have this decade to cut emissions in half.

That actually makes sense until you ask the question: what if we faill or struggle? Then the lowered population could really come in handy.

This same argument also neutralizes the voting problem: your child won't have the right to vote in the next decade. Even in the longer term, who is going to guarantee that the child will vote for reduced emissions?

I'm a fan of astral codex ten, but I had the impression that the usual writing has less blind spots.

The author's arguments that the "First World" is somehow largely insulated from climate change are not very convincing. For example:

> But so far, the droughts haven’t been bad enough that California stopped golf courses from watering their massive lawns to keep them perfectly green every day. So far, California has continued using 5.3 million acre-feet per year - more than enough water for every residential building in the state - to farm alfalfa. Alfalfa gets used to feed cows, and the beef industry lobby is very powerful, and so far California has preferred to ask citizens to conserve water rather than make the beef industry stop growing water-hungry alfalfa plants. But if anyone was actually dying of thirst, or even having enough trouble getting water that they might be motivated to vote out some politician over it, the government could redirect the alfalfa water, or the golf course water, or any of a thousand other things like this, and everyone would have more than enough. You see this everywhere - lots of resources are being wasted for stupid political reasons. If the political calculus ever changed - as it will, if these problems ever start inconveniencing privileged First World citizens - then we can stop wasting the resources, and use them to address the symptoms of climate change instead.

Basically, the author's argument boils down to "it can't be that bad if people in the First World don't feel it, and once they do, somehow the problems will quickly be fixed".

If that's the case though, I wonder why my friends and family back in the states keep complaining to me about the empty shelves, Amazon Prime delays, etc. Shouldn't fixing the symptoms of today's strained supply chain have been an easy task compared to climate change?

1) Being a parent was the absolutely best thing that I've ever done and experienced. Nothing IMO, can compare to this.

2) Climate change was not (ever) a consideration for us in the late 90s. Though the climate wasn't that great back then (fairly hot preceeding decade, a few years before the pause).

3) Economics were definitely a consideration. I was making good income at my job, my wife was enjoying her life working at a museum. We could easily live on what I made alone (though not what she made alone). Additionally, we live(d) in a LCOL area, compared to the coasts.

Honestly, the LCOL areas are IMO a much better place to consider raising a family anyway, from an economic viewpoint. Some LCOL areas aren't great from a security or environment standpoint, due to years/decades of pollution and terrible politics. But in this day and age you can choose where you want to be. There is nothing special about the coasts, and much to be gained by not living there.

All this said, there are many valid reasons for not wanting to become a parent. But climate change isn't one of them. For the simple reason that, despite protestations of many, the climate has always changed, and humans have either adapted to these changes, or died out.

I recall from middle school biology, a definition of adaptation to an environment given. When a species can reproduce in its environment, it is said to have adapted to it. This has quite a bit loaded into this definition that is not spelled out in detail, but the point remains that you need to have line of sight to food, shelter, security, etc. in order to be able to consider procreating.

Some points about population collapse are worth noting. When a society fails to produce sufficient children such that it can sustain itself and its quality of life, it eventually reaches a point where there are too few young people to replenish what you lose. When that occurs, you get something similar to what we see today, in terms of insufficient number of workers available to work.

That case could be "fixed" by improving the healthcare, compensation, and social security nets right now, but in the future, with insufficient offspring, no amount of additional incentive to work, will create new workers for you.

Put another less sympathetic way, not having kids because of irrational reasons is an automatic Darwin Award nomination. It is species level self-own. An L.

The gene pool only propagates the winners of adaptation. So if you don't adapt, i.e. reproduce, your genes are not going to be in the gene pool. Which, is the literal definition of the Darwin award.

Have kids. Its worth it. Every last second of it.

All of this not even taking into account the cost of raising kids. If families with both parents making 6 figures a year have this much stress and difficulty, how about those who are making minimum wage or slightly higher than minimum wage?

Instead of simply asking young people to have kids, how about improving conditions in society so young people will voluntarily have kids? How about having sane immigration policies (and not being racist and xenophobic) so countries like Japan can at least slow down population decline?

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.