Large percentage fear having children because of climate crisis
thehill.com
thehill.com
The original paper is here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3918955
The survey is specifically about climate change. If I wanted to know why people are fearing having children, i'd do a survey where people rank fears for that so we could see where climate change ranks, say, as compared to economics.
I have friends and family in a number of the countries surveyed in this paper and I rarely hear about climate change as the reason for fearing having children, usually it is economics.
This is not to say climate change isn't a problem, but I dont think this title accurately represents the subject.
Most people don’t care much about climate
Huge sums of money have been spent in an effort to will into existence a mass social movement to tackle climate change, and it basically hasn’t worked. You can get people out to a march, but the people who come are all-purpose leftist activists, which is why you have incredible trouble imposing message discipline and preventing people from showing up with “Free Palestine” and “Defund Police” signs.
And you see it in the polling. Reuters did a survey recently that showed 69% of Americans say the United States should take “aggressive” action to combat climate change, but only 34% would be willing to pay $100 more per year in taxes to achieve that goal. A hundred bucks is not a lot of money. People spend that on Halloween decorations. A nice dinner date could cost you more than that. If you’re buying a car, the dealer tries to upsell you on fancy floor mats that cost more than $100.
Years ago, I used to be a real carbon-pricing head. It seemed (and still does) like an elegant, important solution to a major problem. Leftists would yell at me that this was too much of a neoliberal, market-oriented thing. And they’ve completely won the argument over a carbon tax — everyone agrees that imposing a really stiff carbon price is just not in the cards.
There are companies like Project Vesta that accept donations for carbon capture and storage: https://www.projectvesta.org/, but I don't see them overwhelmed with interest. The most popular vehicles sold to individuals in the United States today are pickup trucks. Nuclear energy is spectacular for the climate but politically radioactive. Vegetarianism, or even just meat-consumption reduction, is a very minority pursuit.
It's hard to square many of these facts with true, widespread concern about climate change.
(Note that I'm not arguing that many of the cited trends are good or desirable: but it is important to understand something before critique.)
Although it's possible the people not willing to pay extra taxes might have a different reason. Like maybe they don't trust the government to spend it for the stated purpose, or use it efficiently.
How do you measure how much it works? From 2005-2018, the US, with no carbon pricing, reduced CO2 emissions per GDP by 45% and the Euro Area reduced it by 52%. So is your claim that the 7% percentage points extra over 13 years is what Carbon pricing achieved for the EU? E.g. a gain of 0.5% per year? At this rate, after 100 years you would have achieved a reduction that is 65% better than the what the US would achieve without carbon pricing.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?locat...
Of course in absolute terms, the US increased efficiency more over the same period (but I think percent change is more relevant, as the US started with a higher base).
At the same time, the EU is facing very high electricity bills, there was a backlash at further increase in gas taxes in France, and the EU is straining to push this agenda further. Meanwhile there are electrical outages in China forcing China to rollback its coal reduction targets.
So what I see is a lot of pain and political capital expended for very small gains in terms of CO2/GDP. If you have a different conclusion, then I'd love to see your methodology and the numbers you are coming up with to measure how effective this is.
There is a set, yearly decreasing amount of emission rights in circulation so it's fairly well quantified.
You can argue that the set rate is too lax, but the current rates are quite steep and it seems obvious that it's having an effect.
If there is no difference in emissions between a nation that has no carbon pricing and a nation that does, then how do you measure the effect of carbon pricing?
If there is only a small difference -- a .5% change per year -- between a nation that has no carbon pricing and one that does -- then how can you argue that the effect of carbon pricing is more than a very slight increase in efficiency?
The central idea of the european carbon pricing system is NOT that we set a price for carbon and hope that it works to decrease emissions.
Instead, we set a certain amount of emissions per year that we allow, and auction the emission rights. And there is a set rate of relative decrease in the annual tonnage of floated emission rights. The annual decrease is currently 2.2%, which is a steepening compared to the pre-2021 1.7%. [1]
So, as long as the mechanism is working (and it is), it makes limited sense to talk about measuring how much emissions happened under the emission trading scheme, since that's a set parameter assigned by political decisionmaking. [2]
But a better critique / caveat about the system is that not everything is covered by the emission trading system. Some big sectors, eg transport, have emission reductions enacted by other mechanisms in more traditional ways.
To tackle your argument of "a lot of pain and political capital expended for very small gains in terms of CO2/GDP" - this is I feel a tangent and feels a bit like moving the goalposts and it would be hard to productively debate this - my opinion is that the gains are big, not only because we've effectively reducing emissions today, but also because we have a robust system for the years to come that we know can cap emissions, steered by the democratic process. You also brought up efficiency in your later comment. My main argument is not really efficiency, although economists do usually tend to think that these kinds of emission auction systems do shine in department too. Efficiency and pain (aka fairness) are often in opposing cups of the scale.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/clima/eu-action/eu-emissions-trading-sy...
[2] Of course there are second order issues, like fraud, etc that merit discussion. But these aren't being ignored either.
No, this is my point.
Look, this is a political process. Just like the law that caps deficits to be less than 3% of GDP, which is ignored when there is some political desire to have bigger deficits.
These are political things that do respond to pressure as to whether they will be enforced. So when the Yellow vests threatened to bring down the French govt, the government backed off, precisely because they weren't prepared to pay the political cost.
So what matters is not the promise to do X, but actually doing X, right? And X is measured in total emissions. There is little benefit in saying "90% of the economy is subject to the system and we exempt the 10% where it would be too painful to meet."
So after all the promises and exemptions, at the end of the day you have some reduction in CO2. If that reduction ends up being not much different than the same reduction in other large industrial economies that didn't go through the whole cap system, then what reasonable claim can you make about the cap system making a difference?
We expect, just with increasing technology, that CO2 efficiency will increase. Just as you go from burning trees for firewood to coal to oil to natural gas to gas combined with hydro, etc, you are switching to more efficient energy sources. But everyone is doing that, because more efficient energy sources are cheaper.
The difference will be when the allotments really start to bite - at which point it will be political pressure, and not the agreement itself, that will decide whether these caps will be respected or whether they will be like the deficit caps. So the only way to determine what difference you are actually making is to look at total economy emissions and compare that to nations like the US that don't bother with any caps. If those situations are indistinguishable in terms of CO2 reductions, then I don't see the benefit of spending all this money in fees for carbon pricing. Do you? Lots of other economies are not spending these fees and they are getting the same reductions.
The reason why I am saying this is that I don't like these types of micro-management free market solutions for a nation's energy policy. People don't care where their electricity comes from. If the government wants clean electricity, they should build 100 nuclear reactors, and have 100% clean electricity. Then they can give choices to people to use electric cars that are basically free to power or gas cars if they really need the gas car. And you can electrify the rail system and public transit, at a subsidy, but then let people fly planes without subsidies if they want to do that as well. This way you are solving the problem directly and giving people more choices and more freedom. You are not pushing the problems of a nation's power sources onto individual businesses or end consumers and then constantly taxing them to use dim light bulbs or whatnot. There are much simpler ways you can accomplish much more. But there is something in the Euro spirit that wants Germany to buy more gas from Russia and shut down its nuclear plant but have lots of little micromanagement of individual consumer choices by slapping surcharges on everything and banning random things. Maybe this is done so end users can feel like they are saving the planet by participating in the struggle, as opposed to having the government provide the entire economy with clean, abundant electricity at very low cost. The whole thing has an air of theater to me.
And like I described in my comment, the reduction rate of was just recently increased in the EU mechanism, but this is not visible in the historical numbers yet.
And re comparing to total economy emissions of the US, let's not forget how much bigger those are in the US than in the EU, more than double. The US has a lot more low hanging fruit to pick.
This also means that development of sustainable alternatives is often slowed, as they will cost more at first, even if they happen to end up being less expensive in the long run (which is unlikely to be true in all cases, but which could potentially be true in a few specific scenarios).
But what are the alternatives? Simply outlawing burning of gasoline effective on some future date will be no more equitable.
Putting a strict quota system on companies would also cause prices to rise and be unequitable to.
I don't see any realistically implementable system that does not potentially cause prices to rise, and obviously rising prices on most goods disproportionately affects lower income people.
I don't think that's true.
> Huge sums of money have been spent in an effort to will into existence a mass social movement to tackle climate change, and it basically hasn’t worked.
I think it has worked. Numbers show overwhelmingly around the world people believe the science (even in extreme denier countries like Indonesia they number under 20%), and as your own quoted numbers show, people do want change.
> You can get people out to a march, but the people who come are all-purpose leftist activists, which is why you have incredible trouble imposing message discipline and preventing people from showing up with “Free Palestine” and “Defund Police” signs.
Most people don't go to "rallies" because they don't see them as having a significant benefit, and they've got other things to do. It doesn't mean they don't support action. Too few people showing up to rallies, or too many "defund the police" signs at them is not the reason really significant action on climate has not happened.
I don't buy the cost argument either -- costly, controversial and unpopular policies and legislation have been implemented in countries around the world with far less support than this. Democratic countries have been dragged into wars of aggression. Banks have been bailed out after causing economic crashes and destroying peoples' housing assets. Immigration policies are widely unpopular among many western countries. The list goes on. The ruling class has not had a problem pushing through their horrendously costly and unpopular agenda before, yet they're telling us the greatest problem facing humanity and their singular most important issue has somehow this one time been derailed by the selfishness of the commoners (or even more hilariously, the boogeyman all-powerful unemployed coal miner in West Virginia who doesn't believe the science and is usually a KKK member, a Nazi, perhaps a Russian agent as well, and is somehow pulling the strings of most politicians from both main political parties)
Garbage. It's their usual lies and divisiveness. Pretend to be battling valiantly and working themselves to the bone to solve this problem that they don't actually want solved, and blame your neighbor for their faux failures.
People need to stop the singular focus on this minority of boogeymen as though they somehow have the power to hold everyone to ransom and the only way to make progress is to reason, plead, or bully them until 100% of them think exactly the same we do. And focus on the real problem which means holding the ruling class to account. And yes, that is likely going to require some very difficult reflection of "your team" and very uncomfortable realization that they have repeatedly promised change and repeatedly failed to deliver it over the decades despite at many times having strong mandates in terms of electoral victories and holding positions of power to make changes if they actually wanted. And make bad, unpopular, and costly changes they did many times, all the while largely ignoring the problem they were repeatedly calling the greatest threat facing humanity.
"believe the science" =/= "a mass social movement to tackle climate change"
>Democratic countries have been dragged into wars of aggression
imminent threat of terrorism is a powerful motivator. abstract threat of lifestyle change in a few decades isn't.
>Banks have been bailed out after causing economic crashes and destroying peoples' housing assets
1. the alternative would be an even worse recession, so it was the lesser of two evils.
2. imminent threat vs abstract future threat (see above)
3. what housing assets were "destroyed"? Did the recession set people's houses on fire? Sure, they caused housing prices to tank, but they were inflated in the first place.
>Immigration policies are widely unpopular among many western countries.
source?
A "social movement", going to "rallies" with the correct signs, is not going to tackle climate change. There is more than enough will for significant political action and has been for a some time. I repeat, the enemy is not your redneck boogyman somehow orchestrating everything you think is going wrong with the world, it is your politicians who have repeatedly promised you just need to elect them to solve your problems while never having the slightest intention of doing so.
> imminent threat of terrorism is a powerful motivator.
There wasn't an imminent threat of terrorism from any of the many recent catastrophic wars and interventions around the middle east and north africa. Fewer people bought that line than want action on climate change.
> abstract threat of lifestyle change in a few decades isn't.
Lots of people think we have an imminent threat from climate change. Do you have a source for the claim that more people believed the lies that Iraq posed an imminent threat of terrorism?
> 1. the alternative would be an even worse recession, so it was the lesser of two evils.
That was the claim of course by the politicians who are owned by banks (e.g., https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/15/wiki-o15.html). Most likely a lie, certainly the actual response implemented was costly unpopular and terrible compared to what could have been done.
And I just listed a few examples of cases where politicians have no problems implementing costly unpopular agenda regardless of what the people want. It was not supposed to be a scientific exact same situation, this is missing the point.
> source?
Well it's common knowledge. Again this is missing the point, don't worry if you don't know the exact details of all the examples or they don't match 100% exactly with climate change. They're just examples of unpoular costly things politicians do all the time. It's not hard to come up with them.
But if you're interested these were among the first 4 links on google
https://comparativemigrationstudies.springeropen.com/article...
"Over the past three decades, research on immigration policy-making has flourished. To explain why so-called ‘Western liberal democracies’ have liberalized immigration despite popular demands for restriction, scholars have pointed at the democratic character of these states. Freeman (1995) argued that immigration policy-making in democracies follows the pattern of ‘client politics’ because the costs of immigration are diffused among the entire electorate, while benefits are concentrated within a small pool of entrepreneurs."
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publicat...
"To begin with, the very fact of immigration creates a central puzzle for democratic theory: For several decades, most Western countries have had high and rising levels of immigration even though a majority of their populations consistently want immigration to stabilize or decrease. This public sentiment has been apparent since the early 1960s, when survey researchers first began to investigate the question of immigration. " [and actual survey numbers follow in table 1]
I don't buy the argument. When France increased the price of gas, they got nationwide "yellow vest" protests that left 11 people dead. In other words, politicians are stalling on the climate change because actually tackling it is a widely unpopular move.
If people say they want a cleaner Earth, but qualify it with "as long as fuel prices don't rise," then they have made their priorities known. Politicians are merely following it.
Regressive consumer fuel taxes are a terrible way to fight climate change. Fairly obvious that wasn't it. That was a lie they went to to try get these unpopular taxes though because they know climate change is in fact quite a popular cause.
The reality is it's just more of the same governments telling you they're desperately trying to fight climate change and sadly being thwarted at the last minute by these violent racist nazis. You really have to stop believing that claptrap and start holding your failed politicians to account. They are the problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests
While some commentators have claimed that the movement was a backlash to policies meant to combat climate change,[115][116] a communique released by the movement calls for a "real ecological policy", including fuel and kerosene taxes for ships and airplanes, but objects to policies like the gas tax that hit the poor and working class most heavily.[117][118]
Why? A fuel tax is not inherently regressive - it gives the correct incentive, because a gallon of gas not burned is a gallon of gas not burned. It's "regressive" in the sense that poor people are hit harder, and I agree that the French government could have handled it better (well, obvious in hindsight), but there are other policies to help the poor while maintaining the fuel tax.
Honestly, I find these "we're actually for the environment" argument suspicious - isn't it rather convenient that the things they want taxed are exactly what they aren't (directly) buying?
As it stands now, addressing the climate will require radical policies. Some of them will hit the rich. Many of them will hit the poor harder, simply because they are the most vulnerable, whenever anything changes. There's no such thing as a painless easy fix, held back by evil politicians.
Look, you can believe the powerful ruling class who have a long and celebrated tradition of implementing terrible, costly, unpopular agenda that helps them and their wealthy owners when they say they can't possibly do anything about climate change because in this one particular instance they suddenly care about the slightest bit of disagreement and oh what a shame the big energy companies won't have to pay for externalities from the product they profit from, this is all the fault of your violent nazi terrorist neighbor go get mad at him.
But that's just denial of evidence and reality on par with denial of climate science, and I assure you that will not help things get done about it.
"Your team" is not acting in your interests. I know this is incredibly difficult to come to terms with and accept. It feels much better to be valiantly side by side with the smooth talkers and celebrities and wonderful people battling the nazi Russians. But that's just not what's really going on here.
Right, but that's going to do far more to signal support than people collectively answering "strongly agree" on surveys. I also think that "aggressive action on climate change" means different things to different people, so 69% answering "yes" doesn't mean there's 69% would support a particular policy. See also: brexit vote.
>There wasn't an imminent threat of terrorism from any of the many recent catastrophic wars and interventions around the middle east and north africa. Fewer people bought that line than want action on climate change.
Whether there was actually an imminent threat is irrelevant, only whether if there were perceived imminent threat. According to wikipedia the afghan was had 88% backing in the US[1] and the iraq war had 59% backing[2].
>Lots of people think we have an imminent threat from climate change.
1. please quantify "lots of people".
2. If al-qaeda pulls off another attack you can easily blame them for it, whereas having one more hurricane in a year is far more ambiguous.
3. a war can plausibly stop the terrorist threat, whereas the same can't be said for implementing climate policies
>Do you have a source for the claim that more people believed the lies that Iraq posed an imminent threat of terrorism?
"This same poll showed that a majority believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but did not expect UN inspectors to find them"[2]
>That was the claim of course by the politicians who are owned by banks (e.g., https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/15/wiki-o15.html). Most likely a lie, certainly the actual response implemented was costly unpopular and terrible compared to what could have been done.
It was widely supported by economists: https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/bailouts-banks-and-automa...
>And I just listed a few examples of cases where politicians have no problems implementing costly unpopular agenda regardless of what the people want. It was not supposed to be a scientific exact same situation, this is missing the point.
unpopular? the bailouts had 57% public support
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2008/09/23/57-of-public...
>Well it's common knowledge.
Sorry but it's impossible to take someone's "common claim" at face value, due to the presence of filter bubbles. Looking at the subsequent paragraphs, it doesn't even look like you had a different idea of "Immigration policies" than I did, so it was a good idea to get clarification before arguing.
>But if you're interested these were among the first 4 links on google
The first article you quoted is just a claim from another paper, which I can't be bothered to retrieve. It also has some case studies, but they were for morocco and tunisia, so applying that to the US is tenuous. The second is much better, so I'll grant that unpopular measures do sometimes get passed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001–2021)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_in_the_United_S...
The rest of this again is really getting bogged down into details that aren't important. My examples are valid ones of costly and/or unpopular agenda being enacted. Politicians and media/propaganda corporations have a common bully word to attack people who disagree with their bad unpopular agendas - "populist". Surely you've heard that frequently.
Is it that hard to to imagine that most people are much more afraid of terrorists than slowly rising sea levels/temperatures? This isn't supposed to be an argument that terrorists are actually more dangerous than global warming, just that the combination of public fear and/or potential fallout from the refusal to act is far greater.
As for numbers, I'll present the "top issues", from 2002: https://news.gallup.com/poll/6586/issues-2002-election-terro.... In july 30% "terrorism" was the "most important" issue. The month before it was at 46%. Let's see what the voter priorties are like in 2020: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/08/13/important-is.... Even though climate change was an "very important" issue to 42% of the people, it's also at the bottom of the list. If we rephrased the question to "what's the most important", I suspect that climate change will be under 10%. I'm going to conclude from this that voters care about climate change far less than terrorism.
>Support for action on climate change is above 60% and you seem to call that unpopular, so I'm not sure what your bar is for it.
We're talking in circles here. You keep on bringing up how many people support it, but fail to address:
* conflating "support" with willing to make sacrifices. Saying you "support" something costs you literally nothing. I'm sure the vast majority of americans also oppose inhumane conditions at animal farms (at least in principle), but how many americans are willing to give up meat, or at least buy free range eggs? Even though they support it, their support is so weak that it evaporates the moment the prospect of costs come up. We see this in the public surveys. Sure, people support doing something about climate change, but what do they want if they think economy is even more important? Will a carbon kill jobs? Will it make it harder for me to make ends meet?
* conflating "support" for something with support for a specific policy proposal. see: brexit where it meant something different to everyone, so if the vote was on a specific proposal it wouldn't have a chance of passing.
>My examples are valid ones of costly and/or unpopular agenda being enacted
The only one you really proved was immigration. The bailouts were widely supported by both economists and the public.
>Politicians and media/propaganda corporations have a common bully word to attack people who disagree with their bad unpopular agendas - "populist".
I'm not sure how this is relevant here. This is literally the first time in the entire thread the word "populist" was brought up.
So you really can't turn around and come up with similar numbers and say those are popular but that climate change action is not.
It comes down to the same thing: your politicians are lying to you. They absolutely can do much more about climate change, and they choose not to. Again, I know it's hard for you to accept you've been had by these smooth talking crooks you voted for, but that's the reality.
They are not being held back by a small minority of the population who don't like it. Continuing to believe this with all the evidence against it is like believing the earth is flat or global warming is a hoax.
>So you really can't turn around and come up with similar numbers and say those are popular but that climate change action is not.
I'm not denying that people actually "support" it (in the boolean sense). I'm just saying that they don't really support it that much. From the polls I've provided last comment, it's clear that terrorism (and therefore the war) was near the top of voter priorities, whereas global warming is at the bottom of the list. Is it that surprising that congress doesn't want to address hard-to-tackle issues that people don't feel too strongly about?
This is such a skewed PoV of the world today. In so many ways the world is the best it's ever been: Poverty, violent crime, etc. (the list really does go on and on). This is especially true if you live in a developed nation. So I'm not really sure what you think a child will have to "endure" aside from all of the great joys life can bring!
We can even just focus on climate change. The "worst case scenario" most scientist project isn't really even that bad. Sure there will be worst weather events etc., but society isn't going to "collapse". And what about you? If society "collapsed' in your lifetime, would you really rather have not lived at all?
I'm not suggesting your anxiety about the current state affairs isn't the motivation for your decision (although it is a convenient scapegoat), rather, that your anxiety may not be all that rational and you may want to revisit your decision from time to time!
Politically, the US seems to be gearing up for civil war. Global warming might rapidly flip to an ice age. International conflicts are warming up, and the saber-rattling between the US, Russia, China, and various parties in the middle east is reaching a tenor that's unprecedented in my lifetime. If we have a chance at reversing the climate disaster, it will take an unprecedented level of international cooperation, and I just don't believe that citizens or politicians are ready to get their collective shit together.
> ... your anxiety may not be all that rational and you may want to revisit your decision from time to time!
The die has been cast. I can no longer procreate. I did revisit my decision, and I'm glad to be a (step) parent. If I want more kids, fostering is an option. You might want to reconsider your optimism from time to time, shit's getting real and we don't have a brake pedal.
In school, my father had to operate his class's Geiger counter while practicing huddling under his desk in fear of a nuclear attack. Then after graduating he got drafted (DRAFTED!!!) into the hell-scape that was Vietnam.
I respect your decision, but you and I? We don't have it so bad.
Still talking past the point, eh? I'm doing fine. I'm concerned about the world that my children, and my grandchildren will live in. I'll be quite old, probably dead, by the time that we're projected to see the collapse of the gulf stream, blue ocean event, +4C, etc, but I'll live to meet the people who will want to survive through those events.
We nailed the Ozone Layer catastrophe. It required worldwide collaboration, but we did it. We're already seeing lethal effects of climate change, and nobody in power seems to give a fuck like they did before.
But yeah, I don't have it so bad. Never said I didn't. I'm thinking about 100-200 years down the line; you keep telling me about how great things are today.
Precisely! My point is that my (or your) grandparents/parents could have held the same sentiments you are holding now. And they would have been wrong.
> I'm thinking about 100-200 years down the line
Your children will not be alive in 100-200 years so your point is also moot.
Unfortunately, I believe you believe what you are saying will come to pass and it will be "society collapsing". I don't. No point in arguing about it any further. Message me in 100-200 years to say "I told you so".
Wow, you really love attacking strawmen don't you? No wonder you're such an optimist.
Are we having the same discussion?
> I did make a deliberate choice to not reproduce specifically because I didn't want to bring a child into an environment that's on the brink of collapse
I suppose I assumed you didn't think "the brink of collapse" would last 100-200 years, rather, that you fear your children would have to (in their lifetime) deal with the fallout from such a "collapse". And that such an event will be so traumatic that it would be better they weren't ever alive to experience it.
I take your pivot towards attacking me as a compliment, and a sure-fire sign you believe your position has weakened. Though I don't care either way. You are free to make whatever decisions you want for whatever reasons you want. I can respect that.
The impetus for my original comment was an "in good faith" attempt to get you to consider (or reconsider) a decision I believed to have been made in ignorance (or at the very least with a healthy dose of hysteria). I have no inclination to change your mind. That's for you to do.
How old are you? Just 30 years ago we were on the brink of nuclear war and had been for ~40 years.
The deterioration of the environment terrifies me. But the sociopolitical situation in the US terrifies me even more, and that disaster is much more imminent.
We're literally watching the world burn around us.
First part boils down to the classic catholic strategy of "outbreed the enemy" with handwavy reasoning along the lines "worst things are not going to be happen to first world peoples". Some cherry picked factoids sprinkled here and there like sea level rise in SF and NYC. Total red herring.
In Europe we already saw the migration crisis from Syria and how it was a great polarizing tool. There is no border wall that can be built (let alone be moral in any shape or form) to keep out billions of starving and misplaced from the global south and keep us in the first world nice any cozy.
Then the part about the carbon cost of raising children goes to the tehcno-utopian realm of carbon capture with some really optimistic dollar numbers.
I'm 40 and probably going to have kids, but if I were young I'd totally hold older generations feet to the fire and tell governments: "fuck you, if you don't get your shit together and start doing something meaningful about the climate catastrophe, I'm not going to have kids".
What exactly makes this so immoral? Edit: The border itself.
Meanwhile a friend younger than me is trying to have her first kid.
The fear is there but not evenly distributed. I personally am a bit of an antinatalist, at least to the degree that I feel its irresponsible to be having new kids while an overloaded foster care system still has children in need of parents.
My children are pushing 30. With everything that's going on, and how dark the future looks, it's rare that a day goes by that I don't wonder if I did them a disservice by having them.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/carbon-costs-quantifie...
If I was 18-20ish today, is be VERY concerned about my possible earnings potential in the next, say 15-20 years. So much work will be automated, further consolidating wealth unto those fortunate enough to have some already, and the mythical "entry-level" bar leaps higher and higher.
I've seen some of the preferred requirements for entry level programming jobs and it's already completely psychotic, I'd be scared shitless getting started in a market that looks like this, and will almost certainly get worse in the near future.
Edit: Growing up lots of kids had a stay at home parent. That doesn’t seem to exist anymore, which isn’t just bad for kids but for communities.
Will that still be true in 5 years after work from home is even more commonplace?
If it's true in 5 years then you potentially maximise your misery.
If it's not then you might be happier, but the dynamics of things will have shifted greatly.
When betting it's usually best to bet on the status quo continuing, that's why the odds on incumbents keeping power is always higher.
Last night I walked into a supermarket and in front they told me to wear a mask because of Covid delta. Then I went to a restaurant and they asked to see my vaccination card. 700,000 dead of Covid in the past 18 months in the US.
For the important things (health and safety) it's never been a better time to have kids!
People with better options (most people with the skills to do it...) won't take those jobs.
But as someone from a "non standard" background (no qualifications on paper but could do the job), low paid jobs demanding relatively high skills were actually really useful for me in terms of building work experience and a network.
The environments tended to be chaotic and high turnover but proved to be a useful stepping stone rather than a dead end.
(1) Stagnant real wages with decreasing buying power means that even with two incomes financial stability can be tenuous
(2) decrease in community interaction means parents must give more focused attention on their kids, versus letting them run with the neighborhood kids.
(3) housing prices push necessary space into extravagant luxury
(4) political gridlock leads to a sense of ennui and fatalism. The information sources used to get clarity about the world are or are accused of profiteering and muckracking, leading at least one side of the political aisle to have existential fear about crowds, the other to have existential fear of their neighbors
(5) brazen disregard of the law being applied to elites degrades the reliability of justice. People pick up on this
(6) technocrats think the solution is more technology. Were we facing an issue as simple as lowering fixed costs and improving systemic inefficiency, as an economist I'm on board. However, I think the issue is more political (power-structure) than economic, and technology favors the currently empowered (as they have funds).
Not just the elites. Law enforcement and prosecutorial discretion can be (is) abused at all levels. It can create bias based on income, race, status (ie if you are part of that same system as a LEO etc), political identity, etc. Rule of law has become a joke and it's essentially an oligarchy since the people in power can choose to ignore the law and we lack proper oversight of the people who run the system.
As a parent of three, I've definitely noticed how much they expect my attention versus what I can recall of the same from my parents (my childhood memories are primarily about playing with my siblings).
My sense is that this is getting better over time but sensitivity and viability to the issue is increasing. This makes it particularly challenging to meet expectations
I think the same is generally true of the economic in equality.
Unfortunately this is incorrect in the US.[0,1]
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
[1] (Entire article: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...)
[2] Commentary on OECD countries generally: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/inequalities-in-hous...
Right now, the working class is needed for it's labor. I'm sure you've all seen the hiring signs. That isn't going to last forever. Can you expect a better life for your kids if they may not have a job?
So much would have to change to make full automation a good thing for everyone.
The best book on this subject is "The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War" by Robert J. Gordon.
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton/d...
Many of these problems are political/societal, and not technical: the stagnation of wages in particular. I would argue that instead of a lack of change being the problem, the issue is that society is still trying to desperately adapt to the increased rate of change that's happened during the last century.
Peter Drucker has argued that the 60 years leading up to 1914 were the most innovative years in human history. A person born in 1860 and dying in 1940 would live through the first lightbulb, the first power plant, the first power grid, the first electrified city, the first electric street cars, the first combustion engine, the first cars and trucks, the first telephones and then the growth of the telephone networks to include every household, the first great oil boom, the first submarines and the exploration of the underwater seas, the development of germ theory, the sterilization of the hospitals and so the first safe surgeries, combined with the first true anesthesias, the first airplanes, the first radio as telegram and then in 1920 the ability of radio to carry the human voice, the invention of the television, the first sulfa drugs followed by the invention of the first true antibiotics, the first plastics, the invention of textiles made of plastics (nylon), and so much more than I can list. A person born in 1860 and dying in 1940 was born during one epoch of the human race and died in a completely different one, much more so than any person born in any other year. The best and most recent book on this subject is "The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War” by Robert J. Gordon.
[ Also, you write about "personal computer, the internet, and the mobile phone" as three separate inventions, but it's really just 2: computers and better multi-plexing, and even the multi-plexing is because computers got better. ]
I recognize that household income has stagnated and there's significant disparity in wealth. However, if you're going to claim that the median standard of living has decreased in most of the West over the last 50 years, you're going to need to cite some evidence.
It's shocking to see pushback on the transformative nature of modern computing on Hacker News of all places.
> Thamus inquired into the use of each of them, and as Theuth went through them expressed approval or disapproval, according as he judged Theuth’s claims to be well or ill founded. It would take too long to go through all that Thamus is reported to have said for and against each of Theuth’s inventions. But when it came to writing, Theuth declared, “Here is an accomplishment, my lord the King, which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt for memory and wisdom.” To this, Thamus replied, “Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequalit...
This data effectively disproves the statement "Standards of living have decreased in much of the US and EU".
It might already be too late to stop catastrophic climate change, so we need to cut down dramatically right now. Not in 5 years or later.
Without things like high carbon tax and credits in place we just don't have the incentive structure to get enough innovation and wide adoption to make a difference with technology in a meaningful timeframe. Instead we still have countries subsidies or give tax cut to fossil fuel companies. It's bonkers.
We could solve this with technology in the needed timeframe, but I don't see the political will and ability to create the right incentives and get this done globally in the needed timeframe.
We could probably cut back dramatically, maybe even to zero, in 5 years. But it would require more than just the technology today. It would require massive political and lifestyle changes.
Instead of degrowth, what about just taxing high-income conspicuous consumption, for example a tax on luxury cars, boats.
I have no opinion on whether this will require human population reduction (and I hope not) but definitely economic reduction is in our future. Whether that will be through catastrophic climate change + large-scale migration + war, or whether it will be through conscious effort to avoid such worse case scenarios is still up to us. For now, it seems we are chosing the former.
Start doing something about climate change then.
Something that seems to be missed in these discussions is that the argument over how bad the impacts will actually be (vs how bad the childfree people think it'll be) aren't actually relevant. It is a problem and the issue is that we've largely tried nothing and we're all out of ideas. That creates a feeling that we're incapable of solving any of societies problems which is probably the psychological root of the issue.
And wanking about fusion reactors doesn't start fixing anything.
We can't even do anything to eliminate and shut down scam phone call schemes, which is a problem created entirely by technology.
Start doing things to address climate change, address wealth inequality, address private issues caused by technology and other technology ills rather than just blindly hoping that more technology will magically fix the problems caused by prior technology. Those would all increase confidence. Right now what we have is a crisis of confidence in society on the whole.
I'd argue that technology and science is the problem, not the solution. For instance, fusion reactors would simply give us more energy to destroy ecosystems faster than what we can do now.
Kind of hard when so many reject these things.
I think that the young children of today experience the same thing. We talk about how the earth is heating up. How the permafrost is melting. How the sea level is rising (this one is especially fun in the Netherlands given that most of the country is below sea level). How people, animals, entire species will die. A person who's roughly my age or older is able to understand the severity of the situation, but at the same time is able to understand that there are things we can do, and that we are in fact doing things, which makes me hopeful.
But I can't help but feel a little for the 10 year olds of today who watch the news every evening with their dads.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210303125901/https://www.nrc.n... (It's in Dutch, sorry)
Perhaps it is a pointer to our drive to reproduce that despite the vast majority finding the future frightening and most believing the species is doomed, most are not hesitant to bring kids into the world. :)
---
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
Anecdotally, I don't plan on having children myself, but that's because I don't think humans (and probably mammals in general) are set up neurologically to create productive, sustainable systems in which life can thrive indefinitely. Let's fade away and give the birds or squid a shot, eh?
I ask the above because, to me, this reads more like a "justification after the fact" kind of result. Certainly climate change could be a reasonable justification for not wanting children (it certainly sounds noble!), but I have a feeling that fears of responsibility, change, or economics are a FAR more likely list of reasons people don't want children.
Not only have the above factors existed forever, I highly doubt the people claiming climate change is such a severe stress to them that they won't have kids (when they otherwise would!) are the same people actively living their lives in a way to maximally mitigate their impact to the climate. That is, putting as much time, energy, and money into fighting climate change as it would take to raise a child.
If not... well... it kind of reads hollow to me. More like a convenient, plausible excuse that sounds nice. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope not. Not having kids isn't the solution. Having kids and teaching them about their responsibility to our climate will workout better in the long-run. Because while you, the environmentally conscious steward, are busy not raising the next generation, the people who don't give a shit are still procreating.
[1] Like climate change
I have kids, but I worry about their future every day and had the decision point about having them come five years later, I think we almost certainly would not have had kids.
Another big one and I'm not sure how to put it but the general state of media. We see other family with their kids on various platforms and it just seems so much to keep up with and we're dealing with just Youtube at this point. Every few days we're getting told about something what was watched which brings up the inevitable discussion of everything that is online is not true and the follow on of "what are you watching".
I do constantly remind myself that my fears are most likely what many parents experience in some form or another and that this is just another generation. But many times I do wonder if we would have chosen to have kids today if we waited.
It's not obvious to me that the college system as it stands today and has stood for the last twenty years is going to be similar in twenty years.
In Arizona, full-time community-college students pay under $2k/semester for school: https://www.maricopa.edu/future-students/tuition-fees. It is possible, even today, to pay relatively little for a four-year college degree.
Most people prefer existence to non-existence, even if the cost of housing is high. https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/046...
* The pure stress of having a child, which I don't think I could handle, and the associated limitation on my own life due to that
* Loss of any sense of social pressure and lack of any ideal that it is something I should do
* I also can't escape the idea that for me it would be a fundamentally selfish act, I would only be doing it because I'm scared of regretting not doing it, which for me is reason enough to _not_ do it
Edit: I see from another comment that you have made a firm decision, so didn't want this to come across as criticism of your choice in any way; mostly wanted to address that "selfish/selfless" thing, and for anyone on the fence.
I worry for my kids. I am pretty much convinced their lives will not be as good as mine, and I fear with the way a lot of things are going these days, without any serious effort in course correction...in fact quite the opposite, that at some point during their lives things will be bad, very bad.
TBH, the financial concerns don't really ring for me. I just see problems that money can't buy their way out of.
I’m not sure if there’s a term for this ironic situation but it feels like there should be.
Its fascinating that I feel the same, but like many people I moved to a bigger city than my parents.
But recently I've been spending a lot of time in old rural villages In NE USA and Eastern Europe (yeah weird combination) and they're all dying, empty houses no one wants to live any more, schools closing.
When I think about the tenacity of life - particularly that of my ancestors - I feel guilty that I do not have children of my own. It feels downright selfish to say "I'd be more comfortable with my modern dopamine faucet than to raise a new generation", or, "Sorry family tree, this branch just doesn't feel like playing the game anymore".
Not arguing for whether you should or shouldn't, but the fact that your direct ancestors did shouldn't be the reason that you do.
I've seen suggestions that it is about 60t a year that sounds absolutely absurd when the average per adult is 13t (in the UK).
So a child that is physically much smaller than me (and so needs less food to eat, less material for clothing etc), and lives in the same house as me (so benefits from the same heating that I have on anyway, the same lighting that I have on anyway) and goes to the same places as me when I drive around anyway, somehow emits over 400% carbon in the process?
How does that work out?
Of course, you can argue that all of these are unnecessary, but it is likely that they are taken into account when discussing average emissions.
So having a kid may build a hospital that requires a truck that requires human to be trained… that requires humans to create paper training materials.
The global population is a key aspect of climate change and environmental damage.
For example, US military is a huge emission producer and is not an individual emission. The only reason it exists is because there is a large group of people (a country) who allocated resources for warfare. It is unlikely for the military to scale linearly with respect to population (at small scale, you’d have a militia).
I am not trying to put forward an exact formula here, but population and individual consumption (that is, wealth) are key factors and I suspect a fit would contain those two quantities as factors.
Regarding economies of scale, ultimately what counts is the number of cars, not the factory that produces them... again that boils down to population x individual consumption.
The US military can do what they do because of the strength of the US economy, which is again correlated, if not proportional, to population x individual consumption.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...
OK... and so the important bit is still the number of cars, which is directly linked to the number of people and how much they consume.
This is inescapable.
Kids grow out of clothes and shoes, so you need new clothes that fit them. You tend to buy them toys and safety equipment and possibly electronics to entertain them. They break things at a much higher rate than regular adults. They want to go play with their friends, which if you live in the suburbs sometimes means driving.
My siblings and cousins have always just passed around clothes as children grow out of them. By the time an article of clothing makes it out of the family, it has likely been worn by 3-4 kids. And then you sell it or give it away.
Sure, some stuff wears out or is destroyed, but you'd be surprised how little. Just stay away from all that pop culture crap where most of the money goes to licensing fees ;)
However, for this discussion, my personal experience is surprisingly in line. I have worked with many colleagues whose primary decision to not have children is a result of worry over climate change. I have seen this response break up multiple marriages, motivate people to quit careers, and sprial in to depression.
Most people are afraid to have kids (even those who ultimately decide to take the leap) - it's a big decision! And we know people are prone to rationalize their PoV using any plausible device necessary. So it's kind of hard to take this at face-value.
If you've been on this Earth awhile you start to realize a few things. Here are two:
1. It's the nature of young people to think the world is going to Hell. Today it might be climate change. 50 years ago it was the Vietnam War. Make no mistake, these things matter but, in my experience, the younger of us almost always think things are far worse than they really are. Still, this is generally a positive as it's an agent for change; and
2. The older people also think the world is going to Hell but for different reasons: because it's changing. Older people get increasingly concerned with their legacy and fighting change, summarized nicely on Mad Men [1].
I have zero faith the world will come together and act altruistically on climate change or any other issue. You've seen ample evidence of this in the past 18 months where a significant portion of the population are willing to minorly inconvenience themselves (by wearing a mask and/or taking a vaccine with <1 in a million chance of a serious negative outcome) so they and other people won't die from what is now a preventable disease.
And we expect these same people to pay the massive cost to fix climate change? There's literally no way.
The only way climate change will be solved is if it becomes economic to do so. We'll replace fossil fuels with renewables when it's cheaper and not a moment before, as just one example.
Circling back to the issue of worried young people: many people had children so someone would look after them when they're older. In the developed world, this is rapidly disappearing. Now what generally stops people is they simply can't afford it. Not big issues like climate change.
I compare how cheaply I could live when I was in university and it's so much worse now. We're making living so expensive that at some point there'll be no one to hand all the accumulated wealth down to.
[1]: https://twitter.com/madmenqts/status/739854907918946304?lang...
Adverse climate change is largely driven by man-made effects, and those effects are largely scaled to the number of people.
For all I know, my spawn might decide to work for Exxon Mobil.
If you believe that a small number of people will have an outsized impact, each person is a "lottery ticket".
If you believe in incremental progress then adding more people is likely to be "slightly positive".
If you believe that little progress will be made on per capita emissions (or that they may even grow) then each additional person is a carbon burden.
If a new person on the planet is born and goes their whole life without contributing to the cause and carrying on the current status quo of resource exploitation and fossil fuel usage, they will have made the crisis worse.
On the other hand, if within a generation or two each person is net carbon negative (through labour, taxes, innovation or other support towards climate efforts) then children born today will be helping to mitigate the crisis.
This is the "incremental" scenario. The plausibility of this depends on how you think system change happens and your assessment of what is possible or likely.
Besides, if it's feasible to earn enough money to offset your own carbon footprint (e.g. by paying for carbon capture), it's possible to scale the solution by having more children who then offset their own carbon cost and more.
The climate crisis and carbon in the atmosphere scales with the number of people available to solve it, as well.
There's much better ways of solving climate change, but fewer people on planet Earth would help.
But this is too OT and I'm sure someone will find a way to argue on this point as well.
We will just have to kill ourselves, can you pick a date?
I do know a lot of people who are not having children for similar reasons
EDIT: There's also a lack of the idea that it's worth having children, i.e. many people don't believe there is any intrinsic value in having a child like they used to
Okay, wow. So they're indifferent to the notion of homo sapiens becoming extinct?
2. Enough people are still having children that it seems unlikely extinction will occur due to their own decision to not have children
if people would like to have children that’s fine. if not, that’s also fine.
is there any reason why homo sapiens must be preserved, just for the sake of it?
Is it not interesting that we are witnessing the biggest selection filter/pressure in human population since smallpox and black death? It is not purely genetic this time though, there is a huge cultural component, societies that do not breed do not survive.
Hmm, well that is completely and utterly wrong...
Decrease in births during Irish famine: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3542599/
Decrease in births during WW1: https://ww1.habsburger.net/en/chapters/dwindling-birth-rates...
Decrease in Uighur birth rate right now: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/extreme-drop-in-xinjiang-...
Found the article:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/31/ireland-popula...
Either way, planting one tree for every child born would have negligible effect on climate change. I think we need billions of trees planted every year to make a significant dent.
The people not worried about an incoming disaster keep reproducing, while the people worried stop reproducing.
Then you haven't been paying attention. It's not about growing bananas where today we grow potatoes, it's about what happens in the areas where today we grow bananas. Those areas will become literally uninhabitable for large parts of the year in the next 50-100 years at the current rates of carbon emission, and the billion+ people living in those areas will move elsewhere.
Looking at how the minute amount of migrants from Libya and Syria were received in some of the wealthiest countries in the world (~1 million people reaching Europe and throwing it into a political crisis), the effect of 3 orders of magnitude more migration will be devastating, and are one of the main reasons for imagining that nuclear war you fear (especially given India, Pakistan, and China have nuclear weapons, and will be at the forefront of this massive migration from Bangladesh and their own coastal areas).
All this will happen, most likely even if we reduce emissions to 0 today. Perhaps it will be limited to a few hundred million instead of more than a billion if we reach some goals of the Paris agreement, but even that is unlikely to actually happen.