I can fly international 365 days a year for decades. But my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have 0 carbon footprint because they’ll never exist.
Conversely, eat bugs and recycle coke cans if you want, but that’s a fraction of a fraction of a drop in the bucket if you’ve had even one kid.
We have to reduce emissions right now, not at your inexisting great-grandchildren generation.
This is the same reason I don’t save any money for retirement. Somebody will surely have figured things out by the time for me to stop working! I can do what I want with no consequences.
Also, the way the human brain's reward system works, lots of people will say: I have no kids, now I can take an extra far-away holiday.
All the kids that are being born anyway.
But it's hypocritical to both have a kid and then malign me for using 1 millionth of the CO2 the decision to have a kid results in.
While I think we need to find a way to limit the number of humans and think it's a perfectly fine decision for people to not have children, I will continue to criticize anyone who uses CO2 excessively whether they have children or not.
I don't have kids. I'm in my thirties. I really struggle with this idea. I fear that this notion is part of why I will run out the clock on my window to get kids.
All I see is finger pointing when everyone needs to rise to the occasion. I'm falling in that trap myself.
Taking responsibility for climate change solution and raising smart and productive kids is probably the single most positive thing one can do.
I will feel bad about the CO2 contributions of my children the day you feel bad about needing goods and services from them.
There will always be something less than ideal.
Of course if everyone dies, we mitigate anthropogenic climate change, but that doesn't really further our analysis of the issue. There is nothing inherent in children that uses carbon, it is human behavior in the context of petro-capitalism that uses carbon. If I have thirteen kids and they live on a farm cooperative, I'll be responsible for less carbon than the parent commenter.
The parent said:
> [international flights taken often] completely dwarfs any [CO2] savings I could reasonably expect to make.
What dwarfs CO2 savings isn’t so much an individual’s international flights, it’s an individual creating more individuals that create more individuals.
Your thirteen kids on a farm cooperative are likely to have and eat cows, which is plenty of tonnes of methane. Not to mention the number of children that 13 couples will produce afterward.
My 0 kids will require 0 cows and 0 methane.
Having children is important for the propagation of the human race and I want our race to be propagated.
But it makes no sense to lecture somebody about their greenhouse gas emissions while taking action that results in a thousand or a million more greenhouse gas.
If you believe having children is a net positive, go for it. I’m not lecturing you to avoid it.
That's certainly your opinion. My opinion is that this thread of analysis (a) is not interesting; (b) tends to propagate harm.
I think the discussion is not interesting because it lacks intellectual rigor. I mentioned that the subject of having kids is an irrelevant red herring. I think we can call your thesis a form of "whataboutism." You actually double down on this in your response. Kids on a farm? Whatabout cows? (It's a vegetable farm. Try again, I guess.) Let me also add that there is no logical limit to your analysis. Who is responsible for your carbon use? You or your parents? Is this toxic comment on the internet something I should address with you or your grandmother?
The harm-causing part is more important. You are saying--here and in siblings--that "other people" can/should have children and that society will be sustained by babies who are "born anyway," but that people who procreate have lost the moral agency to participate as your equals in the climate discussion.
This is toxic (harm-propagating) because it treats biological procreation as a distasteful externality. Procreation is not an external process when we are considering anthropogenic climate change. Worse, you are drawing an artificial line to separate people who can have valid policy opinions on climate change from those (parents) who can't. Ironically, this is the same thing that you accused me of doing when you objected to my use of the word "toxic."
"Why are you telling me where I can't go while blowing up large chunks of it with dynamite?"
"That's whataboutism. Besides maybe my dynamite isn't causing any damage, and I'm still right that you're trampling it."
Does it span more than one generation?
In the most developed countries, children are now more of a burden than a gain, which is why women are having fewer of them every generation.
Not only because they're expensive, but because they are often born unhealthy (physically, mentally, or both) and are a large, often unrecoverable blow to most careers.
Since we don't need children to work on the farm or to let us move in with them when we're old (er, less than previous generations, anyway), it becomes purely a "nice-to-have" decision.
And then if somebody does voluntarily have children, they don't have much of a leg to stand on when lecturing others about their impact on climate change.
I just want to add to the conversation, that somehow your reasoning strikes me as a bit selfish. It is of course true, what you are writing. Still reading it, makes me sad. I am missing some higher meaning. Who cares about a career in the end? A career in our system is just a story of someone, who exceeded at providing value. But for whom, if you do not have kids?
I am missing a bit of Kant in there. A little bit of "You get one (life), you give one back." We (including you) just cannot all do it like that, if we do not want to end our lives rather uncomfortably. So again something about ultimate maximes and what they should be.
It's more likely the opposite: a lot of people would agree that their parents' decision to have children, particularly at a time when they couldn't afford them or lacked the mental strength to care for them and raise them in psychological safety, was selfish.
Not everyone gets to make the conscious choice.
Sounds more like you've given up and are using it as the moral high ground.
To turn your earlier phrase- 'Sorry, I don't take advice from people who are removed from the human race.'
Sounds stupid, because it is.
You do what you can, I will do what I can. But don't think for a second you are better than anyone else over a single choice you made.
I'm suggesting childfree people have a negligible impact on climate change compared to people who have children.
You can bring "moral high ground" into it wherever it seems applicable, but I have not done that. I've said only that it's hypocritical to criticize a person for their climate impact while simultaneously making a thousand or a million times more of a climate impact.
You are making an assumption that children just are a net negative.
As others have mentioned the carbon footprint of a child is miniscule compared to an adult,
They are not driving, flying, owning homes, etc for a while, and many never will.
One of those children could very well be the solution to that, and many other problems.
As for moral high ground you insist that you are better for having made the choice not to have children, as you see their opinions as less than and not worth listening to, as they have had children.
Since life can just be given to the next generation and you have already gotten yours, it would be logical to return the favor to the next person and give a new life.
I did not say, that it actually is selfish. Maybe it is not. It just came off a bit like that to me, as I read your comments.
> It's more likely the opposite: a lot of people would agree that their parents' decision to have children, particularly at a time when they couldn't afford them or lacked the mental strength to care for them and raise them in psychological safety, was selfish.
Sure. Although most people would surely still choose to live.
You can have children if you want, but I'm not requiring that of you.
If your children take care of me late in life, it's because they're exchanging their work for money. And the reason they're obligated to exchange their work for money is because that's the economic system into which their parents decided to bring them.
It is not moral to not have children. Paraphrasing Kant: An action is moral, if the state improves when everyone does it.
You cannot recommend everyone to not have children, since you depend on them. So why bring it up as an argument in a thread about climate change in the first place?
The argument is hypocritical. It just does not make much sense.
Do you see it as an optimization problem, where others have exactly enough children to care for you at old age, but so few that the climate suffers as little as possible? If so, you are still relying on the children and do not gain any more imaginary rights to pollute than those parents.
The "career" is a great lie and joke. Imagine choosing to exterminate your heritage in order to please short term goals of politicians or company owners who at best see the career worker as a cost center on a spread sheet.
But even if it doesn't and even if we're forced to make hard choices, the hard choice won't be "should I skip my vacation flight?", it'll be "should I skip raising a CO2 machine?".