My point is not that they require a lot of work. My point is that they have a massive impact on climate change. You could spend your entire life flying to conferences, living on a cruise ship, dumping trash in the ocean, and none of it would even hold a candle to the environmental impact of having a child.
This type of attitude is pretty common these days. It's this postmodern view of the world where humanity is somehow separate from nature and must be controlled to protect nature. This is such an arrogant attitude. Sure, you may be right, that having a child has a high carbon footprint, but your decision to not have children doesn't improve anything. Not being actively bad isn't the same as being good.
What's your point? That we should collectively bury our heads in the sand and keep living the two-kids-and-a-minivan suburb life right up until the end?
That's quite the extrapolation from what I actually said. My point is that the choice to not have children is not the same as actively helping. Not making things worse is not "good". And demonizing all of humanity as though we are somehow a virus to be eliminated is arrogant. We can be mindful of our impact on the environment without assuming that we're a problem.
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.
> That we should collectively bury our heads in the sand and keep living the two-kids-and-a-minivan suburb life right up until the end?
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....
There's a 3rd option not being given attention here: adoption. Why play into the idea that the fate of the future depends on some contest to reproduce more "good guys" than "bad guys"? There's plenty of kids that need families who, otherwise, may become the very "bad guys" you speak of. At the same time, you're not further burdening the world's ecosystem with another human simply because of a selfish desire to have another "you" out there. Sounds like a win-win to me.
The view isn't that humanity is separate from nature. It's being cognizant of humanity's impact on nature. The decision not to have children absolutely does improve the situation. In fact, as far as environmental impact the decision to have children is one of the highest-impact choices a person can make. I suppose if you want to be pedantic it doesn't improve anything but it does drastically reduce the continued harm to the environment.
> It's this postmodern view of the world where humanity is somehow separate from nature and must be controlled to protect nature.
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 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...
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.
> 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.
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.
> People who don't have kids are making the rational, forward-looking choice as far as I'm concerned.
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.
Ideology and science are not like the ability to run fast. They don't require biological heritage to propagate. If I spent the money I would spend educating my kids on funding education in the developing world it would probably result in far more net increase in awareness of climate change.
And we can work towards that kind of preservation without demonizing humanity as a whole and not view ourselves as some kind of virus that must be eliminated. That's really my point. And it's a very arrogant view that ironically stems from religion, though no liberal westerner will ever admit to it. The concept of humans being separate from nature goes back to the story of Adam and Eve and is embedded in western thought. It's a good thing to be mindful of the environment, but it's not a good thing to think that all of humanity is evil and needs to be eliminated in order to save the earth.
I don't understand why you're being downvoted. Carrying capacity is a thing, and it applies both at the petri dish level and at the biome/global level.
“Nature” as it existed 500M years ago has been obliterated and does not exist today. Same for nature as it existed 100M and 10M years ago. Who’s to say which era’s version of nature is correct and deserves special preservation?
> Being not-bad is not the same as being good. Inaction is not the same as positive action. That's literally all I'm saying.
Well of course, I don't think anyone was suggesting that not having kids was all you had to do to become a good person and save the planet.
The person who avoids having kids is still probably doing more to reduce CO2 than the average superficially "eco-conscious" family. Positive action that actually makes a difference is really hard work; avoiding plastic bags, recycling, and driving a Tesla isn't going to do much.
Someone who has kids, and raises them to respect the environment, while also planting trees and actively working to improve the planet is far more "good" than someone who just sits around being lonely doing nothing.
Yes, if they do enough, they could have more of an impact on CO2 reduction than the average layabout with no kids. It's not impossible. It just takes a lot of work.
> My point is not that they require a lot of work. My point is that they have a massive impact on climate change. You could spend your entire life flying to conferences, living on a cruise ship, dumping trash in the ocean, and none of it would even hold a candle to the environmental impact of having a child.
Your argument applies equally to "having a child" and "letting some person live."
That's a pretty big jump. In one case, I create a human where one does not currently exist. In the other case, I choose to impose my will on a human that currently exists and has a will of their own.
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.
This is like the bartender telling you that "maybe you've had enough" and, instead of just not drinking anymore, you immediately calling an ambulance to take you to the hospital and get your stomach pumped.
> perhaps it's a big enough crisis to motivate a re-evaluation of some old ideas about the sanctity of individual human lives
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.
You're delusional if you think climate change isn't going to play out without human deaths on a massive scale, regardless of whether that's wars for habitable land and water or explicit murders of "surplus" populations.
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.
It really, really sounds like you haven’t done the math. The average per-capita CO2 emissions in the USA is about 15 tons (among the highest in the world) and a round-trip flight between SF and NY is about 1.5 tons, 10% of that. So if you flew to conferences 10 times per year, you would be using the entire carbon footprint of an average US citizen, which is among the highest in the world.
Your original statement - that a carbon-hedonistic lifestyle of frequent flying and cruise ships would still be lower CO2 output than having children - is flatly wrong, and your source does not bolster your argument.
Sure, but who's to say whether or not those children will fly on planes or go on cruises? Or their grandchildren? Or their great-grandchildren? This strikes me as a fallacious argument that simply not going on cruises or plane rides can offset the environmental footprint of having children. At least not unless there's some mechanism to forbid those children from every flying on a plane or taking a cruise - and not aware of any such mechanism.
What have you personally done to change that? To reduce your ecological impact? To improve the world.
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.
So you are saying that children "have a massive impact on climate change" ?
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.
Are you crazy? Increasing the number of humans on the planet is the number one thing you can do to worsen climate change. You forget that we are nothing but an organism, we all produce waste and contribute hardly nothing beneficial to the environment.
If that is true of organisms, then life of all types is a net negative.
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.
Why not just raise your kids with a low eco footprint? The whole argument is silly to me. If you want to find the best action you and your children can do about climate change - it’s going vegan.
There’s a ton of info out there that says it better than I can but the consensus is the vegan diet is the biggest thing you can do.
“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.”
In a book i've read the hero was saying that if you believe the end of the world is imminent, and you are contemplating suicide, then most likely you are in a cult.
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).
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.
> 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?
Because they can do immense good as well. The future has not been written yet. They have agency to do well, and I think that those who are able have a responsibility to pass on their values to ensure there are people in the future who will do good.
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.
