Jill Filipovic: Having Kids is Bad for the Planet

[Nevilledog]

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Jill Filipovic
@JillFilipovic
What would a difficult but honest conversation about children & climate change look like? Having a child is one of the worst things you can do for the planet. And also, every person deserves a life of purpose & connection -- for many, that comes from kids.

jill.substack.com
Having Kids is Bad for the Planet
It's fine to do it anyway.
10:43 AM · Jun 14, 2022

https://jill.substack.com/p/having-kids-is-bad-for-the-planet?s=r


If you care about the future of planet Earth, should you forgo having children? If you do have children, are you consigning them to an apocalyptic future in a burning, flooding hellscape?

Last week, Ezra Klein tried to answer those questions in a column that basically concludes that parents (or potential parents) shouldn’t worry too much about how their children will fare in a future world ravaged by climate change, because human beings acclimate to awful conditions pretty quickly; because climate change is a problem better solved by politics than personal reproductive decision-making; and because children are potential change agents who can solve some of these problems.

It’s a good column, and makes an excellent affirmative case for having children despite climate concerns — because truly, if you deeply want to have a child, you should probably have one even if you are also concerned about wellbeing of the planet. But I’ll be honest that I don’t find the “children are hope for the future” argument all that compelling. Climate change is a major crisis; the decision whether or not to have children, or how many to have, or in what conditions to have and raise them, is not simply a personal matter but one with broad social consequences — and at the very least, a matter with direct and significant consequences on your offspring, who are in fact entities separate from you.

We could have a more honest conversation about reproduction, population, and climate, and it wouldn’t make anyone feel very good, but it would go something like this: It is true that having children is one of the worst things you can do for the planet; according to one analysis, “Having a child is 7-times worse for the climate in CO2 emissions annually than the next 10 most discussed mitigants that individuals can do.” The more children you have (if you’re a person in the US), the bigger the problem. It’s also true that the children of the global wealthy and privileged — a category that probably includes most readers of Ezra Klein’s columns and of this newsletter — will probably be fine even in a world ravaged by climate change, while the children of people toward the bottom of the global food chain will the be ones living with, or dying from, our growing climate disaster. That does in fact make the decision of whether or not to have children a morally complicated one for people who care both about the planet and about the other people on it.

*snip*

[Ferrets are Cool]

1. Hard to argue with science.

[enough]

2. "It's fine to do it anyway."

This is humanity’s motto. We all act on it all the time. This is why humanity will not act significantly on climate change.

[MineralMan]

3. "It's OK if we do it. Our children will fix things..."

In 1965, I pledged to myself not to reproduce, due to my concerns about overpopulation. I kept that pledge.

I figured it had to start with someone, and it might as well be me. Since then, I've been called "selfish," "ignorant," and told that I would have had great children. I respond with a shrug, because if people don't understand my reasons, I can't explain it well enough for them to understand.

Things have not gotten better. The dilemma still exists. People are still adding children to the world's population. Each of us has to decide. I decided. Others decided differently. And there it is.

[Scrivener7]

4. If two people have only one kid, that would work.

I'm making up for a two child family.

[Kaleva]

5. It'd be a major strain on 1 child to support 2 parents

A larger family unit made up mostly of younger members would have a better overall chance of survival then a smaller family unit made up mostly of older members

[TreasonousBastard]

7. China tried that. How'd it work for them?

[Scrivener7]

8. It reduced the number of births considerably. Which was the purpose.

[TreasonousBastard]

9. A population way out of balance.

.

[Scrivener7]

10. A population that isn't starving. So there's that.

And PS, perhaps you would be surprised at how many children never take care of their parents. If you're a parent, you should make arrangements and not assume anything.

[meadowlander]

14. As opposed to what, India?

As much as the One Child Policy was a human rights nightmare, the alternative they were staring down at the time was a humanitarian crisis of crushing, unmanageable inter-generational poverty. The main reason there's a middle class in China and that it's taking its place on the world stage was because it limited its population growth and focused on educating the hell out of the kids that were born.

[TreasonousBastard]

15. The Chinese discovered that as good as One Child looked on paper...

it ended up with the practical problem of a generation of lonely males running around.

A socialogical problem not well addressed by simple logic.

[PortTack]

11. As far as the current economic model, not so well.

But, the current economic model is doomed to failure anyway. It’s not just China it’s everywhere, and indeed if we are to survive we’re going to have to have a completely different way of living.

[waddirum]

6. The *snip* at the end

is probably the best advise that one can give.

[hunter]

12. Nature doesn't care about "reasons."

In nature there "is" and everything else "is not."

Thoughts and prayers and hopes for the future don't matter.

Nature doesn't care what you think, doesn't care how many children you have. In a few million years our civilization will be a curious layer of trash in the geologic record.

The current human population is about 8 billion. Fossil fuels are destroying the environments we humans are best adapted to. What do we want to do about that?

We have the tools we need to halt human population growth and quit fossil fuels entirely, on our own terms. Will we do that? I don't know.

If we let nature take care of the imbalance by her usual means things are going to get ugly.

The wealthy are completely out of their heads if they think they'll be able to avoid the chaos. Their society is the MOST fragile of all human societies.

[Igel]

13. My take's a bit different.

But along the same lines.

People care about the Earth as though the Earth were somehow intrinsically valuable. It's like Mars. Or Jupiter.

Or maybe uninhabited planets that we and nobody else have no clue exists. They form. They exist. They get tortured by stars in their red giant phase and then get hit as the star collapses to form a white dwarf (or worse). Nobody cares--they have *no* net worth because the Milky Way doesn't assign worth.

The Earth has value because humans value it--but the Earth only has value to humans. Now, that's one good argument (in my view) for environmentalism; that's also a good argument for "the Earth would be better off without humans." Seriously--who was around to mourn for the dinosaurs? Or the Ediacaran fauna that existed pre-Cambrian? (Ever look at what the scant traces of those critters says they looked like.)

Or the life that existed prior to the Great Oxygenation Event?

Trashing the Earth hurts us and our fellow Earth species. But without humans to value those fellow Earth species, there'd be no appraiser. It's like the worth of gold nugget in the pre-Cambrian.