Environmental Impact of Children

magicbastarder wrote: »

overconsumption, not overpopulation, is the main problem in the west. overpopulation is a tricky one because it's been used in eugenics arguments plenty of times, so it's an argument you need to be careful to avoid sharing some unsavoury bedfellows with.

bunny_mac wrote: »

Absolutely! Overpopulation is never talked about, which I find utterly bizarre.

The late Hans Rosling talked about it a lot, and pointed out (very conclusively) that the problem of overpopulation is, at this point in the world's development, entirely caused by old people living too long.

The number of children being born into the world plateaued about forty years ago and is now heading downwards. The number of old people not dying, but living on and on, and being an ever-greater drain on the planet's resources is still increasing.

Articles and infographics comparing the financial and/or environmental cost of having/rearing a child almost always exclude the financial and environmental cost of looking after the over-60s - a one that dwarfs the former.

bunny_mac wrote: »

Exactly this. We can't go around culling old people but we can absolutely stop creating more new people.

Culling? No, but there is a whole industry dedicated to not letting people die when that'd be the best thing for them (and society in general). There's a massive amount of money to be made out of keeping people alive beyond their "use by" date. Here on the Continent, there's an accelerating movement to make dying a normal part of life, much as it is in the more "enlightened" Third World countries.

Deleted User wrote: »

What’s worse for the climate crisis: Your child or your pet?

Funny you should find and mention that. To while away a few hours on a wet Wednesday, I decided to look into the FT survey, which (for those who don't already know) is essentially based on a 2017 "research" paper, which I also looked into.

It contains this gem:

We originally hypothesized that two additional actions, not owning a dog and purchasing green energy, would also fit our criteria for recommended high-impact actions, but found both to be of questionable merit. Only two studies with conflicting results could be found for dog ownership ... , so we have not included it in figure 1

Fair enough - it's reasonable to exclude an hypothesis where you've only got two sources and they say opposite things. They wrote off "green energy" because they couldn't make sense of the numbers. :rolleyes:

But, and it's a big BUT, their "not having a child" hypothesis is based on one single paper [pdf], which isn't even proper research but someone proposing a formula for calculating whole-of-life carbon debits, based entirely on the historical behaviour of parents and grandparents.

Not only that, but the authors deliberately excluded data from low environmental impact countries because ... well ...

The choice to focus on developed regions was motivated by the higher emission and consumption levels in those regions

In other words, that "best thing you can do for the planet" figure they came up with is completely bogus - they've aggressively massaged just about every set of data used to give a shocking headline figure, and the world's media has mindlessly regurgitated it for the four years since.

Somewhat ironically, though, their review (it wasn't research at all, they just did a lot of reading and summarising) and the "carbon cost of children" paper from where they got their headline figure reinforces the point I made earlier: the best thing you can do for the planet is kill your parents.

bunny_mac wrote: »

But surely not creating another human being to use up resources is going to be a positive no matter what? How could it be any other way?

Because, if you dig into the data, it's not the creation of more humans that uses up resources, it's the kind of human. If you're worried about the environmental impact of humans, the very best thing you can do is not be American. After that, the next best thing you can do is not be Western European or Australian.

That's why this study is not just inaccurate but actually harmful: the dramatic headline reads "environmental impact of children" and provokes threads such as this one. The small print, which few read, includes the clarifications that (a) this conclusion only applies to rich, wasteful, consumerist Westerners; and (b) these findings assume that the next two generations will follow the same wasteful consumerist behaviour of their parents and grandparents; and (c) any data that were too complex to interpret were excluded from the calculation.

Moreover, the original paper didn't argue for not having children - it argued in favour of (Americans) having fewer children per family, which is in itself an assertion of questionable environmental merit.

The suggestion that having no/fewer children will dramatically reduce the human race's carbon dioxide emissions is totally undermined if the person not having a child transfers all their bad CO2 habits to, for example, looking after a dog. In fact the data, as presented, support a proposal for having more children, as long as they're the right kind of children.

Edit: Or to put it another way, I suppose the FT survey is actually quite encouraging - it shows that the majority of people don't believe baseless, random statistics they read on the internet.

We are all rich westerners posting here, us not having kids has to be the best thing we can do for the environment. Look at all the plastic and rubbish one must buy for a child, whole houses full of crap. Every child probably goes on to have thousands of animals killed for them to eat, then they have kids...

One of us probably consumes as much as 200 Bangladeshis but we are who we are in this mega consumer country and there's no argument for me in saying the best thing for the environment is not to have kids.