Protect our children from climate change by not having them: researchers

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Could you give up your right to have children?

With predictions world temperatures will rise to dangerous levels within decades, some US researchers want you to consider their provocative push for population engineering to help reduce your carbon footprint.

The idea is that any climate crisis is actually a reproductive crisis and that the best way to save our children from having to deal with drastic environmental changes is to simply not have them at all.

“The argument is even more extreme than that,” says Jake Earl, a bioethicist and PhD candidate in philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

“We look at current models for what it would take to actually avoid a 2 degrees Celsius increase in average surface temperatures by the end of the century. We don’t have a lot of confidence that what’s been decided on in the Paris agreement and previous agreements is enough to get us all the way there. So we recommend people have fewer children.”

While the intentional manipulation of the size and structure of human populations raises ethical questions, Earl, and his colleagues have released a paper arguing it is morally justified to prevent the harms of global climate change.

“Having fewer children — not necessarily none — is greener than a number of other individual behaviours that you can perform. Restricting copulation could account for something equivalent to a whole new source of carbon neutral energy that we didn’t have,” Earl tells NEWS 1130.

Oregon State University researchers have calculated the savings from driving a hybrid, driving less, recycling, using energy-efficient appliances, windows and light bulbs.

They found that a typical American would save 488 tonnes of carbon dioxide over a lifetime by taking those measures. By contrast, when a person chooses to have one less child, they save 9,441 tonnes.

Earl and his Georgetown colleagues’ calculations suggest that even having the equivalent of a half child less per couple would go a long way toward helping governments achieve their greenhouse gas commitments. “We’re talking 15 to 23 percent of those long-term reduction goals worldwide by reducing human fertility.”

Earl says their suggested policy solutions fall short of actually coercing people to have fewer babies. “We think people should have the opportunity to make their own choices. A lot of people lack access to information on family planning, birth control, and elective abortion. We also think we could use media to influence people’s opinions and beliefs about what family size is right for them. And we think there could be incentives to delay childbirth or have fewer children.”

Given the massive scale of some of the projects proposed to combat climate change, Earl suggests having fewer children is a pretty simple solution.