Countries like Brazil, Ecuador and Papua New Guinea are asking for financial compensation to address deforestation, and now Saudi Arabia wants compensation if countries reduce their oil consumption to mitigate climate change. Is it entirely far fetched to ask if individuals should be compensated for having fewer or no children?
At a Wilson Center discussion on Wednesday, New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin considered this idea and stated that having fewer children was one of the best ways that individuals could reduce their carbon footprints. Humans reproduce exponentially, and having two children instead of three could reduce energy consumption that would otherwise occur for generations. A report by Paul Murtaugh PDF from the University of Oregon found that the “carbon legacy” of having an extra child is twenty times more important than other choices individuals take over their lifetime (such as what kind of transportation they use, for example.) In the United States, a child has 160 times the carbon impact than a child born in Bangladesh, according to Murtaugh.
Smaller Trees, Fewer Emissions
The current world population is 6.8 billion and is projected to increase to 9.1 billion by 2050. We are in a global predicament: industrialized countries are trying to constrain their energy consumption while encouraging and in some ways helping developing countries to industrialize, which will boost their energy demand.
Carbon credits for fewer children might be less applicable in developing countries, since industrialized countries have much higher per capita emissions. Also, according to population expert and Worldwatch vice president Robert Engelman, an estimated 200 million women who want to avoid pregnancy are risking it anyway because they have inadequate access to contraception and related reproductive health services. As Engelman explains in his book More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want, providing such access to all women will naturally cause fertility to decrease. Other key factors include increasing girls’ education and gender equality, which empower women to seek out reproductive health services, influence them to start childbearing at a later age, and increase their bargaining power with husbands to decide when and how many children to have.
According to a recent report by Population Action International PDF, 37 of the 41 National Adaptation Programs of Action (NAPAs) submitted to the UNFCCC by Least Developed Countries have identified population growth or high density as a factor which makes them more vulnerable to climate change. Only one of these countries, however, proposed an adaptation project that includes reproductive health and family planning. Despite calls to promote reproductive health and family planning services as a human rights issue, it remains generally absent from the negotiations leading up to Copenhagen. Even if we don’t start handing out carbon credits to childless couples or parents of very small families – an idea likely to prove challenging to turn into policy – we can foster discussion about these connections to climate change. And we can help build the capacity of women and their partners everywhere to choose for themselves the timing and frequency of pregnancy.
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Mr Revkin noted on his Facebook page: “So both CNS (right news~) and Worldwatch picked up on my thought experiment proposing that one-child families in USA get to sell carbon offsets. If it’s good enough for avoided forest destruction, for Ecuador oil left in ground, why not for… un-conceived 20-ton/year high-octane kids?”
This is an IDEA worth pursing and discussing worldwide!
That’s a great idea. Why don’t all you environmental people stop having kids all together for the sake of the planet. There is no such thing as a carbon footprint.
it is getting NASTY now. see Mr Revkin’s latest blog post: sad, that Mr Limbaugh is such a rightwing nutcase a shame on the USA really, but there are lots of people like him out there, sad to say. Denialists all.
from Andy’s DOT EARTH blog:
“Thought Experiments on Birth and Death
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
I’d like to think that Rush Limbaugh was floating a thought experiment, and not seriously proposing something, when he told millions of listeners the following: “Mr. Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself, and help the planet by dying.”
He had picked up on some commentary and reports that have been bouncing around the instanet ever since I spoke via Skype video at a symposium on media coverage of the population part of the climate and energy challenge, put on by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
I had talked, in part, about recent studies concluding that programs offering family planning information and services to women seeking smaller families, in essence, had a climate value by avoiding emissions of greenhouse gases that would come with more kids. Here’s a Worldwatch Institute blog post with some context. Here’s a different take from the National Catholic Reporter.
I’ve written quite a bit about whether markets in carbon credits earned by cutting, avoiding or absorbing such emissions — whether from avoided deforestation, tree planting, or leaving oil in the ground — are credible, sensible or doable. So I mused on whether the next logical step, in a world increasingly fixated with carbon markets, would be carbon credits for avoided kids. This is something particularly relevant in the United States, which — nearly unique for rich countries — has a fast-growing population and very high rates of emissions per person.
As I put it in the Wilson event: “Should you get credit — if we’re going to become carbon-centric — for having a one-child family when you could have had two or three. And obviously it’s just a thought experiment, but it raises some interesting questions about all this.”
The result, once the reverberating blogosphere ramped up the sound bites and eliminated the context, was Mr. Limbaugh’s challenge — or was it, in fact, a thought experiment?
Equating “environmentalist wackos” with “jihad guys” who strap explosives onto other peoples’ kids and the like, he said:
This guy from The New York Times, if he really thinks that humanity is destroying the planet, humanity is destroying the climate, that human beings in their natural existence are going to cause the extinction of life on Earth — Andrew Revkin. Mr. Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself and help the planet by dying?
This might be funny, in a sad way, if it weren’t for the fact that my mailbox is already heaped with hate mail. And of course there’s the reality that explosive population growth in certain places, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, could be blunted without a single draconian measure, many experts say, simply by providing access to family planning for millions of women who already want it, but can’t get it — whether or not someone gets a carbon credit in the process.
Seems to me the planet will be fine without us, but if we want to survive on it we need to curtail population.
What a novel idea..
Would i get carbon credits for killing people too? How many would i get for killing myself?
The world’s population is not sustainable. We must continue educating our girls and women in schools and family planning. Pay families a pension, if they have 1 child, $3 a day ($2 a day is poverty level), $2 a day if they have 2 children and none if they have more in developing countries. Families would have fewer children if they could afford to & this would curb population growth. We would look for changes in the next 20 to 30 years, whereby our money goes to the cause of the planet’s problems, too many people, particularly in the poorest and overtaxed areas of the world. I’ve been writing to governments for 6 years now. savetheworld@gmail.com
The logic is unassailable.
If you take the whole thing seriously, don’t have kids!
The big problem is> how would you reward smaller families, and what is appropriate for zero-reproducers to receive.
If there exists an equal right to reproduce, then those who refrain from procreation should be favourably recognised in this context.
If the reward is going to matter, it has to be worth something, not be a mere token.
Also relevant is the important subject of whether bigger countries, such as china and India, should be granted pollution concessions on account of their large and growing populations, and consequential economic needs.
Regardless, this is an important subject to bring to the table whenever we get a load of moralisers carrying on about “doing something for the planet”.
You hear so much about cutting birth rates; but how is that viable? If we cut birth rates too dramatically, how do we keep the human race? It is not as simple as not having children. If it was and we reduced it dramatically who would be around to keep economies function (and look after the aging population)?If people want to be heartless (and just say stop reproducing or to act as “big brother”) and govern who is entitled to reproduce, why don’t we be rediculous and go to the opposite extreme and take the approach of the old movie “Logan’s Run”? In this silly movie they terminated people at 30 to keep a sustainable population (arguing that older populations are not viable or productive). Honestly, we need to cut this rubbish (yes, by all means educate and give options for reproducing), but more importantly reduce consumerism.