“Have fewer children” – again

Last updated on: July 13, 2017 at 9:23 pm by Jane the Actuary

“Have fewer children” – again 2017-07-13T21:23:18-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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From The Guardian: “Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children“, which reports that having one less child reduces one’s annual carbon emissions by 58.6 tons per year, which far outpaces any other actions one can take, such as taking mass transit or not flying anywhere. This article cites a report, “The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions,” which, oddly enough, has a rather different focus: how frequently are the top “carbon-reducing” (non)actions mentioned in Canadian high school textbooks.

(Funny, Canadian kids are already at a TFR of 1.6. Do they really want them to drop down to a 0.6 rate?)

The idea that that human beings are, in net, a burden on the world, and we really could stand to halve the global population is nothing new, though this is the first time I’ve seen it quantified quite like this. (Well, it’s probably not – I have a poor memory.) Often enough, there’s a caveat of “those people who have a dozen kids should cut it out, but my two kids are going to be highly educated and net contributors to the world.” Sometimes this is all a rationalization for the decision of the “childfree” to remain so.

And what does “one less child” really mean? Is it, “whatever number of children you had intended to have, reduce by one”? Or, “have as few children as you think you can minimally get by with and still feel you’ve had a fulfilling and enriching life”? Remember, this is in the context of high school textbooks, and the authors’ objective is for textbooks to convince teens to make these changes, now or in the future:

The majority of the textbooks that we analyzed are aimed at Grade 10 students (typically age 16), which is the same age that most Canadians are first allowed to obtain a driver’s license. Adolescents can also choose their own diets, can influence family decisions on vacations (e.g. flying vs. staying local) and should be informed of the environmental consequences of family size as they are likely becoming sexually active.

(Bangs head against wall.)

Yes, in principle, a teen could choose to ride her bike to school rather than nagging mom for a car. But a teen has no ability to choose to live in a mass transit-friendly area. A teen who decides to be vegetarian can cause serious disharmony in the family (demanding special meal plan accommodations). A teen complaining about flying somewhere for vacation? Give me a break – the notion to “vacation local” comes largely from people who live in vacationable areas. And it’s bizarre to imagine that a teen would be all set to get pregnant but for concerns about the environment, or be extra diligent about contraception for that reason.

What’s more, they’re comparing apples and oranges. If, for purposes of meting out shame on parents, they calculate the cumulative “carbon-costs” of each child and their descendants, in order to reverse this into the “carbon-savings” of a negative child, then they ought to likewise calculate the average carbon usage per person per year, which they cite as ranging from 7 tons in the UK to 16 tons in the US, as a much higher figure reflecting the cumulative usage of the average person’s descendants. But they know that their audience would reject the concept of deeming “annual” carbon emissions to somehow include future emissions as well. Besides, if the whole point of these exercises is to persuade people to reduce their carbon emissions, and to advocate for more government spending on renewable energy sources, it’s all the more inappropriate to ascribe to each child/descendant a fixed and known amount of emissions, if at the same time their message is “we can all reduce carbon emissions.”

It’s enough to make your head explode.

But this paper does cite a source for their per-child “carbon cost”: “Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals“, published in 2008. This paper does acknowledge that there are multiple choices for the projection of future fertility rates and carbon emissions levels. They choose the UN “medium variant” population projection, which assumes that fertility rates in all countries will decrease to 1.85 children per woman by the year 2050. (This seems to have been revised in the meantime; the 2017 projection is 2.2 children by 2045-2050 and 2.0 in 2095-2100.) There are also multiple scenarios of carbon usage put out by the experts, but for the purposes of these calculations, the authors have chosen to use the “constant” scenario.

They then take the approach that, basically, for each child, the individual is responsible for half the emissions; for each grandchild, 1/4, for each great-grandchild, 1/8, and so on. And, depending on life expectancy, due to the magic of calculus and limits, as long as you’ve got sub-replacement fertility, you end up with a cumulative total “net descendants” that is finite. You can work out an elementary calculation in excel, though their math is more sophisticated. But it all depends on that magic long-term 1.85 TFR, along with the lower life expectancy in poor countries. The closer the TFR gets to replacement-level, the more “net descendants” there are, until at replacement-level or above, there is no limit to the number of descendants. In such a case, the “carbon legacy” of any child born into the world is infinite, and, hence, meaningless, which pretty much blows up the entire concept, and demonstrates that it’s just preposterous to pin “the sins of the children” upon the parents.

Image: https://pixabay.com/en/babies-children-park-caprice-girl-857470/; pubic domain

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