Q: What are your thoughts on reducing population growth? Doesn’t fewer consumers mean fewer carbon footprints?
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A: I absolutely adore goofy four-year-olds and sassy seven-year-olds, but I’ve never been particularly inclined to bring my own screaming infant into this world. Will I someday? Possibly.
Will a growing number of environmentalists groan if I, you or anybody else decides to bear a few? You bet your Pablum.
Back in the 70s, enviros were preoccupied with the concept of death by baby. Overpopulation was going to strip the planet of its natural resources, and we needed serious population curbs, so the theory went.
Of course, real-world examples of how draconian a one-child policy could be (think forced abortions/sterilization) put the kibosh on most of that talk. But with global numbers expected to hit 9 billion by 2050, chatter about saving the world by wearing a condom is back.
Except this time, the focus is your baby’s emissions (and not the bodily kind). This summer, statisticians at Oregon State University published a report on the “legacy emissions” of reproduction. They essentially say you can slash your personal carbon emissions by driving less, switching to greener light bulbs/windows/fridges and recycling your heart out, but having a child will still blow your carbon footprint out of the water.
How? Well, they tabulated the full lifetime carbon emissions of the average American mom, factoring in her descendants’ emissions, and came up with a hefty total: 18,500 tons of CO2 per mom (compared to, say, 136 for a Bangladeshi mom). More specifically, every bambino raised on U.S. soil coos an additional 9,441 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere over a lifetime (assuming they bear another generation).
The study didn’t look at Canadian emissions, but our per capita climate-cooking history trails right behind our southern neighbours’.
As you can imagine, discussions around what to do about all this have a tendency to piss off a lot of people.
Some focus on Western moms and say, you know, “Mull it over before you have more than a couple of kids.” One British study said straight up there should be a voluntary two-child cap, since each UK child pollutes the equivalent of 620 return flights between London and New York in a lifetime.
Most focus on the need for more voluntary “family planning” (aka contraception education) in developing countries. In fact, last week, the London School of Economics, in conjunction with Brit think tank Optimum Population Trust, released a study pointing out that condoms might be the cheapest way to fight climate change.
According to their figures, for every $7 spent on basic family planning, more than 1 ton of CO2 emissions can be saved. That’s a hell of a lot cheaper than the $32 it costs to cut a ton of carbon through low-carbon tech.
Of course, talk about “educating the Third World” on contraception can ruffle a lot of feathers – especially when the West pollutes astronomically more per capita than poorer countries, and the Catholic Church keeps telling its followers to leave their family planning to God. We also can’t ignore the value of large families in rural agricultural settings and the fact that having two kids makes little sense when infant mortality rates are high.
Then there are those population-curbing greens who fan racial flames. Over the past three decades, the U.S. Sierra Club, for instance, has repeatedly been embroiled in internal battles between enviros favouring immigration reduction to limit environmental stress and those who say overpopulation may be taxing the planet, but keeping immigrants out of Fortress America doesn’t actually limit the total number of people in this world.
Beyond all the bull, the bottom line is that 200 million women across the world are asking for contraceptives but just can’t get their hands on them. And if they don’t get the access they need, rapid population growth will only increase their vulnerability to the impacts of climate change (from food and water scarcity to human displacement), says the World Health Organization’s Leo Bryant in an editorial in medical journal The Lancet published last week.
Social scientists say the best way to balance out birth rates in developing countries is to give women access to education and equal rights.
As for all of you would-be-parents here in North America, I’m not about to tell you or anyone else to have fewer children, but I will nag you into raising them as green as you possibly can. Deal?
Got a question?
Send your green queries to ecoholic@nowtoronto.com
