Children Are Not a Threat to Global Warming
A growing number of adults decide that they are not interested in having kids and cite environmental concerns as a driving factor. Research papers, opinion articles, and activist groups have all successfully encouraged people to think about reproductive rights within the context of a broader environmental agenda.
Camila Thorndike, a 35-year-old living in Washington, D.C., is hesitant to have children because of the fear that her child will not have access to a peaceful and joyful life due to the uncertainty of the world with respect to climate change.
“Our basic premise is that a person is responsible for the carbon emissions of his descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him...For example, a mother and father are each responsible for one half of the emissions of their offspring, and 1/4 of the emissions of their grandchildren.”
-Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax of Oregon State University
Murtaugh and Schlax encourage parents to feel responsible for the environmental impacts on their children.
The Pew Research Center published an article sharing that up to five percent of adults are not expecting to have kids because of their concerns about how their offspring will impact the environment.
While it is reasonable for parents to be concerned about the world that their children will grow up in, environmental concerns should not prevent parents from having children altogether. Adults should be encouraged to think about the positive impacts of their children in the development of a world that focuses on humanity as the answer to overcoming world challenges.
Access to necessary resources is one major concern among environmental activists. What many fail to realize is that population growth is not correlated with the access to and prices of resources. Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon made a bet in 1980 trying to predict a connection between resource scarcity and population growth. Simon believed that an increased population would cause prices of commodities to go down, while Ehrlich thought that resources would decrease and eventually be consumed altogether. Over a period of ten years, the price of five different metals decreased in price. During this time period, the world population grew by over 800 million, making it the largest decade increase in history.
As stated by Dr. Stephen Barrows in his The Triumph of Population Growth lecture, people should be viewed as the earth’s ultimate resource. The ingenuity of people and their positive advantage in finding new strategies to overcome world problems should be prioritized instead of trying to decrease population growth.
Shortages, difficulties, and despair are nothing new in the world. Humans are creative by nature and have already overcome many challenges. The negative impact of adults not having children will be seen in population decline and will directly result in labor shortages, loss of government revenue, and overall decline of economic growth.
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