Lucy Proctor
speaker
119 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard Jul 2018
Lucy Proctor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hello.
Yes, I'm one of those people that recycles and shouts at my partner for leaving the car idling.
So when I came across this idea, I did start to worry that all my environmental do-gooding was basically meaningless compared to the toll my two kids are inevitably going to take on the planet's finite resources.
I know.
I'm blaming Seth Wins.
He's a PhD student at the University of British Columbia.
He got me thinking like this.
He set out to compare all the things we're told we should do to reduce our carbon footprint, from recycling to mowing your lawn less.
He had someone like me in mind.
Yep, he found that while living car-free saves 2.4 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions per person per year, not having a child saves a much, much bigger 58 tonnes per person per year.
It's because, Wes, the problem with creating humans...
is that they are probably going to create more humans.
And before you know it, you are partly responsible, along with your offspring's other parent and grandparents, for a long line of polluting, consuming human beings.
The result of which is called your carbon legacy.
It was calculated by a previous group of researchers.
They inputted current carbon emissions, fertility rates and life expectancy into a computer model.
Yes, that is a figure for American-level consumption, totaled over many, many generations.
But the 58-tonne figure comes from not looking at Americans, but taking an average of all the carbon legacy figures for developed countries and dividing that number by average life expectancy to get to a figure of 58 tonnes.
And to put that 58 tonnes figure into perspective...
If we want to prevent a rise in global temperatures of more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels, which is what the IPCC and most climatologists think is a reasonable figure to aim for if we want to avoid something really, really bad happening, we need to half global per capita per year emissions in the next 30 years or so from around five tonnes to around 2.5 tonnes.
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