Should We Have Smaller Families To Save The Planet?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service with me, Wesley Stephens. Now this week, we're looking at a controversial topic, so much so that one of the academics we're going to hear from has received numerous death threats. So no death threats, please, listeners. But here's the question.
Is having children the biggest individual action affecting your carbon footprint?
Is having children the worst thing you can possibly do for the environment? Yes, it's not cheery talk about family. We're talking about cutting down on the family. Lucy Proctor's been looking into this. Hi, Lucy.
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.
That's quite a harsh way to look at your kids.
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.
The kind of person that might type in, what are the 10 most important things I can do to prevent climate change? and who are actually looking for a top ten list.
And the top action an individual can take to reduce their emissions is to have fewer children.
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.
Wow. In comparison, that 58 tonnes seems like a huge figure.
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.
How did Seth Wynes calculate '58 tonnes' and what is a carbon legacy?
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.
The model sort of project's one generation of lineage. Maybe one person has a child. That child goes on to have three grandchildren. Those grandchildren go on to have five grandchildren. And you add up the total amount of emissions attributed to that whole lineage. And then you run the model again. And perhaps this next time it goes on for 100 generations. And they run that model 10,000 times. And they take an average. And for the United States, the average CO2 emissions is 9,441 tons.
So each child actually leads to 9,500 tonnes of carbon. That's not a big... That's a huge figure.
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.
OK, but I'm guessing that not everyone is going to agree with the way that Seth's done his calculations.
Well, first of all, there's a split in the world of academics who look at climate change, roughly between those advocating for individual actions, like reducing family size, and those looking for a big technological fix, something that will free us from our addiction to fossil fuels. Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus is in the latter camp.
I'm somewhat controversial because I do accept that global warming is a real problem and something that we need to fix.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:05–0:22
2
Is having children the biggest individual action affecting your carbon footprint?
0:22–2:02
3
How did Seth Wynes calculate '58 tonnes' and what is a carbon legacy?
2:02–4:35
4
How do models attribute emissions across generations to estimate a child's lifetime impact?
4:35–10:17