Professor Claims Families Need To Have Less Children To Reduce Emissions, Says They Are ‘Degrading The Environment’

Trevor Hedberg, Assistant Professor of Practice, W.A. Franke Honors College/Philosophy Department, at the University of Arizona, recently published an opinion piece in The Conversation titled, “Children are expensive – not just for parents, but the environment – so how many is too many?”

Hedberg gets into the philosophical reasons why people ought to consider having less children, claiming that one less child saves metrics tons of additional carbon being pumped into the atmosphere, and more of them would just further erode the current conditions even more so.

Here are some of the salient points from his piece (citations included):

People born in the future stand to inherit a planet in the midst of a global ecological crisis. Natural habitats are being decimated, the world is growing hotter, and scientists fear we are experiencing the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history.

Under such circumstances, is it reasonable to bring a child into the world?

My philosophical research deals with environmental and procreative ethics – the ethics of choosing how many children to have or whether to have them at all. Recently, my work has explored questions where these two fields intersect, such as how climate change should affect decision-making about having a family.

Procreation is often viewed as a personal or private choice that should not be scrutinized. However, it is a choice that affects others: the parents, the children themselves and the people who will inhabit the world alongside those children in the future. Thus, it is an appropriate topic for moral reflection.

[…] But the decision to have a child – to create another person who will most likely adopt a similar lifestyle to your own – vastly outweighs the impact of these activities. Based on the average distance a car travels each year, people in developed countries can save the equivalent of 2.4 metric tons of CO2 emissions each year by living without a vehicle, according to one literature review. For comparison, having one fewer child saves 58.6 metric tons each year.So, if you think you are obligated to do other activities to reduce your impact on the environment, you should limit your family size, too.

[…] For example, statistician Paul Murtaugh and scientist Michael Schlax attempted to estimate the “carbon legacy” tied to a couple’s choice to procreate. They estimated the total lifetime emissions of individuals living in the world’s most populous 11 countries. They also assumed a parent was responsible for all emissions tied to their genetic lineage: all of their own emissions, half their children’s emissions, one-quarter of their grandchildren’s emissions, and so on.If emissions stayed similar to 2005 levels for several generations, an American couple having one fewer child would save 9,441 metric tons of CO2-equivalent, according to their calculations. […] But since climate change may harm billions of people over the next millennium, this person may be responsible for the severe suffering, or even death, of one or two future people…