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Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of

Climate Change
It will probably make things worse, and there are better ways to contribute
1 hr ago 23 49
I.

A recent poll finds that 39% of young people “feel uncertain” about having children because
of climate change. And sure, people say a lot of things on polls, but people seem to be
talking about this more and more. For example, from NPR: Should We Be Having Kids In
The Age Of Climate Change?

Standing before several dozen students in a college classroom, Travis Rieder tries to
convince them not to have children. Or at least not too many. He's at James Madison
University in southwest Virginia to talk about a "small-family ethic" — to question the
assumptions of a society that sees having children as good, throws parties for expecting
parents, and in which parents then pressure their kids to "give them grandchildren."

Why question such assumptions? The prospect of climate catastrophe. For years, people
have lamented how bad things might get "for our grandchildren," but Rieder tells the
students that future isn't so far off anymore.

Or, from CNBC, Climate Change Is Making People Think Twice About Having Children:

Analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a note to investors last month that the “movement to
not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility
rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline.” Some people are
choosing not to have children because they fear that that doing so will amplify global
warming while others are concerned about extreme weather events their children may
have to endure and the knock-on effects.

See also Guardian, BBC, NYT, etc, etc, etc.

The people profiled in these articles make two arguments. First, climate change will be so
destructive that it would be wrong to bring children into such a bad world. Second, the
more people there are, the more carbon they produce, so having more children will make
climate change worse.

I disagree with both arguments. Starting with the first:

The current scientific consensus, as per leading scientific organizations like the United
Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is that climate change will be very
bad, but not world-endingly bad.

Climate change will cause worse hurricanes, fires, and other disasters. It will lead to
increased spread of invasive species and diseases. It will hit subsistence farmers in poor
agricultural countries very hard, and some of them will starve or become refugees. But it
won’t cause the collapse of civilization. It won’t kill everyone. Life in the First World will
continue, with worse weather and maybe a weaker economy, but more or less the same as
always. The people who say otherwise are going against the majority of climatologists,
climate models, and international bodies.

One way to think of this is to notice that we’ve already gotten about 25-30% of the global
warming we’re likely to see by 2100.

(source)

This has already been pretty bad, with unusually many hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts.
It’s hard to tell how many people have died of climate-change-related causes. Maybe
thousands? Maybe tens of thousands? Probably trillions of dollars have already been lost to
disasters and agricultural problems. But tens of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars
lost is completely compatible with the average person in the First World not really noticing
much of a change to their daily lives. The next 75 years of global warming are going to be
worse than we’ve gotten already, maybe millions of lives lost and tens of trillions of dollars
in damage. In aggregate, they’re going to be a giant disaster. But the average person in the
First World, probably including your child, still won’t notice much of a change to their daily
lives.

I want to focus on sea level rise because it’s easy to quantify and display. Sea levels have
already risen about a quarter of a meter since 1880. This has flooded some low-lying islands,
damaged some coastal cities, and devastated some wetlands and other habitats. But the
average person in the First World hasn’t noticed. The IPCC predicts sea levels will probably
rise another half a meter to a meter by 2100, so maybe 2-4x as much as they’ve risen already.
This also won’t be very noticeable to average people. Here’s San Francisco now (top picture),
after 1m of sea level rise ie the IPCC’s worst-case scenario for 2100 (middle picture) and
after 3m of sea level rise ie the worst-case scenario for 2200 (bottom picture):
 (source: FloodMap.com)

Here’s the same analysis for NYC:

I don’t want to trivialize this. About 1% of SF and 10% of Manhattan are gone by 2200. Lots
of people would lose their homes, and lots of businesses would lose multi-billion-dollar
skyscrapers. But none of this is happening by 2100 (ie during your kids’ lifetimes), and no
serious expert endorses those pictures where the Statue Of Liberty is underwater up to the
shoulders or anything like that. Again, this is going to really suck for a lot of wetlands and
beaches and people with houses in those places, but the average person in the First World
isn’t necessarily even going to notice.

(exception: Miami, New Orleans, Venice, and a handful of other extremely low-lying cities
could sink before 2100 unless extraordinary measures are taken. If you live there, you should
be extremely worried - but instead of giving up on having kids, consider moving somewhere
else.)

What about problems other than sea level rise? One way of looking at this is to think of how
much slack there is in First World systems. For example, California has had lots of droughts
recently, and probably this is related to climate change. Probably those droughts will get
worse in the future, and it’s easy to imagine parched Californians begging for water.

But so far, the droughts haven’t been bad enough that California stopped golf courses from
watering their massive lawns to keep them perfectly green every day. So far, California has
continued using 5.3 million acre-feet per year - more than enough water for every
residential building in the state - to farm alfalfa. Alfalfa gets used to feed cows, and the beef
industry lobby is very powerful, and so far California has preferred to ask citizens to
conserve water rather than make the beef industry stop growing water-hungry alfalfa
plants. But if anyone was actually dying of thirst, or even having enough trouble getting
water that they might be motivated to vote out some politician over it, the government
could redirect the alfalfa water, or the golf course water, or any of a thousand other things
like this, and everyone would have more than enough. You see this everywhere - lots of
resources are being wasted for stupid political reasons. If the political calculus ever
changed - as it will, if these problems ever start inconveniencing privileged First World
citizens - then we can stop wasting the resources, and use them to address the symptoms of
climate change instead.

Am I sure that things will work out like this, rather than end up in some runaway loop
where the planet turns into Venus? Not totally sure. The scientific consensus says it’s very
unlikely this will happen, but I don’t think they’d admit to being they’re not 100% sure
either. I’d guess maybe a 1% chance that we end up like Venus. Is it fair to bring children
into a world with a 1% chance of getting destroyed?

I can’t answer this question, but I would remind you that your parents faced the same
question. Ever since World War II, the world’s been at risk of destruction from nuclear
Armageddon - at some points probably a lot higher than 1% risk - and your parents chose to
have you anyway. I am grateful for my parents’ decisions here and so I conclude that having
children in a world with a 1% risk of apocalypse is fine.

I think point is true more generally. Most of the people profiled in the articles above are
well-off, educated Americans. I think it’s important to remember that well-off, educated
Americans are in the top 1% of people today in terms of how good their children’s lives are
likely to be, and probably in the top 0.01% throughout history. Five hundred years ago, an
average child had about a 40% chance of dying of some terrible disease before they were five
years old. If they survived, they would be chattel property of some lord who would make
them do backbreaking farm labor their entire lives without any hope of earning more than
subsistence wages. If female, she could be married off against her will to some random man
10-20 years older than she was, with the legal right to rape her as much as he wanted. If
male, he might be drafted to serve as a literal pawn in some border war, and die of dysentery
on the way to being bayonetted by some enemy. If gay, they could be burned alive; if black,
enslaved; if poor, left to starve. Much of the world is still pretty similar to this! Meanwhile,
your child is likely to live in a stable home, get spoiled and bought a thousand different
kinds of toys, go to a good college, and make well above median US income. Even quite a lot
of global warming-related suffering doesn’t take them out of the luckiest 1% of people in
history.

If you think privileged modern Americans shouldn’t have children now because of quality-
of-life issues, you implicitly believe that nobody in the Third World, or nobody before 1900,
should ever have had children. This isn’t necessarily wrong. There’s a group of philosophers
called “antinatalists” who believe nobody should ever have kids because life is suffering.
These people are at least consistent. If you’re not one of them, I think the quality-of-life
argument for not having kids now is pretty weak.

II.

The other argument is the moral one. Yes, climate change will probably mostly affect poor
subsistence farmers - so not your own children. But isn’t it still immoral to have children,
knowing that they’re making the problem worse for others?

I think no. How many people are you expecting to not have children because of global
warming? 1%? 2%? 1-2% of people changing their individual decisions will do basically
nothing. What we actually need is concerted government action.

But your choice not to have children makes that government action less likely to happen.
Suppose 1-2% of Democrats stop having children because they’re worried about climate
change. Meanwhile, Republicans don’t care about this and have just as many children as
ever. Since children tend to share their parents’ political beliefs, this skews elections in
favor of the Republicans, who will prevent strong government action.

(sorry for being so America-centric here - other people can figure out how this applies to
their own countries)

I did an analysis to try to figure out how much this matters, and I predict that if 5% of
people in the last generation had avoided having children because of climate change, that
would have been enough to switch the outcome of the 2020 presidential election from Biden
to Trump. Remember, most presidential elections are very close. So even though 5% fewer
kids will only decrease carbon emissions by 1-2%, it will decrease Democrats’ chance of
winning elections by a lot more.

It feels kind of mercenary to say you should let your decision about having kids hinge on
how it affects national politics. Normally I wouldn’t recommend it. But if you’re already
going to let your decision hinge on how it affects climate change, it does seem relevant that
(through national politics) it would probably make climate change worse instead of better.

For any percent of people not having children because of climate change, this affects the
climate some linear amount, and the political calculus some much larger amount (because it
affects a razor-thin majority). But this is just the most quantifiable part of a more general
argument. The future is going to need more climate scientists, climate activists, renewable
energy engineers, and climate-friendly politicians. Not all of those people are going to come
from families that care a lot about climate change. Some of them will be born to climate
deniers and change their minds. But that’s an uphill battle, and it’s the people who care a lot
about climate change who have the best chance of raising those people. If you take the few
percent of people most committed to stopping climate change, and remove them from the
next generation, that doesn’t look good for the next generation.

III.

Finally, I want to respond to the news articles that say having a kid will create 60 tons of
carbon a year and be a disaster for the planet. You can find these at The Guardian, Yale,
Euro News, etc.

I think most people would be surprised by the methodology of the study involved. It
assumed that you would have a child, that child would have children of their own, those
children would have children, et cetera. Each of those children would produce carbon,
meaning that in theory your decision to have a kid could produce infinite carbon. But then
they assumed that due to declining reproduction rates, maybe the chain of having kids
would end at some future point, producing a very large but finite amount of carbon. Then
they divided all these generations of future carbon production by the number of years you
personally would live, and said it would produce 60 tons of carbon per year.

There’s a lot wrong with this study. For one thing, almost nobody who reads it realizes that
this is about the amount of carbon produced by a vast clan of descendants, and that an
actual kid produces more like 1 ton of carbon yearly while they’re still living at home. For
another thing, it assumes people in the future will produce exactly as much carbon as we do,
which is almost certainly false - carbon emissions per person have been decreasing rapidly
since 2000, and are on track to decrease more. Finally, it covertly assumes that global
warming won’t cause too many problems - if it leads to disaster in 2050, your kid won’t be
having a giant clan of descendants who keep on producing 2010s-levels of carbon all the
way to 2100 and beyond.

Even the scientist who wrote this study said in an interview that she still believes people
should have kids if they want to:

SS [interviewer]: What I think is really interesting is that despite you and your colleague
being the ones who ran this study that produced this finding, you still say that people
should totally have kids if they really want to be parents. So how do you square that
circle?

KN [scientist]: One thing it’s really important to realize is that population is actually
irrelevant to solving the climate crisis. And the reason for that is that we only have the
next few years to solve the climate crisis reasonably well.

We know that we have this limited carbon budget that determines how much warming
we’re going to experience. We’re really close to scary and dangerous limits right now.
And we know what we have to do, which is leave fossil fuels in the ground and switch to
regenerative and sustainable agriculture. That’s what our job is basically in this next
decade.

So in that sense, creating new people? Well, yes, of course, it is true that more people
will consume more resources and cause more greenhouse gas emissions. But that’s not
really the relevant timeframe for actually stabilizing the climate, given that we have this
decade to cut emissions in half.

Another interesting way to look at this is: how much money would it take to offset the
carbon cost of your future child? That is, you can build machines that suck carbon out of
the air - how much would it cost to use these machines to suck up exactly as much carbon
as your future child will emit over their lifetime?
The average child emits about 1 ton of carbon during childhood. The average adult emits
about 15 tons of carbon during adulthood. But if emissions decline at the same rate they’ve
been declining recently, by the time your child is in their 20s that’ll be down to 7.5 tons.
Also, location matters - the people of Wyoming emit 100 tons each, and the people in DC
only 4 tons each (rural lifestyles require more carbon than urban ones). I’m going to predict
your future child is more likely to live in a city than in Wyoming, and round off their adult
carbon output at 5 tons/year. Suppose your child lives for 90 years - 20 years at home, 70 as
an adult. Then their total lifetime carbon emission is 20*1 + 70*5 = 370 tons.

Right now the people with giant carbon-sucking machines charge $1000/ton to remove
carbon. There are prototype machines already working that can do it for $500, so that price
point should be available shortly. There seems to be a Moore’s Law for this kind of thing,
and when people calculate it out it looks like it’s going to get cheaper pretty quickly:

(source)

So by the time your child is an adult, carbon removal will probably cost about $50/ton.

So 20 tons of near-term carbon offset at $500/ton, plus 350 tons of long-term carbon offset
at $50/ton = $10000 + $17500. Round up for uncertainty, and my guess is you can offset your
child’s lifetime carbon emissions for about $30,000.
This is a lot of money, but most of the people considering not having children for climate
reasons are pretty well-off. Most privileged parents are already resigned to having to pay
$100,000 - $200,000 to get their kid into the best college; surely they should also be willing
to pay $30,000 to let their kid exist at all.

But also - how little confidence in your own parenting skills do you have to have, to believe
that your child will add less than $30,000 in value to the world? Even if you’re not an Ivy
Leaguer and you don’t have that kind of money, if you want kids at all you have to believe
they’re going to add something to the world, right? Maybe it’ll be as a climate change
activist or environmental scientist, maybe it will be in some totally different field, but if you
don’t think your kid is going to make the world a better place in some way, why bother?

I realize this is not really as sober an argument as some of the others, but those others were
my attempts to make sober arguments. This is the one I actually believe.

In conclusion, climate change will probably be very bad for the world, but not in a way that
will have catastrophic effects on your child in particular. Cancelling plans to have kids
because of climate change will decrease emissions a very limited amount, while having a
disproportionately large effect on the government’s ability to pass climate change related
legislation. A less destructive way of assuaging your guilt over having children would be to
donate some money to climate charities or carbon offsets in your kid’s name. Nobody who
really wants a kid should avoid having one because of climate-related concerns.

23 49
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Discussion
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Chronological

5 new replies
ramparen 1 hr ago
No one really does it because of climate change imo, that is just a neat excuse to avoid the
responsibility and limitations that being a parent brings into your life
Reply
2 new replies
Scott Alexander 1 hr ago
AUTHOR
"No one" is a strong claim, and given that eg ethical vegetarians definitely exist, it sure
seems like people are willing to make extremely big and difficult life changes to stand up
for their environmental views. I agree we should sometimes be cynical about people's
real motives, but I have also seen a lot of people get burned by totally failing to believe
that other people can possibly believe what they claim to believe.
Reply
ramparen 1 hr ago
Fair point, what I meant was most of them, in other words this is made into a bigger
issue than it is when the discussion should be around what are the reasons so many
people would pick up such an easy to refute excuse. What I have seen is a mix of
cultural and economic disincentives that push this trend.
Reply
Jerdenizen 58 min ago
Even if it were true that "no one" really does it because of climate change, I think it's fair
to push back with a polite "well, actually..." since I imagine this rhetoric makes a lot of
people who have/intend to have children feel at least a little guilty.
No they can be like "ah, but if I raise them all to care about the climate, I can have an
exponentially increasing impact over time" and get on with their life.
Reply
ramparen 46 min ago
I admin I might underestimate the level of conditioning people in the US have, but
my train of thought is that if this is just an excuse, they will just find another one if
they can't back this one up. And excuses not to have kids are a plentiful resource in
most of western societies.
Also you have to admit that last line is chilling "I should have kids so that they can
advance my political/religious agenda through "educating them" since birth",
reminds me of the crusades lol.
Reply
Jon Writes consider this: · 55 min ago
I am no one, and this article has actually cause me to rethink my stance
Reply
ramparen 51 min ago
So can we use you as an example? How much savings do you have (or do you have
debts), what is your relationship status, age and career?
Reply
1415926535 40 min ago
 exactly what I was going to say - a lot of people are actually too lazy to have kids and
use climate change as an excuse :)
Reply
Kayla 18 min ago
Or “feeling uncertain”because climate change is a proxy for all the other reasons one
might feel uncertain about having kids—and that particular reason makes one look good
in certain circles, so is more likely to be cited.
Reply
wombatlife 1 hr ago
"The people who say otherwise are going against the majority of climatologists, climate
models, and international bodies."
I think this is a bad argument for something, especially given the increasingly high
reputational costs of publicly going against this consensus. What do you think based on your
review of the evidence?
Reply
Scott Alexander 1 hr ago
AUTHOR
This is mostly a rhetorical post intended to convince people who are planning not to have
kids because of climate change. I think these people trust the IPCC and so it's fair to use
the IPCC's conclusions when talking to them without backing them up. If I were writing to
try to convince global warming skeptics, I would be more careful about explaining why
they should trust IPCC. I personally do trust IPCC but agree that it would be important to
justify that if I was talking to people who might not.
Reply
Mark Louis 1 hr ago
Housing & education costs and inflation are much better reasons to give up on having
children.
Reply
1 new reply
Loren Christopher 1 hr ago
Particularly for Scott's heavily EA audience, right? I'm paying $25k/yr just for daycare,
which amounts to failing to save multiple lives *every year* through charitable donation
just so I can have a kid. I guess you can argue that my kid is likely to become a net payer
to EA causes, but I'm not sure the math on that works out. Actually, having typed that, I
feel sure someone in EA has done the analysis already. Anyone have a good link?
Reply
Mark 54 min ago
You could say the same thing about spending $25k on a car though. I think of EA as
“giving what you can” and how to maximize the good you can do with your surplus
 wealth, not depriving yourself of achieving your own life goals such as having kids if
that is one of them.
Reply
Mr. AC 32 min ago
As a Third-Worlder this feels to me insane as well. Cannot every single person inside the
US see the seething, teeming masses of people outside of your country yearning to get
in? Crossing the border in such numbers sp that literal walls across the desert have to be
built? Risking persecution, jail, deportation? People paying thousands of dollars to fake-
marry a US citizen for a chance to move? The Green card lottery?
So are people in every single less rich, less developed, more unequal country not
supposed to have kids as well?
Reply
JBB 29 min ago
Spot on Reply
Alex Alda 1 hr ago
I don't plan on having children ever, and not because of climate change, so may I go on a little
tangent here?
You make an interesting point here that the 60 ton carbon cost per child is not actually
calculated only for the child, but for their descendants too. I didn't know that.
So does it mean that not having children is NOT the best decision one can make, in an
environmental sense? I always thought deciding not having kids had more impact than
deciding to recycle, or to use public transport etc.
Reply
Scott Alexander 1 hr ago
AUTHOR
See https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/carbon-costs-quantified , especially footnote
25, for Much More Than You Wanted To Know on this topic.
Reply
Alex Alda 1 hr ago
Thanks! Reply
Jerdenizen 1 hr ago
It probably still comes out ahead of recycling, which may well be worse for the
environment (lots of energy required to turn plastic back into new plastic, even assuming
that it doesn't accidently end up in the ocean while on the way to the recycling plant in
Malaysia), but it's hard to really know since we're comparing current life choices to
hypothetical future life choices in a (presumably) more environmentally friendly
economy.
Reply
Jona Sassenhagen 1 hr ago
My question to everyone abstaining from procreation for the purpose of saving the planet is:
whom are you saving the planet FOR?
Reply
NJC 1 hr ago
Let the natural selection take over. Anyone who is ideologically brainwashed enough to
consider kids as ' pollution ' shouldn't be having kids anyway.
Reply
Roxolan 23 min ago
Willingness to take ethical arguments seriously and make sacrifices according to their
conclusions is not a trait I want purged from the gene pool. (Though, this is just for the
sake of argument. In practice, the time scales involved here are too small to have an
evolutionary impact before this particular ethical argument is made irrelevant one way or
another.)
Reply
1 new reply

Mark 1 hr ago
Great article. On the first point, I would add that even Third World living conditions are much
better on average today than 50 years ago even notwithstanding climate change, with higher
incomes, life expectancy, and even self-reported happiness in the majority of the Third World.
The effects of economic development far outweigh the harms of climate change, which are
real but much smaller than what past generations of humans had to face.
And America today compared to what almost all humans have experienced is so good that I
would feel morally wrong not having children because of the lost potential positive utility.
Reply
JBB 54 min ago
Great points. Let’s assume one in a million kids might have the intellect to graduate
college and help develop some technology that would really move the needle on climate
change. 140 of those kids are born worldwide every year. I would suggest the more of
them born in the first world, the better the chance they will graduate and develop the
answers we all need. Rationally, if it’s answers we want, western parents should be
upping their game
Reply
JBB 1 hr ago
Raising children is by an overwhelming majority of opinion the most fulfilling and important
thing you can do with your life. To choose to not do so on the pretext of potentially reducing
the small risk of future hardship due to climate change by an immeasurably tiny amount,
would be a mistake.
Besides, why save the planet if no one is around to enjoy it? If the answer is to allow other
people to enjoy it, then why them and not you. The meaning of life is literally to propagate
your genes. The satisfaction you might occasionally feel that hundreds of other children from
poor countries who live their lives completely untroubled by any feelings of responsibility for
the climate will be massively offset by your loneliness as you face solitary dotage.
Reply
BronxZooCobra 44 min ago
You raise an interesting point. In my experience the more educated and affluent a family
the more likely the kids are to end up in different parts of the country (or world) due to
educational and career opportunities. That could be part of why avoiding a solitary
dotage carries less weight.
Reply
JBB 33 min ago
That’s the thing with regrets in old age. When you have them, it’s too late.
I read somewhere that families with real inter generational wealth are much more
likely to have multiple children than the educated upper middle class. Working class
people also tend to have larger families. Why is it that highly educated upper middle
class couples have fewer kids?
Reply
Sable GM Writes Sable GM's game mastering advice · 53 min ago
Your logic is faulty in part 2. Yes, theoretically, if it was a binary decision between kid/no kid
with no other changes in your life whatsoever, then it would hold. But this is never the case.
Kid sucks out, optimistically, 2-3 years of productive life outside of work, either from you or
your partners or some split in between. Pessimistically, much more than that. That's a
massive investment that you make in order to bring ONE voter into the world. Compare that
to, for example, trying to convince your friends - who are intending to have kids regardless -
to show up to votes and to vote appropriately. If you have spent several whole years doing
that, as a dedicated second-job more or less, I would wager you would get more than one
new voter convinced (with stacking effects on their kids, naturally). And these are, most
likely, your most productive years - while you are young and full of energy and enthusiasm.
On top of that, they suck out absolutely enormous amounts of money - money you could
spend much more efficiently. Sure you could spend something like 400k dollars raising a kid,
OR you can donate those 400k dollars. Return on investment doing basically anything at all
with that money is going to be ridiculously better than childrearing.
Have kids if that's what you are into, but from a pure cold cost/benefit standpoint, it's a
terrible idea.
Reply
1 new reply
JBB 30 min ago
Kids = commitment. Why would I trust a person who has no skin in the game to act in the
best interests of society? Donate money all you like, but if the only thing restraining you
from nihilism is a commitment to EA, then good luck.
Reply
Sable GM Writes Sable GM's game mastering advice · 23 min ago
I bloody well live in this world. How am I supposed to have more skin in the game
than the literal 100% of skin I have.
Next you will say that kids make me have skin in the game after my death, but that
is totally false, they just make me make sure my kids will have a good life. Somehow
dictators in various places don't try to fix their own governments because they have
kids, they just make sure their kid will inherit their stuff and call it a day.
This is, frankly, a fallacious argument.
Reply
JBB 20 min ago
No, it’s a comparative argument. You care a lot about the environment. But you
know full well you won’t be around to see any really nasty effects.
So even if you are a moral, stable actor, you are less likely to have the same
motivation as someone who is leaving children to live in the world.
Reply
Sable GM Writes Sable GM's game mastering advice · 25 min ago
Actually also faulty in part 1, unless you show that costs from temperature rise are linear.
I am pretty sure they aren't, so talking about "30% of the heating" is highly misleading.
Things like larger floods and longer drought seasons and such are very much not linear
in their impact versus size, and can very easily just get to the point where mitigation
strategies we have right now just straight up don't work. IIRC Australia already has an
issue where they can't do controlled forest burns because weather conditions never
allow for one to happen.
Claiming that first world people will be separated from these changes is also highly
misleading. You aren't an island. If "subsistence farmers" in Congo aren't having a great
time, they aren't going to be making a lot of food for the locals. If there is no food for the
locals, locals will go into farming as opposed to e.g. mining cobalt (half of worldwide
supply btw), and if there is no cobalt, there won't be any microchips being made in
China, and no computers on the shelves in the US. Crises in poor non-western countries
totally can royally fuck you, in ways that you (and your children) will feel very strongly.
It's also not correct to claim that there will always be slack that could be redirected to
solve climate problems if political pressure gets too severe. Yes, this is a large effect,
and it will take place. But even relatively large effects can be overwhelmed. E.g. the
world is having a bit of an energy crisis recently due to several crises compounding on
one another. An easy solution to it would have been having more nuclear plants. But you
 can't build those overnight, you need several years. So even if political pressure
suddenly turns in that direction, you can be stuck not having any solution for years.
Reply
Steve Hart 46 min ago
In this community, I bet I am something of an outlier, as a parent to four children. Actually, I'd
be curious what the demographics look like (a suggestion for a future survey). Being a parent
is not easy - it affects the time you have to devote to your career; you will most likely travel a
lot less; you most definitely sleep a lot less; you will have a lot of anxiety and stress and other
mental health concerns. And yet, parenthood is also capable of creating some of the most
unique and supernal joys. Interacting with and teaching your children provides a sense of
fulfillment that is hard to match through any other endeavor.
More to the point, I have always made climate-friendly lifestyle and reasoning an integral part
of our family life. Unlike virtually all of their suburban friends who get shuttled to school, my
kids walk. They see me take the bike and trailer to get groceries (for 6 people, it's quite a
load). While we eat some meat, we eat it pretty sparingly. We spend a lot of time cultivating
our own little vegetable garden. We avoid buying new things whenever possible and basically
always have the motto of seeing if we can use anything for something useful before it joins
the landfill. We limit our travel, and when we do recreate, we often opt for simple outings in
the nearby natural world, rather than engaging in some resource-heavy travel and recreation.
My hope (my plan, even) is that my children will each have a negative carbon net-influence
(direct use + effective change) in the world through their lives. And it is about more than
carbon. Access to clean water, clean air, and other important environmental resources are
limited as well. Obviously they will consume some amount of resources themselves. But if
they can become part of a force that helps convince society to carefully care for this
absolutely miraculous planet that we live on, then I trust that they will, in all of its cliché-ness
glory, make the world a better place.
Reply
Mr. AC 42 min ago
Thank you Scott. Someone needed to write this post, and I'm glad it's you.
I've always though all of this is blindingly obvious and I'm a bit shocked every time when I
hear similar arguments in "polite company". Even if even 5% of people are subconsciously
convinced by this, it's a demographic tragedy of planetary proportions, the impact of which
will be felt throughout the future.
I always feel like if I say "hold on, that makes no sense", I might be branded a climate denying
crackpot since "everyone knows" "Mother Earth" is "suffering" from "overpopulation" etc etc
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Mike H 25 min ago
At some point you have to help these people, though. There's nowhere near enough
skepticism about climatology in the world. We need at least 1000x more given the many
 reliability problems within it. Post-COVID you may find moderates are more willing to
consider the possibility that scientists aren't 100% trustworthy all the time.
Reply
alesziegler Writes alesziegler’s blog · 37 min ago
I wonder how much of this "I am not having kids because of climate change" is going on
because it is not very socially acceptable to just declare "I am not having kids because I just
don´t want to".
Reply
rbn 37 min ago
Besides having your own children, you can also adopt. This has a much lower incremental
carbon cost, and whether or not you adopt these children will still exist so the question of
"bringing a child into a horrible future" doesn't need to influence your thinking. Also, if you
can provide a loving and stable household, you can increase their chances of becoming a
happy and functional adult who contributes a lot to society. That could be an ideal
compromise.
Or would it? It's hard to say without looking at a lot of numbers.
Reply
Michael Greenberg 36 min ago
I'm all for Warmists ceasing to propagate.
Reply
Lizard Man 34 min ago
Why do you want people to have kids so badly? Is it because you've been reading too many
things about how ageing demographics hurt economies? I'm not interested in having kids for
you; the economy is already screwed, climate change is already bad, and I'm not part of this
demographic that will bear kids into a comfortable united states lifestyle. What do you want
from me?
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deleted 31 min ago
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Lizard Man 31 min ago
The title of this is literally "Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate
Change"
I'm not saying he cares about me personally but it's addressed at people like me.
Reply
2 new replies
JBB 25 min ago
Having kids is literally the meaning of life.
 Aside from that, the only thing that will solve global warming is application of
human intellect. Where are we going to get that from?
Reply
Drifter Writes A Crank's Notes · 30 min ago
Since you didn't mention you might not be aware: although it wasn't about climate change,
there actually was a very similar movement against having children 50 years ago. There is an
All of the Family episode about it. I think Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" and Club of Rome
calculations and such were behind it. If there hadn't been, would Trump have won in 2016?
Reply
Duane Stiller 27 min ago
Yes, some parts of the world will suffer, but other parts like Canada and Siberia will improve.
I’m not sure the we fully understand the pros and cons of this change. Finally, it is important
to remember that, on whole, there is no apocalypse.
Reply
Kyle M 26 min ago
I looked into this during a previous California drought and my (very limited) understanding is
that alfalfa is an important part of crop rotation in California because it sucks salt out of the
ground very effectively. CA starts with high salt content and other crops raise the salt content
more, which risks “salting the land” and wrecking the soil. I’m sure there are other crop mixes
and intensiveness that could work, but the issue isn’t alfalfa specifically.
Reply
Peter Gordon 23 min ago
How about some skepticism re 80-year forecasts. Are there any 1940s forecasts for the
2020s that we now cite as near useful? Forecasts for 2100 presume that we know the future
of technology? What are the odds?
Reply
1 new reply

James Miller 17 min ago

The more productive adults in the world, the greater the world's wealth. As we get richer,
more will be spent on all kinds of technological research including research that mitigates
climate change.
Low fertility rates are one of the biggest economic challenges of rich countries. Since
concern about the environment is a normal good meaning you care more about it the richer
you get, anything making us relatively poorer will cause us to care less on average about
climate change.
Reply
Ran Writes Book Review · 16 min ago
The offset argument is so obvious that I don’t even understand what the counterargument is.
People must assume that it’s impossible to offset emissions.
Reply
1 new reply

MG 16 min ago
My sense is that the people who answer "I am choosing not to have children because of
climate change" disproportionately belong to the very-liberal group of "I am a 35 year-old-
woman without children yet, and am convincing myself that this was a good conscious
decision."
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Frank 14 min ago
Thank you very much for this article. I am having a hard time lately, and worrying about
climate change and how it will affect the future life of my son often made me feel bad,
helpless and even irresponsible for having kids at all. I do not have the time or brain to argue
with anybody of this friendly community, but I feel obliged to tell you that your thoughts on
this topic helped me feel better. Thank you very much!
Reply

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