I have studied global warming for a while now, and I assume you all know what it is and what its consequences are, so I'm not going to dumb it down or explain it to you. You may have noticed how one of the key 'slogans' of concerns is what shape we are leaving the planet in, for our children and grandchildren.
But should we even be having children?
The planet now houses over 7.3 billion special human snowflakes, and we recently reached the doomy-gloomy 400ppm carbon dioxide threshold. The latter, probably permanently. And needless to say, this CO2 business is bad news. It's hard to say if the environmental policy goals dreamed up in political chambers all over the world will actually be able to mitigate a further rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, or the disastrous consequences we already have to get ready to face.
So what can we do? Surely, this must be in the hands of large corporations and governments? They're the ones who use everything, right?! Pointing your finger at all the bad men out there isn't going to help, first of all. And to be fair, neither is recycling really. It helps re-use materials and lessens environmental impact to an extent, but why aren't we buying more non-packaged items anyway? If we didn't -want- it, it wouldn't get produced.
"Recycling is like an apology after a punch in the face." - unkown
So what does this have to do with kids? A human produces a gargantuan amount of waste in a lifetime, and their humans after that and after that... According to a scientific paper (1) having ONE less child saves 9,441 tonnes of CO2. And I know of voluntarily childless couples who have been called "selfish". Really? Not in the slightest.
How much can you save if you commit to the 'usual' lifestyle changes, like recycling, driving a fuel efficient car, making your home energy efficient...? A whole 486 tonnes of CO2 emissions. Around 20% of what having one less child could 'save'. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for doing what we can to contribute, but it doesn't seem enough.
Pair this with the frightening amounts of children out in the world that are orphans (140 million children according to (2)), and the conclusion to me personally is that we are rather looking at this in the wrong way. We don't actually have a need to reproduce individually, the world has plenty of us. But we want to. We claim it's our right to do this and that, and consume everything like it's going out of fashion, when it absolutely is not our right to drive this planet into destruction. If we keep going the way we have, we will have nothing to leave for future generations and thus not our descendants either.
I am not saying to anyone to not have kids, but it poses an interesting dilemma. Should we even care? Why should we sacrifice our own priorities? What obligation do we have to change our own lives when others won't?
To child or not to child? That's the question.
(1) http://t.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/pdfs/OSUCarbonStudy.pdf
(2) http://www.sos-usa.org/our-impact/childrens-statistics