Whether remaining childless decreases your carbon footprint is going to depend to some extent on what you do with the money you save by remaining childless. This idea floated vaguely around in my head the first time I heard the population reduction argument, then recently I read a clear statement of it in an academic journal (I think the article was by two guys named Wapner and Willoughby, in Ethics and International Affairs). The authors point out that the money you put in the bank doesn't just sit there; it gets loaned out to other people, possibly to help them engage in projects that enlarge THEIR carbon footprints. I would add that the spending decisions you might make once you decide not to have kids (e.g. to travel more, buy a boat, whatever) might not increase your footprint as much as having a kid would, but it might still increase it a lot.

I'm not sure how the math works out in the end in either the savings or the extra spending case, but it's worth noting that simply choosing to remain childless won't automatically green your life beyond reproach. And since you can't direct your bank to only lend for projects you approve of--but the government can make rules about energy use and emissions that apply to everyone--there might be an argument here for taking a less personal, more political approach to environmental protection.

That idea is nutty.

A far more pertinent calculation is the impact not just of one's direct child, but of all the children that child will have and the children's children that child will have and so on into the future in an endless chain.

If you have no child, you don't just reduce the carbon imprint of one person, your one child, thereby halving your total lifetime impact in one stroke, but assuming that your child has as many children as the average person (the only responsible assumption) and so on down the line with each descendent, you are actually responsible for reducing the impact of THOUSANDS of lives, each with a carbon imprint about the same as your own.

So, if you do all the silly little things the ecomagazines suggest like turning off lights, recycling plastic bags and so on, but don't change your reproductive behavior, you will reduce your own impact by about 5% or so. Meanwhile, since you have chosen to produce these children, each of which will do as much damage in their life as you have in your ENTIRE life, and, you will have set in train a series of carbon imprints which must be assumed to extend indefinitely into the future, each new human in which will have an imprint equal to your entire lifetime imprint.

Assuming that you have one child and each child has one, you are merely creating a chain with thousands of times the impact of everything else you do in your lifetime.

However, assuming that you have one child and then all your descendents have the average number of children, which is the only responsible assumption, and the average is over 2.1, which it is now in the US, you are setting off a bomb which will explode slowly but surely into the future. You are creating MILLIONS of times the impact of your entire life, extending out into the future in an expanding chain.

I know one Mennonite woman who claims 75 great-grandchildren. We are talking a huge BOMB here. If humans have 2.3 children, as Americans do, you are still going to see gradual but eventually MASSIVE increases in human carbon imprint.

Eventually, of course, it has to stop. At SOME point, regardless of technological progress, human population has to stop expanding and start shrinking. Technology can increase the total human load at the maximum point, a dubious achievement, but it cannot expand the supportive capacity of the globe indefinitely without end.

However, if you simply forgo childbearing, you will have in one stroke reduced your carbon imprint (including, of course, the carbon imprint of your sex life) to one one-thousandths of what it would have been if you had had a child.

The math of this is unassailable. You either participate in the future population of the earth will a series of humans extending forward in time indefinitely (until SOMEONE is childless and stops the wreckage) or you stop that indefinite series in your own life by being childless.

Or, simply DON'T DOUBLE the indefinite series extending forward in time by HAVING ONE CHILD NOT TWO.

Duh.

What is wrong with people that they can't see this?

They are thinking with their gonads, that's what's wrong with them. Gonad juice has saturated their brains and they just can't think straight.

Jan VanDenBerg

You don't have to put money you "save" in the bank.

There are plenty of green things you can do with the money saved. Like, buy solar panels, and solar power company stock. Build a house that is more energy efficient. Buy land and grow your own food.

Right -- the people who don't have any children have been to Europe six times and Bali and Nepal. They drive a bigger car. They have a larger house- Their carbon footprint is huge.

I see your argument, but it is just like the 1960's zero population argument. Back in the day they were sure that our planet was on the brink of not being able to feed the many billions of people who would be on the planet in 2000. However, people the world over have decreased the number of children they have. Most without government regulation. (China is an exception). Agriculture has been able to increase crop yields that no one had envisioned half a century ago.

By the way, Russia announced today that they would give their citizens bonuses and a new refrigerator if they have a baby nine months from now. Their population has drastically decreased. The younger generation cannot support the older generation much longer.

Haven't any of you taken an economics class and learned that the government hasn't put Social Security in the bank for the next generation. They have spent it thinking that the upcoming generation would support the older generation by their SS funds. That will not happen.

Yes, and if you tax larger families for having more children, will they then tax the people who are childless because they didn't have anyone to fund their SS?