so, it looks like a lot
in 2017, there was a climate change paper that caused some hand-wringing by comparing the greenhouse gas (ghg) impacts of individual actions with their relative coverage in educational materials. the thrust of the paper was supposed to be that the most costly individual activities (left side of the chart below) aren’t the ones that get covered in schoolbooks (mostly right side of the chart below). the fuss however, was all about the authors’ novel inclusion of the choice to have a biological child as a lifestyle decision with ghg footprint consequences.
fig 1. average emission savings of individual activities for members of different developed countries. credit: wynes and nicholas, 2017
more precisely, the authors described the amount of ghg that average individuals in different countries could offset through the choice to have one fewer child. they ranked this against other high-impact offsetting behaviors for the average individual in these countries like taking one fewer transatlantic flight per year, going vegan, or buying an electric car.
here’s the original paper
here are citing articles from google scholar
here’s a book-length treatment of the topic
understandably, many people objected to the article—reading into it an implication (intended or not) that people’s personal and frequently-lauded decisions to have children might not be as praiseworthy as they’d have otherwise thought. after all, there seem to be plenty of reasons to procreate and raise a family, so even if we agree with the authors’ assessment, how are those sensitive to their ghg footprints supposed take the authors’ data about the impact of procreative decisions and weigh it against everything else that seems to count in favor of having kids?
answering that question depends upon how we account for the apparent shared responsibility for children’s ghg emissions. it’s intuitive that both parents and their children are in some sense responsible for children’s lifelong ghg emissions, but we can’t count that towards both of their carbon footprints without double-counting. assuming there is some way to account for their intuitive overlapping responsibility without double-counting, we can then ask what we are to make of the extra responsibility for ghg emissions that parents seem to bear.
many will surely feel that all the considerations which count in favor of procreation still far outweigh any liability posed by procreation’s marginal ghg impact; others will feel like it points to alternative family planning decisions, like adopting or having fewer children; but some still may be drawn to anti-natalism based on these arguments.
i want to spell out a short solution to the double-counting problem based on recent work published in the journal of ethics, and then build upon it to offer a way to “offset” any additional liabilities some will believe parents bear because of their decision to have kids.
solution to the double-counting problem
double-counting problems occur when we count the same thing twice as belong to a particular measure. in this case, counting a child’s lifetime ghg emissions as part of their ghg footprint and counting it as part of their parents’ footprints too (in addition to the parents direct, personal ghg emissions). this double-counting is a problem because we are counting the same emissions twice, and end up with a higher total count of emission than what actually was produced.
in certain cases, double-counting problems just need technical solutions—like the double-counting problem currently hanging up section 6 of the paris climate accord. in this case though, we need more than a technical solution: we need a conceptual one.
that’s because on the one hand we want to say that parents and their offspring cannot both be responsible for the offspring’s ghg emissions, otherwise we count the same emissions twice when we should only be counting them once. on the other hand, we plainly recognize that parents are counterfactually responsible for their children’s emissions; if they hadn’t had the children, the emissions would not have resulted.
one initial solution to the double-counting problem proposed a cutover date—say 18 years old—after which a child is fully responsible for their emissions and a parent is not.
this solution has some nice features. most notably, it coheres with our other legal institutions for dealing with legal responsibility of independent agents. we widely accept that once children reach legal adulthood, their parents are no longer legally liable for their actions even if they may still be counterfactually responsible. we also usually don’t ask parents to reconsider their procreative decisions because their future children might become menaces to society, because we assume these possibilities are exceedingly low.
with ghg emissions though, the likelihood that children will have a significant negative ghg impact is exceedingly high, so the legal-liability analogy starts to lose some of its utility. it also doesn’t seem to get the intuition right that parents still bear some responsibility for their childrens’ emissions even after they are adults. we can pump the intuition even more by suggesting that parents encouraged highly-consumptive behavior with significant ghg impact—like international air travel—and that their children carry these behaviors well into adulthood.
other solutions, like the one published in august, 2020 by philosophers felix pinkert and martin sticker try to accommodate our intuition that parents bear extra responsibility for future emissions by distinguishing between two kinds of responsibilities: the footprint measure on the one hand, which is subject to certain set of evaluation conditions; and an impact measure on the other hand subject to a different set. while this distinction is handy, and seems to track our intuitions about responsibility for emissions we cause “directly” and “indirectly” it seems to just post-pone the question of how parents might account for any debts introduced by the higher ghg impacts they have compared to non-parents.
a different kind of solution—which i haven’t seen considered anywhere—might be to say that parents bear partial responsibility for their children’s emissions as long as they are alive, and then that the child inherits those emissions when their parents die just like they might inherit other debts. in this case, a metric ton of co2 emission from a child would be, say, quarter-owned by parent a, quarter-owned by parent b, and half-owned by the child. this would avoid double-counting, but it would also have the odd effect of making children less responsible for their emissions than they intuitively are. or at least, they would not be responsible for any felt debts carried by these emissions until they inherited them.
acknowledging that neither of the last two solutions are perfect, i’ll use a mix of them to consider ways to “balance out” the extra felt responsibility that parents bear for their childrens’ emissions which can hopefully be useful to anyone who feels they ought to constrain their family planning decisions in light of these considerations.
balancing out the extra impact
i think there may be a way to strike a balance to accommodate our intuitions about the social responsibility for ghg emissions that procreative decisions introduce. before considering it though, it’s important to acknowledge an alternative “offset” solution—namely, adoption—to which the parenting-impact argument may move some.
adopting clearly has many pro-social benefits and is a way of experiencing the joys of parenthood without adding new humans to the planet. it’s effect is on a parent’s climate footprint though, would ultimately depend upon the adopted child’s likely adult footprint had they not been adopted. adopting from developing countries into developed countries could actually raise a child’s lifetime emission impacts because of the average individual emission differences between countries. and even adopting within a developed country can significantly raise a child’s likely lifetime impacts depending upon the class into which they’re adopted, as average emissions vary significantly as a function of wealth.
so, setting aside laudable alternatives to biological parenthood, let’s also recognize that many people will recognize the extra ghg impact of procreation and still decide that the benefits of procreating at or near the replacement rate far outweigh the costs of the added emissions. this group may break down into those who feel the costs are significant enough to merit some behavior change—for example, those moved to adopt a second child rather than make one—and those who don’t think they merit any changes. this solution is addressed to those who feel the extra impact is enough to merit some behavior change, including changing family planning decisions. for simplicity, let’s call this cohort, climate-natalists. while the majority of them are not anti-natalists, they are all moved to consider their family planning in light of its future climate impacts.
climate-natalists believe that parents are responsible for their extra emission impact, and that something needs to be done to account for or “balance out” this extra responsibility. after all, the intuitive idea motivating these folks is that the average parents in a developed country have a ghg impact that is orders of magnitude greater than their non-parent peers, owing entirely to their procreative decision. the climate-natalist wants to do something about this: they might have fewer children, or no children, or they might adopt. they acknowledge that there are plenty of pro-social and personal considerations that would count in favor of having more children, but they believe these considerations are outweighed by a new human’s added ghg impact.
but instead of trying to prevent this impact from occuring in the first place, climate-natalists could just as well seek to minimize it after the fact. they could do this in the standard ways, by planting trees or buying additional offsets to balance out the portion of their children’s emissions which they own. but they could also do it by working to influence their children and the world their children inhabit to have lower average ghg impact overall. they might even imagine that in exchange for the extra impact of having a child, communities extend parents additional emission impact “credit” that they don’t extended to non-parents. the debt introduced by this credit would be repaid through the fulfillment of duties for which parents bear an even greater responsibility than non-parents. these duties would be something like the following:
parents—especially in high-impact developed countries—are responsible for making reasonable efforts to raise low-impact adults
parents—especially in high-impact developed countries—are responsible for making reasonable efforts to change systemic consumption practices and policies to make normal living in developed countries produce less ghg emissions
parents—especially in high-impact developed countries—are responsible for making reasonable efforts to offset the portion of their children’s impact that they “own” until they no longer can, at which point these portions are inherited by their children.
for the climate-natalist, parents would then only carry a net social liability for the extra ghg impacts introduced by their procreative success if they failed in these duties. they would not be faulted for their decision to procreate; rather they would be faulted for not making reasonable efforts to mitigate the effects of that decision. so while the climate-natalist could insist that parents incur an extra climate cost, they could see a route to paying off this cost over the course of their remaining lives.
this would not shift responsibility for reducing average individual ghg impacts from governments, corporates, or non-parent individuals, but it would offer a way to “account for” and address the extra responsibility that many believe parents bear for their children’s lifetime ghg emissions.
I really don't get anti-natalist environmentalists. The effects of climate change are going to far and away hit the next generation, and the generation after that. My way of thinking is why would you even care about climate change if you didn't have kids. You literally have no skin in the game.
Anyway, I have five kids, so I don't even want to see what my ghg emissions debt is. Add in that my job is 100% travel (inspecting power plants), and I am the opposite of carbon neutral.
Then again, if climate change really is that catastrophic, having multiple kids increases the chances that my lineage will survive to the other side, and I have 5x the chance that one of my kids comes up with some sort of innovation to help solve the issue.
I'm an eternal optimist.