Via Ronald Bailey [1] at Reason comes word of a paper [2] from Oregon State University on “Reproduction and the carbon legacy of individuals.” It’s a rather…chilling…little study. Snip:
Clearly, the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle. For example, a woman in the United States who adopted the six non-reproductive changes in Table 3 would save about 486 tons of CO2 emissions during her lifetime, but, if she were to have two children, this would eventually add nearly 40 times that amount of CO2 (18,882 t) to the earth’s atmosphere.
In other words, you can drive an electric car, replace your incandescent bulbs with CFLs, recycle your newspapers and even buy an energy star refrigerator and it still won’t come close to doing as much carbon good as having one less child.
By what means you choose to avoid creating that child are left unsaid. But the implication is that having none is best, birthing one is tolerable, producing two is too much and daring to breed three or more would rank you alongside BP in the pantheon of climate criminals.
(Cross-posted to Score Radio Network [3])