Is having kids bad for the planet?

By Mark Gongloff

In the fictional world of the P D James novel Children of Men and its movie adaptation, humanity has lost the ability to reproduce and thus faces certain extinction. We are meant to understand this as a bad thing. But there is a subset of people who would consider it a utopia. To them, Earth is doomed as long as it’s infested with humans.

One such person is a YouTuber named Sam Mitchell, who identifies as an “Eco-Nazi,” an “unapologetic doomer” and an “unrepentant collapsitarian.” In a recent Medium post titled “Why I Am Proud to Be an Eco-Nazi,” he explains that humanity is a plague upon the Earth, that all right-thinking people should therefore sterilize themselves immediately to avoid making more — as Mitchell claims he did when he was 22 — and that “breeders” are “clueless morons.”

Anybody who identifies as a “Nazi” of any sort should struggle to win converts. I probably wouldn’t be writing about this manifesto except for the fact that it was amplified by the much-better-known Twitter account of author and former math professor Eliot Jacobson, which was then re-amplified by the even-better-known Twitter account of Berkeley climate scientist Zeke Hausfather.

And it does get at an anxiety that breeders and the breeder-curious alike feel at a time of chaotic climate change (not to mention wars, pandemics, mass shootings, megalomaniacal leaders and more): Should we really bring children into this world?

Jacobson’s tweet quoted this line from Mitchell’s post, one of the few that delivers anything like verifiable data: “[A] vegan electric car driver with one child will do a HELLUVALOT more damage to this planet, and cause countless more suffering to his or her fellow Earthlings, than a meat-eating, SUV-driving, jet-setting corporate executive with no children will ever do.”

The climate scientist took issue. “This is utterly untrue (and reprehensible),” Hausfather tweeted, correctly. “It assumes we fail at decarbonizing our economies within our children’s lifetimes. In reality, someone in the UK today emits half the emissions in a year that their grandparents did. In the US we emit about a third less than our parents did.”

It’s actually a little better than that: US per-capita carbon emissions fell 38 per cent between 1973 and 2022 (the latest data available), according to Global Carbon Budget numbers crunched by the website Our World in Data. UK emissions fell about 60 per cent in that time. China made up some of the difference, but the net effect was that global carbon intensity remained roughly flat for 15 years even as the global economy expanded by about 46 per cent.

That is an extraordinary human accomplishment. And our political leaders have promised to do much more by eradicating emissions altogether in another generation. They aren’t on track to achieve that yet. But little humans are growing less polluting and wasteful by the year.

Meanwhile, the hot anxiety these days is not a population bomb but a population bust, with forecasts calling for humanity to peak sometime this century and decline, maybe sharply, thereafter. This makes economists anxious but should be good news for environmentalists.

Of course, people can have plenty of good reasons not to reproduce. And conscientious parents can’t deny fearing the impact their children could have on the planet, or vice versa. Polls and studies have shown climate change is a top factor in the decision not to have children. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Lara Williams has written, babies born today could see unimaginable economic and physical destruction in their lifetimes if we don’t get global heating under control.

Climate scientists often gear studies toward finding out how the world will look in 2100, when our environment could be in full boil. That feels unimaginably distant to me, a person born in the 20th century. But if my daughter, who was born in 2013, lives as long as my grandmother, who died at 96, then she will experience every bit of it.

This can seem like a terrifying prospect — except for the fact that my daughter is already far better off than a child born in, say, 1913, when the Spanish Flu, Great Depression, World Wars I and II, the Holocaust and a Cold War were in store. Or 1313, when the Black Plague was around the corner. Or 513, not long before what historians agree was the worst year to be alive. Or 30,013 BCE, when just turning 30 was an accomplishment.

There has never been a perfect time to be a human baby, in other words. And yet we keep making them. That’s partially down to base stuff like biology and ego, but optimism plays a big role. As a three-time breeder, I am biased. But I would like to think that teaching my children to care for their neighbors and their environment will help them build a better world. And polls consistently show young people are more concerned about the climate than their elders and more likely to take action.

In turn, adults can start improving the world for children right now, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Faye Flam has written. Millions are already suffering the effects of climate change, particularly the poor in both developed and developing countries, who unfairly bear the brunt of conditions they didn’t create.

Telling people to simply stop having children is unrealistic at best and inhuman at worst. The best vision for the future treats both people and the planet with care and hope.