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Comment by throw1118 | Hacker News Reader

> 8. Should I think about how many children I have (or don’t have)? ...

> Nicholas’s study concluded that having fewer children is the best way to reduce your contribution to climate change, with almost 60 tonnes of CO2 avoided per year. But this result has been contentious – and it leads to other questions. ...

> And we could ask if having children is necessarily a bad thing for solving climate change: our challenges may mean we will need more problem-solvers in future generations, not fewer.

Way to make the quantitative answer on this question ambiguous when it is clear that unless your kids will work or donate much more than average to climate change, they will add to the problem.

Just be honest and admit that this possible solution (fewer kids!) conflicts with your ideology.

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It's also way too late to be banking on "future generations". Every credible report signals that either the adult generation in power today takes immediate action to curb climate change, or the effects will be catastrophic and, in most cases, irreversible. The recent UN report says we need to cut emissions worldwide by 50% by 2030. Your 11 year old child will not fix the climate.

All this warm-fuzzy nonsense about leaving the solution to "future problem solvers" is how we got here.

Quoting Donella Meadows:

> The world can respond in three ways to signals that resource use and pollution emissions have gone beyond their sustainable limits. One way is to disguise, deny, or confuse the signals. Generally this takes the form of efforts to shift costs to those who are far away in space and time.

> A second way is to alleviate the pressures from limits by employ- ing technical or economic fixes. [...] These approaches, however, will not eliminate the causes of these pressures.

> The third way is to work on the underlying causes, to recognize that the socioeconomic system has overshot its limits, is headed toward collapse, and therefore seek to change the structure of the system.

Leaving the hard decisions to "future problem solvers" is exactly response #1, "shift costs to those who are far away in space and time", i.e. future generations.

http://donellameadows.org/archives/a-synopsis-limits-to-grow...

Just be honest and admit that this possible solution (fewer kids!) conflicts with your ideology or your reader’s

The planet’s population has doubled in my lifetime alone, and I may see it double again, and it could be pure coincidence that all the warning signs clearly track the human population (CO2 levels, sea temperature etc etc) but maybe, just maybe, there is some causation there...?

We could all have nice things if, a few billion people ago, everyone had decided to reproduce at replenishment rate only.

Most countries actually did. Should you only send this message to societies which did not? Caution: Will be very un-PC.

You mean like distributing contraception in places like Africa? There's been a huge push for it in recent years and until your comment I don't think I've ever heard it described as "un-PC".

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