About climate-damaging nature of children

When I first heard about the “cli­mate-dam­ag­ing nature of chil­dren”, I thought of moun­tains of laun­dry (because the lit­tle ones need sev­er­al sets a day) or food waste (because the por­ridge ends up on the floor and not in the stom­ach) or hob­bies where the lit­tle ones have to be dri­ven around.

No, it’s actu­al­ly going in a whole dif­fer­ent direc­tion. It’s in fact about birthing chil­dren in gen­er­al­ly because every child born should be “cli­mate sin num­ber one”. Under the hash­tag “birth­strike” there are main­ly arti­cles by activists from the USA and Eng­land who prop­a­gate that the world would be bet­ter off with­out chil­dren.

Should we explain to activists the con­nec­tion between species con­ser­va­tion and chil­dren? Fun­ni­ly enough, it is often such activists who deny anthro­pogenic cli­mate change, and at the same time prop­a­gate that the Earth would be bet­ter off with­out human­i­ty.

Statement interpretation

But these are of course only state­ments. If you want to be a true activist, you need stud­ies that sup­port your own opin­ion. And of course these stud­ies can be bent a lit­tle. In Ger­many some peo­ple claim the attribute “child-free” because “child­less” is too neg­a­tive for them (in ger­man the word child-free does­n’t exist). The fact that the orig­i­nal dis­cus­sion in the USA was not about not hav­ing any chil­dren at all, but only about the lifestyle and the num­ber of chil­dren in the fam­i­lies, is dis­creet­ly hid­den here. Orig­i­nal­ly it was about start­ing a fam­i­ly with two instead of three chil­dren.

A study by Wynes and Seth (Wynes, Seth et al.: The cli­mate mit­i­ga­tion gap: edu­ca­tion and gov­ern­ment rec­om­men­da­tions miss the most effec­tive indi­vid­ual actions (Envi­ron­men­tal Research Let­ters, 2017), who claim that a total of 58.6 tons of CO2 per year can be saved by not hav­ing a child, is glad­ly quot­ed. Of course, CO2 equiv­a­lents are meant again, as it is usu­al in the cli­mate dis­cus­sions. Now the Fed­er­al Envi­ron­ment Agency of Ger­many states an aver­age con­sump­tion of 11 tons per capi­ta and year for Ger­many and 16 tons per capi­ta and year for the USA. How can a child con­sume so much more than the aver­age cit­i­zen?

It’s sim­ple. They do not take into account the CO2 con­sump­tion of one gen­er­a­tion, but of sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions, because the chil­dren nat­u­ral­ly have chil­dren again, and these chil­dren also have chil­dren. The study con­sid­ers gen­er­a­tions up to the year 2400!

Compare apples with oranges

This can of course be done, but seman­tic errors occur when these fig­ures are put in rela­tion to the CO2 foot­print, e.g. of a meat­less diet of an adult over his lifes­pan. The same applies, of course, to the renun­ci­a­tion of air trav­el or a car, which was also only con­sid­ered over one gen­er­a­tion.

At the same time, these sci­en­tists have pos­tu­lat­ed that CO2 con­sump­tion over a life­time is the same. How­ev­er, this is wrong, because small chil­dren con­sume much less ener­gy than adults, so that the CO2 foot­print is indeed age-depen­dent. The pos­si­ble rethink­ing of the younger gen­er­a­tion is also bla­tant­ly neglect­ed. The protest action “Fri­days for Future” will cer­tain­ly bear fruit in the form of a future reduc­tion in CO2 emis­sions. In what­ev­er form. This remains com­plete­ly uncon­sid­ered.

His­to­ry shows how lit­tle birth con­trol con­tributes to cli­mate pro­tec­tion. Germany’s pop­u­la­tion remains sta­ble, main­ly due to immi­gra­tion, but soci­ety is still age­ing. Even Chi­na, with its one-child pol­i­cy, is unlike­ly to be able to exon­er­ate itself from cli­mate dam­age. A trend towards even more sin­gle house­holds is com­plete­ly the wrong sig­nal for our soci­ety, because it is not for noth­ing that chil­dren are our future. And that is our com­mon(!) future. It is there­fore fit­ting that the Unit­ed Nations has declared fam­i­ly plan­ning to be a human right.

Dissemination

By the way, these wrong num­bers are often tak­en up and spread, as for exam­ple by the teacher and author Ver­e­na Brun­schweiger, who in her book “Kinder­frei statt kinder­los: Ein Man­i­fest” (avail­able only in ger­man) gives exact­ly these num­bers. How­ev­er, this false state­ment is only one part of her “man­i­festo”, because the (accord­ing to her own state­ments) rad­i­cal fem­i­nist was (also accord­ing to her own state­ments) dis­crim­i­nat­ed against and host­ed sev­er­al times because of her child­less­ness. How­ev­er, she con­sid­ers a social­ly accept­able allo­ca­tion of jobs with­in her teach­ing pro­fes­sion to be dis­crim­i­na­tion.

How­ev­er, I won­der in which part of soci­ety the author lives that she can devel­op such a real hatred towards moth­ers.

I can­not rec­om­mend the book because it is full of false state­ments (and for­tu­nate­ly only avail­able in Ger­man).

Conclusion

Since our future inevitably does not func­tion with­out chil­dren and our Ger­man social sys­tem is even based on a con­tract between gen­er­a­tions, it is more than sense­less to prop­a­gate child­less­ness, espe­cial­ly since the argu­ments put for­ward are sim­ply wrong.

Any­one who wants to get an idea of what is hap­pen­ing to an age­ing soci­ety should take a look at Japan. And Ger­many is also head­ing into this dilem­ma, because the num­ber of sin­gle house­holds in the big cities is above aver­age, so that basi­cal­ly a trend towards child­less­ness has long been notice­able.

How­ev­er, this does not have a pos­i­tive effect on the cli­mate, as a sin­gle house­hold bur­dens the cli­mate much more than a fam­i­ly house­hold!

The images in this post were tak­en by Pix­abay:
“Das Mäd­chen mit dem Ted­dy­bär” by lisa run­nels
“Chil­dren are our future” by Gerd Alt­mann