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Top ten reasons the “Population Bomb” is bullshit.

I’m involved in a few “green action” groups, and a fellow volunteer and friend recently asked me whether my having a fourth child was an environmentally responsible thing to do.  I honestly hadn’t thought about it since the decision to have children tends to be a little more personal and emotional than analytical.  But the question stung a little and at first, had a certain visceral impact: earth’s resources are finite and are already strained, so more people is just straining them more, right?

And while I readily admit I may only be rationalizing, because it would just be too painful to imagine any of my four beautiful children ever being a mistake, I can’t help but see quite a few holes in the argument that not having children is somehow more environmentally responsible than having them:
  1. It’s convenient.  Much easier for Climate Change to be someone else’s problem than to have to make hard choices about your own consumption.
  2. It’s a red herring.  It draws what limited time climate scientists can get in the national dialogue away from far more urgently needed and rewarding actions such as getting off fossil fuels and making the transition to renewable energy sources.
  3. It’s skewed: Google around for “environmental footprint calculators,” and you’ll find it would take four or five earths for everyone on earth to enjoy the average American’s lifestyle.  On the other hand, it’d take only a fraction of one earth for everyone to enjoy the average African’s lifestyle.  Somewhere between the two there’s a lifestyle that each of us could enjoy and which would require only one earth.
  4. It’s wrong.  Turns out population growth is slowing and is expected by many experts to level off at 9 billion within the next thirty years.
  5. There’s plenty of space.  The entire current population of 6.8 billion could easily live within the 268,820 square miles of Texas.  It’d be cramped - about 1,000 square feet per person - about what it’s like to live in New York City.
  6. It’s shooting ourselves in the foot.  The kinds of people who would act on the advice to adopt or forgo children as an act of environmental responsibility are by definition thoughtful and engaged citizens - precisely the people whom (how to put this delicately?) ...we don’t need FEWER of!
  7. It’s timeline is useless.  Even if population growth did correlate with emissions, limiting growth would only yield results in the twenty or however many years it takes for today’s newborns to grow up into adult consumers.  Since current rates of warming make our civilization unlikely of surviving even that long, we need solutions we can implement yesterday and the timelines of whose effects span the short-term.
  8. It’s premised on an increasingly outdated model of consumption.  “Population bombers” make the huge assumption that a child born today will, over her lifetime, have the same environmental footprint of a current adult.  They assume we will not progress towards renewable energy solutions and will continue to be an entirely fossil-fuel-based economy.  But clearly, IF (a big if) we’re even around in ten years, it will only be because we were successful at implementing massive changes in how we secure and use energy.  Scotland, for instance, expects to be 100% wind-powered by 2025.  If they are successful, it means a child born today will have a far smaller environmental footprint than one born 15 years ago, maybe even none at all.
  9. It hurts our chances of survival.  Maybe we should look at the big picture and find ways to accelerate population growth since, as resources become increasingly scarce in a heating world of increasing crop failures, rising waters and violent storms, having more offspring may be the only way for the species to survive.  That’s how it works in nature, after all.  (Ok I admit that one’s a little weak, not to mention grim, but I wanted a nice round number...)
  10. It ignores the approach of the Singularity.  Assuming funding for research continues, computers will become conscious sometime in the next ten years.  Since such an Artificial Intelligence will evolve in billiseconds and massively in parallel with countless other like and networked minds, scientists are calling it a technological singularity.  Whether it will have any use for us humans, we can only guess.  But one thing’s for sure: it will be a cosmically game-changing event and we can no more speculate on what awaits us on the other side than we can now on what happened prior to the Big Bang.