Senator Mike Lee wants you to know that we can stop climate change by fucking

[OfficerLamarr]

Logically speaking, having another child in a western environment would essentially double that impact then? You are creating another person with a similar way of life to yourself.

In fact within the USA, having one less child reduces your individual carbon impact by approximately 117 700 kg of CO2e per year. This second only to living car free which only reduces your impact by 5300 kg of CO2e per year. (Source)

[Sableye]

ya he's saying we can solve climate change by ignoring it, being unconcerned about it and living our lives, because a passive populace is one that doesn't stand up to corporations destroying the earth.

[AxeI]

Not if you changed your living habits accordingly beforehand? Not every US resident emits the average amount, for instance. If you're part of the lower end of the spectrum, then so will your child.

Again, families all over the world manage to live on a fraction of the carbon footprint of the vast majority of individual westerners. It's definitely possible.

This also assumes that the general western way of life and its consequences in terms of carbon emissions will remain constant over the lifetime of your child. It won't. Either we collectively change our habits in a sustainable way, and carbon emissions are reduced as a result, or we don't and your children will start to suffer the consequences before the end of their life, among which a drastic reduction in quality of life, and as a result the associated carbon emissions. Both scenarios eventually result in drastic drops in carbon emissions. So you're not looking at doubling your carbon footprint either way.
Have you read your source's methodology?

The part about the impact of having a child cites this as its method to estimate the carbon footprint of having a child. It says:

The summed emissions of a person’s descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him, may far exceed the lifetime emissions produced by the original parent.

Apparently it doesn't solely consider the emissions of your children, but also the entirety of their descendance. "It may exceed the emissions produced by the original parent", no shit. I don't see how your share of responsibility for potential carbon emissions that your descendants will cause in centuries is relevant to the immediate threat of climate change.

But it gets worse:

Under current conditions in the United States, for example, each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions.
5.7 times her lifetime emissions

This is a huge figure, so let's see what it actually means. Let's use their own method here and calculate the total emissions of the average US female's entire descendance, weighted by relatedness.

Let's assume all of her descendants have roughly the same lifespan and the same yearly carbon footprint (which is unlikely, as explained above). This means that every additional descendant adds 1 unit of "lifetime emissions" to the total.

Every child has two parents, which means that for every child you have, you add 1/2 a lifetime's worth of carbon emissions to your indirect carbon footprint. Every grandchild adds 1/4, great-grandchild 1/8, and so on.

The average birth rate in the US is 1.8. This means that the additional carbon legacy that the average female gets per child is 1/2 (for the children) + 1.8*1/4 (for the grandchildren) + 1.8^2*1/8 (for the great-grandchildren) + 1.8^3*1/16+... = (1.8/2+(1.8/2)^2+(1.8/2)^3+(1.8/2)^4+...)/1.8 = 1/(1.8*(1-0.9)) - 1/1.8 = 5 times her own lifetime emissions. We do end with a result in the same ballpark.

Now let's look at what portion is attributed to which generation.

The generation directly below is responsible for 1/2 = 0.5 lifetime emissions within the average female's carbon legacy. That's only 10% of the total.
The second generation is responsible for 1.8/4 = 0.45 lifetime emissions. That's 9%. The first two generations only account for 19% of your source's figure.

At this point I think it may be useful to try and look at how much CO2 has actually been emitted at a given time. Let's look at 2050. The average first-time parent's age is 28. Which means that our average female's child had their 1.8 children around 2047, and her grandchildren are around 3 years old in 2050.

The average US life expectancy is around 80 y/o. This means that the first child has emitted 30/80 = 38% of their lifetime carbon footprint, and the grandchildren have emitted 3.8%.

Thus, only 0.38*0.5+0.038*0.45 = 0.21 lifetime emissions, that's 4.2% of your source's figure, have been additionally emitted by 2050 as a result of having a child. Even according to gross overestimation, having a child only increases your pre-2050 emissions by about 35% if you're an US resident born in the 90s.

4.2% of 117 700kg is 4943kg of CO2 per year, that's less than 5300kg per year, the reduction in carbon footprint associated to living car-free, according to your source. As far as emissions prior to 2050 are concerned, living car-free does reduce your carbon footprint more than not having children.

As far as I'm concerned, if we haven't drastically collectively reduced our carbon footprint by 2050, we're pretty much fucked when it comes to the consequences of climate change. But just to further drive the point home, the additional emissions as the result of having a child now by the year 2100 is the equivalent of 0.5 + 0.45*53/80 + (1.8^2/2^3)*25/80 = 0.127 + 0.298 + 0.5 = 0.92 lifetime emissions, ie 18% of your source's figure.

82% of the additional carbon emissions that your source attributes to having a child won't occur before 2100.

Heck, I've done the maths and 50% of the emissions attributed by your source occur after the year 2230.

https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/211575/bcb27ec6-17d0-4d19-a680-6e8d0bb295db/wow.png

Yeah.

It's really important not to take articles' figures at face value and research what they actually mean. Right now, even if it is a fun thought experiment, the numbers given by your source have no basis in reality nor are they relevant to the matter at hand. To consider the additional emissions caused by your descendance hundreds of years from now to tackle an issue that we have a century tops to solve is absurd, and so is assuming that the carbon footprint associated with our way of life will remain identical for a whole millennium.

[myxo]

more people = more soylent and sources of replacement organs

[CyclonatorZ]

Dear god, I just glanced at the comments section. The alt-right is truly filled with fucking morons.

[AxeI]

What's this?

Under current conditions in the U.S., for instance, each child ultimately adds about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average parent - about 5.7 times the lifetime emissions for which, on average, a person is responsible.

There's that 5.7 figure again! That video cites the exact same study that I've shown is extremely misleading above.

Not to mention that the still conveniently leaves out the following paragraph:

The research also makes it clear that potential carbon impacts vary dramatically across countries. The average long-term carbon impact of a child born in the U.S. - along with all of its descendants - is more than 160 times the impact of a child born in Bangladesh.

Which kind of goes strongly against the point of this whole rant. It's also kind of intellectually dishonest to imply that demographic transition models are based on the assumption that "fucking will go out of style" and that the population will just keep growing ad infinitum if we don't stop reproducing.

Like, I'm aware it's supposed to be hyperbolic and I dig the "drunkard rant" approach, but it doesn't make the underlying message any less of a load of bullshit.

The whole "having children is the worst thing you can do to the environment" meme needs to die. It does have some impact, but it isn't nearly as bad as other lifestyle choices.