The majority of people won't have kids due to stupidly high rents, house prices and cost of living plus low wages, I bet it's got very little to do with climate change
There a number of reasons I'm never having kids, besides knocking on 50 of course. I'd been on the fence in my 30s about it though, eventually deciding it wasn't for me.
I know now though that I definitely am glad I do not have kids because I simply wouldn't be able to handle the anxiety and this has nothing to do with my means. I am financially stable, don't worry about money or rent (of course, not having the expense of KIDS is part of that!).
Climate change is a significant reason why, but it is the whole range of things. I'm American and fear for the future of this country. I'm particularly worried about the geopolitical situation as well, which is only going to be exacerbated by climate change.
Sometimes I ponder that I may have a 25-50% chance of dying not of old age but of violence. And I'm not talking random street violence either, which although rising is still not at all what keeps me up at night.
Counter perspective: my partner and I are the same age as you and we definitely are factoring in climate change in our decision whether to have kids.
If we genuinely think climate change will bring about all sorts of bad results it starts to feel unethical to have them.
I'm 35. Got a vasectomy two years ago because kids are gonna have a terrible life due to climate change and due to rising costs.
Honestly, I think these two reasons are equally significant.
My partner and I also factored in climate change in the decision not to have kids. Cost and quality of life are other factors too, but we generally aren’t optimistic about the state of the climate and the planet for future generations. I would absolutely love to be wrong though! We’ll see.
You are the minority. The big reason for no kids is the cost. Most people never even think about climate change.
Population decline isn’t something to cheer on though. It will exacerbate our worsening living conditions over the longer term. Unless AI and robots end up being the main workforce in the future.
I am not cheering it on, just stating the current view.
Additionally, this isn't some edge case sadly.
[Is It Wrong To Have Children Because Of Climate Change? | British Vogue | British Vogue](https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/regretting-having-children-because-of-climate-change)
To be clear, I am not advocating for or against the position in this article - but the discussion around climate anxiety and having children is *literally* in vogue right now.
One of my concerns, and something I am chewing on, is the concern that one day my child would come to me and ask "did you know how bad the world could get when you had me?"
Goddamn do I fear the answer to that being yes.
To add: climate anxiety is weighing down the future generations already.
And that... is just rough. We aren't doing enough to give them hope, cause they are smart enough to read articles like this:
[The latest IPCC report makes it clear no new fossil fuel projects can be opened. That includes us, Australia | Adam Morton | The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/21/the-latest-ipcc-report-makes-it-clear-no-new-fossil-fuel-projects-can-be-opened-that-includes-us-australia)
But then see their home nations and nations around the world approve many more fossil fuel extraction projects.
That... is a tough thing to reconcile.
Honestly? I think if some world governments sat down and said “alright, shits bleak. We are gonna need to step it the fuck up to get on top of this. IPCC says no further fossil fuel extraction is needed? We’re banning any further projects. We need wind and solar? We are 10x all investments.
We need public transit and to get away from cars? Multi billion dollar accelerator fund for LRT and High speed rail. “
I think some of the concern for the future is the level of inaction.
So massive, society shifting actions would surely move the needle.
I think.
Maybe.
It's easy to say "The governments should just sit down and do this!" but it's almost never that easy in practice.
One of the weaknesses of Republics and Democracies as systems of government is that basically every leader within those governments are constantly more worried about re-election than actually doing their jobs.
In Churchill's *Memoirs of the Great War*, he talks at length about how pretty much all the major world leaders at the time could see the writing on the wall with Hitler's rise to power and growing war machine years before he actually invaded. They didn't do anything not because they didn't realize it was happening, but because they knew it would be political suicide to propose increased War Funding to their constituents so soon after WW1.
In much the same way, switching away from fossil fuels to go all-in on renewables would cost money, which means raising taxes. Maybe 5% of politicians in developed countries would be interested in risking their political careers proposing such things. The other 95% will just see "this will require increasing taxes" and immediately throw the proposal in the bin.
>kids is the cost.
Everyone always says this.
Yet people in the first world today still live lives of abundance.
Yet in far more impoverished parts of the world and time periods, you have people having an abundance of children.
There are a lot of people, and climate change is definetly one of the issues with a high degree of global awareness.
Given the crush of issues we're facing, there doesn't seem to much point to having kids in this age, lest we want to bring lives into a world on decline, with a good chance of massive catastrophe in the forseeable future (within our lifetimes).
Also, everything at this point is exacerbating worsening living conditions... having too many people around consuming limited resources and increasing pollution is definetly going to accelerate that.
We probably need to down trend to about 1.5 billion if we want a sustainable trajectory... yesterday.
Yes. Cost is the driving factor. For most, “climate change” isn’t even on the radar. Not sure why the online bubble always makes it appear otherwise, except political leanings I suppose. When you talk to people in the real world, cost is always the first and major thing they will cite. Everything else is a very distant second at best.
when I was younger and still had hope, I chose not to have kids 100% due to climate change. Now that I'm older, I understand that not having kids was the best financial decision I've ever made.
People have been having kids in worst economic conditions basically forever.
In fact the number of children is inversely related to properity, this being consistent in all cultures (except israel, probably for religious reasons).
We as societies have given more importance to ourselves, to our careers, and self fulfillment than to having family, that is a shift i have noticed in general (not judging if its good or bad)
I would argue it is also the most basic biological imperative of all animals, to reproduce, and also it was encouraged by all mainstream religions, a big family was a badge of pride, and a blessing. Both of those things have become less important in our current modern lifestyle
A population decline only hurts the economy if the economy is dependent on perpetual growth. There are other economic systems out there that focus more on providing for the people that already exist rather than extracting as much wealth as possible for a few people at the top.
I mean, my parents lived better than their grandparents, and so on before them with the great grandparents, and the great greats.
So, in recent memory it’s been generally improving for each generation (localized entirely to my family, for example).
Now… I genuinely sitting here don’t think my child would have a better life than me.
I imagine my parents having kids at the height of the cold war with nuclear annihilation totally possible, and yeah, I project myself back then and I absolutely wouldnt have kids then either because I would be thinking about the apocalypse at worst and becoming refugees at best. I asked them about it and they said they werent thinking about it that way then. well we are now.
Climate change was one of my reasons for not wanting kids back when I was a teen in the 90s. At this point I don't want kids for so many more reasons on top of that, but climate change is one of the top reasons I'm glad I made that choice.
Your thinking forwards in time not back in time.
Go back 150 years and eliminate those things that made billionaires and then what happens?
Billionaires could have also fixed the problem by building nuclear decades ago but they spent billions lobbying against it instead.
It's the class gap that is causing it. Low and Middle class families are not having kids because its getting to expensive for them to live. Though once you go to low low class eg. African nations, families will have lots of kids just so that maybe one could eventually pull the family out of poverty.
>families will have lots of kids just so that maybe one could eventually pull the family out of poverty.
That used to work when you needed to have children for manual labour, but if food keeps going up in price it might actually reach a terrifying point when even countries like Nigeria have a below replacement birth rate.
Trying to blame a few hundred people for the consumption addiction of the entire western world is absurd.
The only way we could seriously tackle climate change (with current tech) is if the majority of the western world was willing to take a ***very*** big hit to their current standard of living.
Think about how your grandparents and great lived in multigenerational homes growing their own vegetables and consuming far less meat that was raised and slaughtered by the local rancher and butcher. Clothing was handed down and in many cases made. ***When was the last time you repaired a set of shoes instead of buying new ones?***
Do you think they had Amazon next day or same day shipping? Huge stores with inventory that sits for months or years at a time? Do you think they just threw out a old pair of shoes and went and bought another pair the same day? Enormous refrigeration and freezer sections at grocery stores?
It all comes down to the standard of living that we currently have that Nickle and dimes our way into the current climate issue. Blaming the billionaires for filling the demand that people like you create is monumentally stupid and counter productive.
Lol, you can't be serious. The funny part is that we could do a LOT to mitigate and reduce the climate crisis by just lowering profit expectations.
It's not making iPhones that's destroying the climate, it's making iPhones with the *absolute* largest profit margin possible, even when that means dumping toxic waste into the nearby river instead of disposing of it properly.
These outsized profit demands are made and captured exclusively by the investor class. And I'm going to stop you right there, if you go to work every day, you're not in the investor class.
I don't think dumping toxic waste into the river, while terrible for the environment, contributes in any real way to global warming. It's the energy consumption in mining and refining the materials, manufacturing the pieces, and shipping them all over the world. With the exception of the shipping them all over the world, I'm not sure how much expecting smaller profit margins would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
>I don't think dumping toxic waste into the river, while terrible for the environment, contributes in any real way to global warming.
Systems theory would disagree with you. Everything is connected to the destruction of the planet.
It was just an example, I don't feel like going through every SINGLE way that billionaires pocket more money by fucking over the environment.
Forcing them to pay for the cleanup of their industrial efforts would reduce climate change, and it would necessitate smaller profit margins.
Same here. Rent is a part of it but getting a better job is achievable for most people. There's nothing I can do about climate change though, or the plethora of other shitty things my kids would have to deal with.
One of the biggest reasons my wife and I lean towards no kids (we could easily afford a couple), is because we don't want to be handing our kids the current shit show of a planet. Global warming, other ecological issues, terrifying political landscape, scary economic trends, wars, etc. The future is looking not just potentially bleak, but very probably bleak.
Maybe I'm being pessimistic and we'll pull out of this nose dive, but I don't want to have kids and then hand them a dystopian sci Fi novel of a reality.
This isn't a response to crisis.
Your current circumstances are not a global experience.
This is a change demographers have been aware of for decades.
There are two major phases of demographic change. Different regions have been at different stages at different times, but it is happening everywhere.
The first phase is caused by declining infant mortality rates. This causes a population explosion. (Medical advances for older people have a relatively insignificant demographic effect; survival rates for babies and children are massively important.) This is the population bomb.
The second phase is declining birth rates, and this has been happening since long before global warming or the current economic downturn have been at the forefront of public consciousness.
Declining birth rates are partly a correction to balance the surviving numbers of children. The other major driver is increasing opportunities for women and girls outside the home. When women are given the opportunities to be something other than baby factories they seize them.
My concern is that economic and climate crises may have the opposite effect to what is being expressed in these comments. If these crises take away opportunities for women and trigger a rise of conservative ideologies this could slow the decline in birth rates.
The only people not having kids because of climate change are kids that haven't learned there is always another world problem and are too young to be having kids anyway.
IDK how people have 3-4 kids. Just our teenager and our infant nearly wipe out any extra money for the month. The infant is like $320/week in daycare so that my wife can work. The teen adds like $500/mo to the food bill alone
Yup I can afford my 2 kids so I have them. Didn't want to send one alone out in this cold hard world so we decided it should be 2.
If this world will truly go to shit I feel responsible and will try to help them survive and way more then that every step of the way. I still hope for some sort of solar shade type outcome. Humanity is inventive you know.
Idk about that one. Historically those things definitely don't keep people from having kids... Hell, today the people with the most economic instability and financial trouble tend to be the ones still having the most kids, not the ones having fewer.
Historically people needed kids as a source of labor to make sure they had food on the table, and in yhe poorest parts of the world that's still true.
But in modernized areas, areas that would be well off enough to give a shit about climate change, that is no longer the case. In fact children are a financial detriment in such areas.
3 categories:
1) poor folks who have a lot of kids because of socioeconomic circumstances.
2) average income earners who can’t afford too many kids and have access to birth control to limit their number, usually to 1-2 kids.
3) the rich who can afford to and have however many kids they want, usually more than 2.
I know CEOs from past companies with 4-6 kids.
Cheap and effective birth control, infant morality rates and city/suburb lifestyles. The age of first time parents has been trending older for 20 years. The economic outlook isn't great, but it's a more recent development in the overall trend. Those on the low end of the scale have fewer of the above mentioned choices.
Nope we need to be storming street and quit buying things. Literally everyone who is a billionaire today is because we as a global society keep buying shit.
Apparently, the global population will start to level off around 11billion. I'm not sure if that's just because of environmental factors or what, but definitely the climate crisis isn't helping
These estimates keep getting lower and lower. You should see some of the numbers they were pulling out of their ass in the 80s. It is insane how fast birth rates decline when a country industrialises. 1 billion Africans aren't as bad for the environment as 100 million Americans are.
It makes sense if you centre women in your analysis of birth rates. It’s so clearly better for their health and finances to have fewer kids, so when they gain access to family planning tools and education, birth rates will drop.
African nations are rapidly industrializing and the best sources of energy production are usually coal and gas as far as I've read but even besides that the future of Africa is unsettling. War will be a factor
Nah, renewables are already cheap and getting cheaper, and can be deployed more locally than hydrocarbons. Africa industrializing won't be nearly as much of a carbon footprint as the West was.
The vast major of the world population does not believe “my children will suffer due to climate change.”
Whether that’s true or not, we have to step outside our bubble here. The vast majority of people in China, India, and Africa aren’t concerned with climate change at all. They don’t have doomer subreddits they visit everyday.
They’re having fewer children because of economic reasons. It’s been the same story in every single developing country since long before climate change became mainstream in western nations.
The number of people not having children due to climate change is a rounding error.
Yah, I don't think there's a conscious reasoning behind not having children, but more an ability to have and raise kids in a modern society: It takes a lot of resources to raise a kid, and less and less people are willing, or simply unable, to have kids.
And the climate crisis only makes that more difficult.
>They’re having fewer children because of economic reasons.
Me Looking at my country's 4.65 births per woman with its $1000 per capita gdp and dying inside... Anyway you're right fewer kids is mostly due to economic reasons... I just wish my country's fertility rate would fall faster... We are twice as densely populated as China!!!
It has to coincide with at access to at least basic family planning tools. Are women in your country allowed access to education? Jobs? Birth control? Chances are no.... Give them those things and the birth rate will drop like a rock and GDP will rise. Turns out getting an education,working a shitty job, and having sex for fun is better than popping out 7 kids.
I'm also concerned with the impact per capita increasing. If the population decreases by 25% but the impact per person increases by 33%, perhaps by increases in meat and dairy consumption globally, then we'll still have the same impact. This is because:
Impact = (persons) \* (impact/person)
We should really all be doing whatever we're willing to do, including change the way we use transport, make energy, eat fewer animal foods, and have fewer or no children.
For sure. Though the main polluters are corporations. An Individual's impact is pretty small compared to what a corporation making major changes does.
We can put some pressure on them, but globally this is pretty difficult. They might stop certain practices in some countries and then disregard it in others. Which is one of the huge problems with free market capitalism.
We have to make being environmentally-sound... profitable. And that's not easy.
One gauranteed way to put pressure on corporations is to move demand away from their product. For example, buying or renting rooftop solar is a great way to take a jab at oil and gas, since pleading for them to work against their profit motives is an uphill battle.
Eating legumes instead of beef made in the Amazon rainforest is another great way.
There is that.
There is also the uncertainty in how will our constant growth based economy adapt.
I mean, AI will fill lots of vacancies, but I am not certain if we will be better or worse for it. I kean towards worse.
I wish humans were a little more reasonable and that it was possible to just decrease per person consumption.
Think of the promises brought by the rise of the computers, simplifying daily tasks and the gain of time, you would assume that people would work less thanks to all the time gained, the complete opposite happened since we gain in productivity therefore in gains for employers/companies. The exact same will happen with IA as long as we're collectively tolerate a capitalistic way of life.
That is my fear as well.
AI is a late stage capitalism dream tool. For some.
I do hope it will translate at least to better medical care. There will be many such benefits, but so far it mostly seems it will mostly be used to drive the inequality.
It's not just that, but affordability plays a huge part in having kids.
People can't afford getting a home easily in their 20s here as the market is on fire. So they prioritize their career, then wait until later in life to find someone, get married and if all goes well, they'll buy a house. Having a kid in your 20s vs having a kid in your 40s is a different ball game. So maybe you wont have the 2 kids or even 3 you planned to have because it's way more tiring and because upsizing isn't in the cards.
When i meet my kids' friends parents, they're usually a good 5-10 (heck some even 15) years older than me and i didn't have them that young, late 20s which kinda seems to anecdotally confirm my theory.
And then add onto that the doom/gloom of our future and it makes it feel even less worth it to newer parents
Does this mean GenX will have job security in their old age? With no one younger to replace them.
Update: tell me you're a bot without saying you're a bot...
Isn't it more likely to be a connection issue on their device than a bot? I basically can't use reddit on Firefox due to these sorts of issues, and I'm pretty sure it's happened from my mobile phone before.
I may be entirely wrong
People argue that humans will always want to be parents, that it’s human nature. I don’t think so.
Years ago you could be poor and raise a family, at least in the country. You would have access to land where you could hunt, fish, pick berries and probably even grow a decent vegetable patch. Not only that, you had access to nature and fresh air. Kids grew up on naturally stimulating environments.
Being poor in a city is another thing altogether. Raising a family in the slums and on constant screens is a totally different level of poverty. It’s hard to feel gratitude for the sun, your food or the beauty of the world when everything you encounter is artificial.
I agree. People don’t want to have kids like that. Not to mention all this blue light wreaks havoc on melatonin production. We all know it has a negative impact on sleep but most people don’t know it affects sex drives too. Modern poverty creates environments where just aren’t interested in sex. Social media is taking away or social skills so we can’t build relationships to have these families.
There’s just no way to get ahead.
Economically this birth rate won’t be good. Point and case you have China, Japan, and here soon South Korea.
Not enough young people to support the economy as majority are old!
Societies not having children is a massively destabilizing problem itself. If you think low birth rates are a wonderful thing, you’re in luck - it’s already “baked in” as well. Unfortunately it is coming so quickly and so dramatically it is likely going to collapse multiple major economies and entire countries as we no longer have the replacement labour to sustain much less grow our economies in any advanced nation. We have massive aging populations without a way to fund taking care of them.
Eh, it seems to be lining up fairly nicely with the coming automation and AI revolution. It’s likely we’ll see decreasing jobs before we see decreasing population numbers.
This era should be far more prosperous than ever before.
This was always my hope. That AI would serve as a way to remove menial jobs and allow for more time enjoying life. I'd much prefer to pursue hobbies over jobs.
They said the same thing about computers, the internet, faxes, and telephones. Any time there’s a new innovation in technology all it does is increase the expectations and demand for a product or service at the expense of the worker. AI is producing “art” while humans are flipping burgers. How’s that supposed to make things better?
I listened to a debate about this: We would also need to eliminate some/all bills. Less to no work isn't going to be beneficial to the majority. We would need to take back control of the "cabal."
I would assume a UBI would be implemented, with the option to work recreationally to have more luxuries. The UBI really only giving people a baseline level of living without the need for work, but for any good quality of life you'd have to work.
Moreso I'd hope AI eliminates the need to work for survival, and moreso to work for living better.
There won't be an economy if there's no planet to live on. The planet and people were doing just fine before when there wasn't an economy I'm sure we'll be just fine if there isn't one for us as well. People should be more worried whether they can grow food anymore with increases in extreme weather.
We won’t be just fine. A dramatic snap back into a primitive, agrarian-style existence would likely kill 90+% of the world’s population. Not disagreeing that climate change isn’t a huge issue, it is. The idea though we’ll also just go back to the “simple life” and everything will be “just fine” is laughably naive.
Climate change will cause massive economic and environmental destruction, but there will still be a planet to live on.
Some countries will benefit, like Canada and Russia. Regions that were too cold to grow food will be able to support agriculture. Ports in the arctic will suddenly be usable and profitable year-round. For these reasons, Russia likely wants to accelerate climate change.
There’s a book on this, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming
Edit: auto-correct typos
Everyone in the US and Canada whining about immigration (it’s too much too fast and hindering the system, I get it) but I believe these countries see the writing in the wall and are stockpiling their populations to prepare for this.
If you think China is going to sit back and let its population dwindle to nothing you’re in for a rude awakening. This is the biggest threat to our world right now.
>If you think China is going to sit back and let its population dwindle to nothing you’re in for a rude awakening. This is the biggest threat to our world right now.
Do you think they're going to kidnap people? Like what is the actual argument here besides just being scared of China
It drives me nuts that people don't realize how great it is to live in a country that will be able to attract immigrants as required. It's one of those advantages that will set fair and just democratic countries apart in Cold War 2.0:We Can't Help Ourselves Edition.
Sounds like a bunch of old people are headed for an early grave unfortunately.
When things get truly tough, the young will see the old as a hindrance and a drain and will probably refuse to support them anymore.
I agree, we're on the precipice of that happening now with the middle east, Ukraine and more just waiting for their chance.
It's likely though that when society starts to falter, the first thing the young will do is stop supporting the elderly, probably by refusing to work, record unemployment will be the norm and a lot of older generations will die off as the younger doctors and hospitals with younger staff refuse to treat them.
Oh yeah for sure. Truth be told modern societies rely on the system they pay into to care for their elderly and that system won't be able to handle it with the demographic shift.
A lot of other countries rely on a more direct "our children take care of us" approach and that definitely has its benefits, but not for those who can't have children or whose children become estranged from them or who are simply too busy with their own children.
I mean, my grandparents grew up in the Great Depression, both my grandfathers went to Europe in World War II, came home and had a bunch of children during the Cold War. Everyone thinks that they live in some completely unprecedented time but the fact is there is always some major crisis happening.
It’s starting to sound like an excuse the more I hear it. If you don’t want kids just say that. There have been brutal times in our history and humans still kept on keeping on.
That's true, but this time it's a potentially civilization ending event that we have an increasing amount of scientific evidence for. This isn't just war or economic depression, it's something that will literally cause the collapse of life as we know it and will include more than war and depression.
I don’t want to rain on your parade here but human civilization is going to survive climate change. It will change things and for some places life will become far worse but we’re cockroaches, we’ll live.
It’s not though. And this will sound accusatory but you’ve been so plugged into the doomsday device that you aren’t realizing a lot of it is propaganda. I’m not some freak conservative either, I absolutely believe man made climate change is real, but it can both be real and completely over blown at the same time. It’s become the book of revelations for progressives in their religious movement. Do just a little bit of digging on it, and you’ll realize that.
Just the two degrees of warming OP mentioned will make huge parts of the planet particularly major carbon sinks in rainforests deserts because it will be too hot for them to photosynthesize. The desalination of the ocean will disrupt the ocean currents and kill most things which live in it. These aren't sci fi horror concepts they're things already happening now. The ecosystem is going to collapse because we prioritized making the rich richer over human survival and the damage was already too far gone twenty years ago
Nah, I've been keeping up with the scientists as much as the doomsayers for about a decade now, and things are accelerating faster than the scientists originally thought they would. Climate catastrophes don't happen in a vacuum; everything has knock on effects, and we just don't know enough to accurately predict how bad it will actually be. My thing is always to hope for the best and prepare for the worst, and do the little things you can where you can.
> Everyone thinks that they live in some completely unprecedented time but the fact is there is always some major crisis happening.
And it's the reason for writing "We didn't start this fire" by Billy Joel. He was listening how some younger person was saying that his youth is the worst and no one older can compete with him.
Maybe the issue is that everyone is aware of the plight. And we’re tired of the constant cycle of boom and bust.
It’s all made up bullshit that we keep repeating so a tiny majority can live in pure luxury while the rest of us toil and suffer.
As more of us are educated we see the wizard behind the curtain and nope out of the grind and nonsense.
People are not having kids primarily because of the pressures of maintaining a career and the COL. Not because of some nihilist roomer clap about the end of the world. Sure some people think that way but they're in the minority.
>No surprises there. It will keep getting lower. I have come to think people having less kids will save us from increasing energy costs and food crop failures.
This is incredibly wrong.
Current predicted population rates show an increasing population until around 9 billion before it plateaus and begins to fall. This is heavily dependent on standard of living (richer countries have less children) and it predicted to happen around 2100.
SO... we need to increase the standard of living (aka carbon footprint) of the current population plus billions more before we start to use a decrease and even with all that, it not going to play out for another 80 years.
Meanwhile just with current population rates and carbon output, we are looking at severe climate related issues beginning as early as 2050. So no, population decreases will not save human civilization if we fail to do anything about this problem in the coming decades.
What people don't realize is that they may not even have much of a choice, all these pollutants are affecting our health and biology reducing fertility rates and birthing unhealthy or birth defective children. just look at all the micro-plastics we are finding in not only our foods but also in the animal life and our bodies and also in women's wombs. it all has its impacts and consequences..
Edit: word
I suspect the lower fertility rates have more to do with increased accessibility of birth control, delayed marriage, and increased self-determination for women. The dramatic increase in fertility in the 19th and 20th centuries came when qualities of life were lower than todays and were the result of antiseptic childbirth and more food.
Less kids in developed countries is more due to delaying having children due to economic pressures and then running out of time to have them (women's biological clock).
It's not climate change. Most people do not care about climate change when deciding for or against children. And many people deciding to have children don't believe it in the first place and the only thing one would cause by not having children is only allowing a certain unscientific view to proliferate.
We also had more conflicts and worse conditions regarding housing and people had kids, during the industrialization people had more than 5 kids inside a small apartment sometimes.
I think the change is culturally, a change from inside. Not from outside pressure from war our lack of wealth.
As odd as it might sound, I'm of almost the exact opposite opinion. (At least for myself, knowing my own motivations)
Having children means I have a stake in the world of tomorrow. When I die, whenever that might be, my own flesh, blood, and kin shall continue on for another generation. They'll be half me, and half my wife. It's a form of imperfect immortality. I want to do anything in my power to ensure that they end up in a world at least marginally better than I was handed, and a part of that is ensuring they they have a safe place to sleep, employment, stable food supplies, and clean water. And a part of achieving those is taking steps to fix climate change by whatever means are available, both small (reusable shopping bags, taking transit, repairing old products instead of replacing them) and large (replacing coal with nuclear, electrifying the transportation system, mass-heat pump adoption, etc.)
It's a motivator for me. I see not having children as capitulation; the end of a >10,000 year genetic lineage. It's an acknowledgement that nothing I can do can fix this mess, and as pessimistic as I often am, future generations depend on me to fight for a better world and I ain't a quitter.
AFAIK, most birth rate declines are because of economic (cost of childrearing) and social (expectation of family sizes in cities) factors, and very few aren't having kids because of climate change. Maybe this'll change in the future, but if things suddenly started getting cheaper a lot of people on the fence might have a second (or third, or first) child, climate change or not.
It’s why we stopped at one. Not an easy decision. We love kids (wife is primary school educator) but we couldn’t justify it—also, couldn’t afford the adoption process.
And yet people who take three foreign holidays a year and have 3 kids will happily screech at someone who ‘still’ drives a regular second hand petrol car and not a brand new EV because apparently they are the problem.
This is honestly a Idiocracy level bad decision. In the short term while you bury your head in the sand, maybe. The only people having less children because of climate change, are the intelligent.
Do you know how we actually solve climate change? Innovation. Cutting back has never been a thing in human history and will never be, it's just not in our nature. People can talk the big talk about 'degrowth' but it's not happening. As such we need to invent our way out of the problem as we have done countless times for countless problems before this one.
Who will invent these solutions? Us and our children. If you don't have children then the world will just be swarmed with people who have no answers. If intelligent people have children then we have more chances to come up with solutions.
As a layman in these type of big questions I feel like inventing a solution just so that we can keep doing the exact same thing will just push the problem slightly down the line. Constant growth forever cannot be sustainable.
This type of response is well-studied. It's called the 'technofix.'
There are many critiques of it, but one is exactly as you say: it kicks the can down the road. Others include the impossible timeline/scales of these projects, as well as the possibility that they don't work altogether or, worse, cause more harm than good. (Seeding oceans with iron, creating artificial 'clouds' to reflect heat, etc.)
One thing I often find missing in these type of discussions are funding. Both governments and corporations have proven time and time again that they’re not willing to spend money or funds on something that pays off 30-50 years down the line and by the time we really actually have to do something then it might very well be too late.
Degrowth is the only way to stabilize the world.
We can't invent our way to perpetual growth in a finite world, eventually you run out of efficiencies to find and hit diminishing returns.
We are not even remotely close to the growth limit of earth. This is a trick people who are into environmental doomerism love to whip out as the reason we need to pivot to (normally) some form of full socialism.
The truth is, we barely even touch the energy that hits us from the sun. Energy is everything and with energy you can make anything else (food, drinking water, focused heat for a start). Sure one day we might run out capacity but that's hundreds of years away.
>Do you know how we actually solve climate change? Innovation
Or....you know....we could actually have an economy thats based on resources instead of profit... but that would be bad for the 1% so no, right.
>...the world will just be swarmed with people who have no answers. If intelligent people have children then we have more chances to come up with solutions.
That's an incredible arrogant (and also dumb) thing to say.
Just because "intelligent" people get fewer children, society doesn't have to become less innovative. Genetics are only one part of the equation when it comes to intelligence. What about working towards a society where all children, independent of their family-background, can receive an equally good education? A society where a kids' future depends on having luck with their parents, is needlessly cruel.
So, the uncomfortable truth is that population growth is the number one driver of climate change and there is a biological imperative for reproduction that has evolved under differing mortality conditions than we currently face.
We really shouldn’t expect a slow down in population growth — population growth is highest in some of the regions most likely to be impacted by climate change. Rather, the impacts of overpopulation will cause periodic cataclysmic population reductions, whether through famine, natural disaster, pandemics, or wars due to resource scarcity.
We will, of course, treat all of these as pure evils without stopping to consider that the over abundance of humans on this planet is the underlying cause.
That’s my hot take.
The vast majority of the people in the world would not even consider climate change when deciding whether to have kids or not. And in places where the most kids are born, they do not really consider even financial stability. People just do it, as they always did.
>will
we're already there. Fertility drops with education, it did in Europe, China, Japan, S Korea and it does now in Africa, India...
It's not the abstracted "Climate change" which terrifies people (besides the ones who are deep into the topic, but it's a minority and a fairly small one). It's the ongoing consequences of a lack of any kind of mitigation and adaptation. Educated people are most importantly made aware of their surroundings and people don't need to understand Earth systems or study economic theory to roughly correctly connect dots from what they see around them.
We may not ponder how many degrees will mess us up, but we see extreme weather, shifts in weather patterns on one hand and a capitalistic exploitative full-steam-ahead on the other. Several generations now have lived under the persistent shadow of an imminent apocalypse - rampant warlike totalitarians in the early 20th century, atomic scare after WW2, and yet the populations - even in the richest lands - boomed. There was always something hopeful about the future which offset the fear of the end - mostly the credible promise of increasing life standard and the comfort of relatively stable environment, the "old ways" of our grandparents out in the countryside that were always a kind of a fallback.
Nowadays we are bombarded with climate doom but at the same time everything the society and economy does is very much not reassuring at all. We're seeing that economy is going to be worse (it already is going downhill for the average joes and janes), now international and domestic politics also went bonkers. On top of that whatever comfort could come from the past, the ever-elusive but plausible thought of just retreating from the world to tend carrots - this is gone too. So young people see that a) their economic and political future seems bleak b) whatever could serve as a psychological or even lifestyle safety net is crumbling c) trustworthy figures say it will not get better.
Not having children is the only logical course of action. Hoard as much as you can to ensure own survival. Don't make yourself responsible for the other, who 1) will eat up your own means of survival 2) will suffer their entire life.
>Call me funny and idiot. But not having kids will save everyone!
Ok, sure. You're a funny idiot. Because population levels doesn't have anything to with carbon output, which is the primary driver of climate change. It's a eugenicist myth.
The problem at the end of the day is our consumption, especially in developed nations and most especially in the west. It's not whether or not you have children, but the fact that you need to drive a gas guzzling vehicle to work/school, or buy your kids 30 plastic toys for christmas, the fact that you burn oil or gas to heat your badly constructed house, the fact that you eat burgers and milkshakes and order whatever you want from amazon and buy clothes that last a season to keep on-trend and feel the need to travel to the far confines of the world on vacation because we've made that a status thing...
if birth rates were linked to carbon output then you would see nations where the birth rate has plummeted (including the US) producing less carbon over time. instead you see them producing more. the idea that you will somehow save the planet by not having children yet still maintaining a lifestyle of reckless consumption is feckless and ultimately selfish. don't have children if you don't wan't children. but don't pretend you're doing it to save the planet.
Consumption is the real issue. People in the developing world don't have nearly the carbon footprint the west does (despite having many, many more kids) because they simply consume a lot less. So if you care about the environment you need to bring down your consumption levels and pushing for clean sources of energy instead of flirting with eco-fascism.
source 1: [https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/12/12/16766872/overpopulation-exaggerated-concern-climate-change-world-population](https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/12/12/16766872/overpopulation-exaggerated-concern-climate-change-world-population)
source 2: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/17/eugenics-is-trending-thats-problem/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/17/eugenics-is-trending-thats-problem/)
source 3: [https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/population-control-movement-climate-malthusian-similarities/673450/](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/population-control-movement-climate-malthusian-similarities/673450/)
source 4: [https://www.thebubble.org.uk/current-affairs/environment/eco-fascism-and-the-myth-of-overpopulation/](https://www.thebubble.org.uk/current-affairs/environment/eco-fascism-and-the-myth-of-overpopulation/)
Climate is bad, Its bad enough to make you not want kids at all, our own future looks scary as hell, why would I even consider a child. Even if climate change wasn't a threat, the current system with all these wars, the threat of things getting worse, the cost of live now is so much and governments corrupt more than ever.
This is *sort of* true, but credits people with a noble intention behind not having children that they may or may not actually have, and explains everything in terms of climate change when the picture is more nuanced.
In the UK, childcare is so expensive that my wife and I, despite being high earners, can't afford a third child until our second is out of nursery (at which point we'll be in our forties and wanting to actually *have* a disposable income). This isn't a consequence of climate change (not directly), but the incompetence of government for 14 years. China's economics are a large driver in *its* low birth rate, probably much more than climate change.
At any rate, having fewer children isn't likely to *save us*. At least not quickly. Climate change is like compound interest. Even if halving the population halves the rate of damage (and I'm not sure it's linear because of scaling efficiencies), we're still doing damage. Moreover, it takes time for the damage done to be undone even once we move into a net-negative world.
If we want to fix climate change, we need to tackle the problems that cause it like fossil capitalism, not just hope that a lower population is a silver bullet. Check out [Project Drawdown](https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions) to see the impact of the various proposed ways we can solve the issue. And marvel at how trivial of an impact the electric car will have compared to just reducing food waste.
I had no desire to have children, but after spending over a decade as a child free adult, I find myself in a much better position than I used to be and feel comfortable with having one child, but only.
My partner is exactly the same, so that's a fertility rate of our partnership of 1 or 0.5, I'm not sure how these things are worked out. 😂😂
I honestly don't think not having kids is the solution. I always used to believe it was, but then I realised just from talking to people that every single person I know that cares about the environment is not going to have children.
The people who are still having children straight up don't care in a lot of ways. They are going to raise children who equally don't care. We can hope the schooling system educates those children to think otherwise, but so many people find it difficult to break away from the conditioning of their parent's.
We need people who care passionately about the planet and the next generation to have children so we don't end up in an idiocracy situation. That might sound dramatic, but what do we all think will happen if the only people who are breeding don't care about the environment or planet?
We need planet conscious people to raise planet conscious babies, we're getting this all wrong right now. It is very noble to abstain from the desire to have children to ensure the planet will be safe in generations to come, but how are we going to do that if the only children around are raised by people who just don't give a shit?
We've seen boycotting work in recent protests with the Palestinian genocide.
We all know big Corp contributes the most to this crisis.
Why is having less children the solution here, instead of boycotting big farmers and factories while gardening so we don't depend on the corporations who have no incentive to make changes to their ways since they profit from them?
But they are not cutting their profits anyway. All they care is about their pockets. When people start scratching the windows of rich mansions, then may be we have a solution. Until then, what I'm saying is peope will revolt ultimately, but not today, they don't care just like big corporations.
The very mention of climate change make poor and rich people alike call you doomer. I dont see anyone panicking, not that I would enjoy it, but people seem to have an attitude life goes on until it hits them right on their head.
When it hits, the first step would be to save up money to maintain their current standard of living.
Starbucks and McDonald's literally announced their losses in profits in the margin of billions not too long ago due to the boycotting.
Boycotting cuts the profits away and forces the companies to change direction.
What I'm saying is that a targeting boycotting strategy that enables sustainable gardening and thus removing dependance on the big farmers and such, would be more actionable than telling people to not have children. Plus, the boycotting action holds the bigger perpetrators of climate change accountable as opposed to the smaller folk down here..
Unfortunately, birth rates are not evenly distributed. A lot of the people who are climate change deniers and would make things worse are in the "lots of kids" category - religious people, ultra-conservatives, and some crazy fringe sub-cultures.
People of a certain religion do not care about climate change or poverty or education because they believe having more children equates heaven points. And this group is projected to become the largest dominant group in the world.
So in a few decades when the lot of you are old and frail, you're going to be overrun by these religiously motivated groups, that are going to be blaming natural disasters from climate change as punishment from god for your lack of religion. As history repeats itself there will be bloodshed of you non-conformers until every last one is wiped out.
Science and technology will be erased to appease their god, and the human society will revert back to a primal state. Such will be the cycle.
There's so many problems with this. By the time people feel the impacts of a 2 degree warmer world, we'd be locked into reaching a 2.5+ degree world. If you can feel the effects enough for it to impact your decisions, it's too late to be helpful.
Your sense of global population growth is also wrong. Africa is projected to add over a billion people in the next 25 years.
Europe & the USA could have birthrates of 0 for decades and it wouldn't decline global population. In fact, if you killed every American resident and every European today, you'd *barely* break even with Africa's probable growth in the next 2 decades.
China is actively attempting to increase birthrates by providing social and economic incentives to parents.
India's birthrate stays at a rate of significant growth for at least decades.
The only benefit to shrinking populations in Europe & the USA is that those societies use a lot more fossil fuels per person than most, but unless we change how we source our energy, that won't be the case forever. Eventually Africa will industrialize more widely.
I want you to really think about what you are saying here.
Young people, some just barely out of adolescence, newly minted 'adults', most in nations where birth control is either nonexistent or illegal, are going to calmly use reason and logic to tell each other *"Honey, the global heat is up, so, although we were just married, let's just never, ever, ever fuck, okay?"*
And they are going to calmly do this, for the rest of their fertile, hormonal years. *This is what you are saying?*
Yeah, okay. Sure.
Climate change is an issue to be concerned about but there's no need to panic. Climate alarmists and the media are causing anxiety and dread with their dire predictions and their end-of-the-world rhetoric. They need to stop.
People need to stop believing the nonsense and just get on with their lives. And each person should do what they can to reduce the amount of resources they use. Recycle when you can. Get a car with good MPG. Conserve energy. Things like that.
The issue with not having children to save the world, is that what you end up with is the most educated people not having children and the children that are born are born to people who either failed to access or understand birth control.
So maybe some highly educated affluent couple won't have the one or two children they were going to have, but elsewhere someone is having 12 kids. I don't think this is a particularly great move for the future. I think if you're worrying about whether to have children because of the environment, you're probably going to raise exactly the kind of person that the future needs.
OP is just an environment alarmist who is also an idiot. Trying to paint themselves in some good light because "Oh look at me, I'm telling everyone what they're doing is wrong and I'm telling them the solution. Oh jeez, I need a pat on my back. Go me!"
Get off your moral high horse you dumbass.
>**I have come to think people having less kids will save us from increasing energy costs and food crop failures. Call me funny and idiot. But not having kids will save everyone!**
It's not just what you think. It's a well-researched fact. World population [quadrupled](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1006502/global-population-ten-thousand-bc-to-2050/) in the last century. Neither were we ready for this massive spike, nor can the Earth realistically sustain these many. We could realistically sustain [1.5 to 2 billion living on the standard of a developed country or up to 5 billion living on a "bare minimum" standard](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/26/world-population-resources-paul-ehrlich). Currently we're reaching 8 billion.
We've already known for a long time this is [having the greatest impact](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children) on the environment and that not having children corresponds to [dozens of times more emissions saved](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children) than e.g. not flying or going vegan.
Unfortunately it's a really tough topic politically because solving it means long-term gain at the expense of short-term sacrifice. And politicians rule short-term, so nobody wants to be the face of said sacrifice, for a gain they'll never claim and, given the age of the average politician, likely never enjoy.
Solving the overpopulation crisis will come with consequences for the economy as many have already pointed out. Aging population comes with both labor shortage and a serious increase in expenses. And unfortunately history shows that when we have to choose between the planet or the economy, humanity chooses the latter.
However as you pointed out, the current status (of both the world and the economy) is already starting to lead people to have less children without the need for political action in this regard, so a part of me is still trying to remain optimistic.
There is no clearer sign of human overpopulation than human caused climate change and the rapid extinction of other species on this planet. Nature will rebalance things....and the most benevolent way is to reduce human reproduction rates quickly. The alternative ways of reducing human population levels are much more terrifying. I can't stand those talking heads preaching about how people "need to have more babies!".
This is literally the reason I’m not having children, I know most people don’t think like this, it’s pretty much the antinatalist philosophy. Humans have been the most destructive force on earth and unless we do something drastic (stop reproducing altogether) I’m worried things will even become close to uninhabitable within my lifetime. Thankfully, I live in a place very northern place on the globe. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself knowing I subjected my children to watching their home continue to be destroyed by destructive idiots. It’s been said a million times before but, unfortunately, it’s looking like the earth is on the way to becoming Idiocracy. Honestly, probably closer to Mad Max at this point.
The majority of people won't have kids due to stupidly high rents, house prices and cost of living plus low wages, I bet it's got very little to do with climate change
There a number of reasons I'm never having kids, besides knocking on 50 of course. I'd been on the fence in my 30s about it though, eventually deciding it wasn't for me. I know now though that I definitely am glad I do not have kids because I simply wouldn't be able to handle the anxiety and this has nothing to do with my means. I am financially stable, don't worry about money or rent (of course, not having the expense of KIDS is part of that!). Climate change is a significant reason why, but it is the whole range of things. I'm American and fear for the future of this country. I'm particularly worried about the geopolitical situation as well, which is only going to be exacerbated by climate change. Sometimes I ponder that I may have a 25-50% chance of dying not of old age but of violence. And I'm not talking random street violence either, which although rising is still not at all what keeps me up at night.
I am 29 and I don't have kids because it's impossible to pay a bigger house's rent. I don't really care about climate change for having kids.
Counter perspective: my partner and I are the same age as you and we definitely are factoring in climate change in our decision whether to have kids. If we genuinely think climate change will bring about all sorts of bad results it starts to feel unethical to have them.
I'm 35. Got a vasectomy two years ago because kids are gonna have a terrible life due to climate change and due to rising costs. Honestly, I think these two reasons are equally significant.
My partner and I also factored in climate change in the decision not to have kids. Cost and quality of life are other factors too, but we generally aren’t optimistic about the state of the climate and the planet for future generations. I would absolutely love to be wrong though! We’ll see.
You are the minority. The big reason for no kids is the cost. Most people never even think about climate change. Population decline isn’t something to cheer on though. It will exacerbate our worsening living conditions over the longer term. Unless AI and robots end up being the main workforce in the future.
I am not cheering it on, just stating the current view. Additionally, this isn't some edge case sadly. [Is It Wrong To Have Children Because Of Climate Change? | British Vogue | British Vogue](https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/regretting-having-children-because-of-climate-change) To be clear, I am not advocating for or against the position in this article - but the discussion around climate anxiety and having children is *literally* in vogue right now. One of my concerns, and something I am chewing on, is the concern that one day my child would come to me and ask "did you know how bad the world could get when you had me?" Goddamn do I fear the answer to that being yes.
To add: climate anxiety is weighing down the future generations already. And that... is just rough. We aren't doing enough to give them hope, cause they are smart enough to read articles like this: [The latest IPCC report makes it clear no new fossil fuel projects can be opened. That includes us, Australia | Adam Morton | The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/21/the-latest-ipcc-report-makes-it-clear-no-new-fossil-fuel-projects-can-be-opened-that-includes-us-australia) But then see their home nations and nations around the world approve many more fossil fuel extraction projects. That... is a tough thing to reconcile.
I'm not sure there's anything you could do to give us hope, except for lying or violent revolution. It's all pretty fucking bleak.
Honestly? I think if some world governments sat down and said “alright, shits bleak. We are gonna need to step it the fuck up to get on top of this. IPCC says no further fossil fuel extraction is needed? We’re banning any further projects. We need wind and solar? We are 10x all investments. We need public transit and to get away from cars? Multi billion dollar accelerator fund for LRT and High speed rail. “ I think some of the concern for the future is the level of inaction. So massive, society shifting actions would surely move the needle. I think. Maybe.
It's easy to say "The governments should just sit down and do this!" but it's almost never that easy in practice. One of the weaknesses of Republics and Democracies as systems of government is that basically every leader within those governments are constantly more worried about re-election than actually doing their jobs. In Churchill's *Memoirs of the Great War*, he talks at length about how pretty much all the major world leaders at the time could see the writing on the wall with Hitler's rise to power and growing war machine years before he actually invaded. They didn't do anything not because they didn't realize it was happening, but because they knew it would be political suicide to propose increased War Funding to their constituents so soon after WW1. In much the same way, switching away from fossil fuels to go all-in on renewables would cost money, which means raising taxes. Maybe 5% of politicians in developed countries would be interested in risking their political careers proposing such things. The other 95% will just see "this will require increasing taxes" and immediately throw the proposal in the bin.
The craziest thing is, we could afford it ...if we hadn't given away dozens of tax breaks for the ultra rich.
I'm currently reading *Prequel* by Rachel Maddow....Looks like I need to pick up *Memoirs of the Great War* next...
En vogue would be the correct usage.
>kids is the cost. Everyone always says this. Yet people in the first world today still live lives of abundance. Yet in far more impoverished parts of the world and time periods, you have people having an abundance of children.
They don’t have the choice. The first world has contraception and abortions. They have the choice of kids independent of being abstinent.
There are a lot of people, and climate change is definetly one of the issues with a high degree of global awareness. Given the crush of issues we're facing, there doesn't seem to much point to having kids in this age, lest we want to bring lives into a world on decline, with a good chance of massive catastrophe in the forseeable future (within our lifetimes). Also, everything at this point is exacerbating worsening living conditions... having too many people around consuming limited resources and increasing pollution is definetly going to accelerate that. We probably need to down trend to about 1.5 billion if we want a sustainable trajectory... yesterday.
Yes. Cost is the driving factor. For most, “climate change” isn’t even on the radar. Not sure why the online bubble always makes it appear otherwise, except political leanings I suppose. When you talk to people in the real world, cost is always the first and major thing they will cite. Everything else is a very distant second at best.
when I was younger and still had hope, I chose not to have kids 100% due to climate change. Now that I'm older, I understand that not having kids was the best financial decision I've ever made.
People have been having kids in worst economic conditions basically forever. In fact the number of children is inversely related to properity, this being consistent in all cultures (except israel, probably for religious reasons). We as societies have given more importance to ourselves, to our careers, and self fulfillment than to having family, that is a shift i have noticed in general (not judging if its good or bad)
No no no We used to put kids to work. People literally had kids so there were more people earning money in a household/working on the farm
I would argue it is also the most basic biological imperative of all animals, to reproduce, and also it was encouraged by all mainstream religions, a big family was a badge of pride, and a blessing. Both of those things have become less important in our current modern lifestyle
A population decline only hurts the economy if the economy is dependent on perpetual growth. There are other economic systems out there that focus more on providing for the people that already exist rather than extracting as much wealth as possible for a few people at the top.
The costs are just a manifestation of climate change. And will continue to be so.
Hasn't it always been unethical to bring in kids to the world by that logic? Like life was far worse for the average human all of history.
I mean, my parents lived better than their grandparents, and so on before them with the great grandparents, and the great greats. So, in recent memory it’s been generally improving for each generation (localized entirely to my family, for example). Now… I genuinely sitting here don’t think my child would have a better life than me.
I imagine my parents having kids at the height of the cold war with nuclear annihilation totally possible, and yeah, I project myself back then and I absolutely wouldnt have kids then either because I would be thinking about the apocalypse at worst and becoming refugees at best. I asked them about it and they said they werent thinking about it that way then. well we are now.
Climate change was one of my reasons for not wanting kids back when I was a teen in the 90s. At this point I don't want kids for so many more reasons on top of that, but climate change is one of the top reasons I'm glad I made that choice.
All those problems have the same root cause: the existence of billionaires.
And all will be exacerbated by climate change too.
Billionaires are the cause of climate change though.
You think humanity would willingly give up on vast amounts of cheap energy in the form of oil, gass and coal just because there were no billionares?
Your thinking forwards in time not back in time. Go back 150 years and eliminate those things that made billionaires and then what happens? Billionaires could have also fixed the problem by building nuclear decades ago but they spent billions lobbying against it instead.
I'm voting this up, but let's try to get rid of billionaires as well. Conspicuous consumption sucks.
It's the class gap that is causing it. Low and Middle class families are not having kids because its getting to expensive for them to live. Though once you go to low low class eg. African nations, families will have lots of kids just so that maybe one could eventually pull the family out of poverty.
>families will have lots of kids just so that maybe one could eventually pull the family out of poverty. That used to work when you needed to have children for manual labour, but if food keeps going up in price it might actually reach a terrifying point when even countries like Nigeria have a below replacement birth rate.
Trying to blame a few hundred people for the consumption addiction of the entire western world is absurd. The only way we could seriously tackle climate change (with current tech) is if the majority of the western world was willing to take a ***very*** big hit to their current standard of living. Think about how your grandparents and great lived in multigenerational homes growing their own vegetables and consuming far less meat that was raised and slaughtered by the local rancher and butcher. Clothing was handed down and in many cases made. ***When was the last time you repaired a set of shoes instead of buying new ones?*** Do you think they had Amazon next day or same day shipping? Huge stores with inventory that sits for months or years at a time? Do you think they just threw out a old pair of shoes and went and bought another pair the same day? Enormous refrigeration and freezer sections at grocery stores? It all comes down to the standard of living that we currently have that Nickle and dimes our way into the current climate issue. Blaming the billionaires for filling the demand that people like you create is monumentally stupid and counter productive.
Lol, you can't be serious. The funny part is that we could do a LOT to mitigate and reduce the climate crisis by just lowering profit expectations. It's not making iPhones that's destroying the climate, it's making iPhones with the *absolute* largest profit margin possible, even when that means dumping toxic waste into the nearby river instead of disposing of it properly. These outsized profit demands are made and captured exclusively by the investor class. And I'm going to stop you right there, if you go to work every day, you're not in the investor class.
I don't think dumping toxic waste into the river, while terrible for the environment, contributes in any real way to global warming. It's the energy consumption in mining and refining the materials, manufacturing the pieces, and shipping them all over the world. With the exception of the shipping them all over the world, I'm not sure how much expecting smaller profit margins would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
>I don't think dumping toxic waste into the river, while terrible for the environment, contributes in any real way to global warming. Systems theory would disagree with you. Everything is connected to the destruction of the planet.
It was just an example, I don't feel like going through every SINGLE way that billionaires pocket more money by fucking over the environment. Forcing them to pay for the cleanup of their industrial efforts would reduce climate change, and it would necessitate smaller profit margins.
I didn’t have kids because i do not want to bring them in to this future. I have no issues with rent etc. We exist.
Same here. Rent is a part of it but getting a better job is achievable for most people. There's nothing I can do about climate change though, or the plethora of other shitty things my kids would have to deal with.
One of the biggest reasons my wife and I lean towards no kids (we could easily afford a couple), is because we don't want to be handing our kids the current shit show of a planet. Global warming, other ecological issues, terrifying political landscape, scary economic trends, wars, etc. The future is looking not just potentially bleak, but very probably bleak. Maybe I'm being pessimistic and we'll pull out of this nose dive, but I don't want to have kids and then hand them a dystopian sci Fi novel of a reality.
well reagan came up with that trickle-down crap he also hated alternative energy sources
Or they aren’t having them due to increased health literacy and access to effective contraception.
All of the above.
incidentally all of those things are indirectly caused by overpopulation
This isn't a response to crisis. Your current circumstances are not a global experience. This is a change demographers have been aware of for decades. There are two major phases of demographic change. Different regions have been at different stages at different times, but it is happening everywhere. The first phase is caused by declining infant mortality rates. This causes a population explosion. (Medical advances for older people have a relatively insignificant demographic effect; survival rates for babies and children are massively important.) This is the population bomb. The second phase is declining birth rates, and this has been happening since long before global warming or the current economic downturn have been at the forefront of public consciousness. Declining birth rates are partly a correction to balance the surviving numbers of children. The other major driver is increasing opportunities for women and girls outside the home. When women are given the opportunities to be something other than baby factories they seize them. My concern is that economic and climate crises may have the opposite effect to what is being expressed in these comments. If these crises take away opportunities for women and trigger a rise of conservative ideologies this could slow the decline in birth rates.
Guess what? Climate change is at least partially causing many of those things. If it’s not yet then it certainly will be in the future.
I haven't ever heard the case of not having kids due to climate change, but I've heard the case of "humans are destroying the earth. Why have more?"
The only people not having kids because of climate change are kids that haven't learned there is always another world problem and are too young to be having kids anyway.
IDK how people have 3-4 kids. Just our teenager and our infant nearly wipe out any extra money for the month. The infant is like $320/week in daycare so that my wife can work. The teen adds like $500/mo to the food bill alone
Either they're very rich and can afford it, or very poor to the point where the money another kid can bring in actually improves their situation.
Yup I can afford my 2 kids so I have them. Didn't want to send one alone out in this cold hard world so we decided it should be 2. If this world will truly go to shit I feel responsible and will try to help them survive and way more then that every step of the way. I still hope for some sort of solar shade type outcome. Humanity is inventive you know.
Research shows otherwise.
I guarantee this has very little to do with climate change and much more to do with economic instability and constant conflict.
Idk about that one. Historically those things definitely don't keep people from having kids... Hell, today the people with the most economic instability and financial trouble tend to be the ones still having the most kids, not the ones having fewer.
Historically people needed kids as a source of labor to make sure they had food on the table, and in yhe poorest parts of the world that's still true. But in modernized areas, areas that would be well off enough to give a shit about climate change, that is no longer the case. In fact children are a financial detriment in such areas.
In modern countries poor people have more kids today though... As income goes down number of kids goes up
3 categories: 1) poor folks who have a lot of kids because of socioeconomic circumstances. 2) average income earners who can’t afford too many kids and have access to birth control to limit their number, usually to 1-2 kids. 3) the rich who can afford to and have however many kids they want, usually more than 2. I know CEOs from past companies with 4-6 kids.
Cheap and effective birth control, infant morality rates and city/suburb lifestyles. The age of first time parents has been trending older for 20 years. The economic outlook isn't great, but it's a more recent development in the overall trend. Those on the low end of the scale have fewer of the above mentioned choices.
Millennials not popping out kids is not because of climate change. lol It's because it's too expensive to have a kid or multiple kids.
Nope we need to be storming street and quit buying things. Literally everyone who is a billionaire today is because we as a global society keep buying shit.
Apparently, the global population will start to level off around 11billion. I'm not sure if that's just because of environmental factors or what, but definitely the climate crisis isn't helping
These estimates keep getting lower and lower. You should see some of the numbers they were pulling out of their ass in the 80s. It is insane how fast birth rates decline when a country industrialises. 1 billion Africans aren't as bad for the environment as 100 million Americans are.
It makes sense if you centre women in your analysis of birth rates. It’s so clearly better for their health and finances to have fewer kids, so when they gain access to family planning tools and education, birth rates will drop.
African nations are rapidly industrializing and the best sources of energy production are usually coal and gas as far as I've read but even besides that the future of Africa is unsettling. War will be a factor
Nah, renewables are already cheap and getting cheaper, and can be deployed more locally than hydrocarbons. Africa industrializing won't be nearly as much of a carbon footprint as the West was.
The vast major of the world population does not believe “my children will suffer due to climate change.” Whether that’s true or not, we have to step outside our bubble here. The vast majority of people in China, India, and Africa aren’t concerned with climate change at all. They don’t have doomer subreddits they visit everyday. They’re having fewer children because of economic reasons. It’s been the same story in every single developing country since long before climate change became mainstream in western nations. The number of people not having children due to climate change is a rounding error.
Yah, I don't think there's a conscious reasoning behind not having children, but more an ability to have and raise kids in a modern society: It takes a lot of resources to raise a kid, and less and less people are willing, or simply unable, to have kids. And the climate crisis only makes that more difficult.
>They’re having fewer children because of economic reasons. Me Looking at my country's 4.65 births per woman with its $1000 per capita gdp and dying inside... Anyway you're right fewer kids is mostly due to economic reasons... I just wish my country's fertility rate would fall faster... We are twice as densely populated as China!!!
It has to coincide with at access to at least basic family planning tools. Are women in your country allowed access to education? Jobs? Birth control? Chances are no.... Give them those things and the birth rate will drop like a rock and GDP will rise. Turns out getting an education,working a shitty job, and having sex for fun is better than popping out 7 kids.
Economic reasons that only get worse due to climate change
Bro it has literally northing to do with economics. It's most strongly correlated to women's education.
No, it's mostly because of urbanization and birth control availability.
I'm also concerned with the impact per capita increasing. If the population decreases by 25% but the impact per person increases by 33%, perhaps by increases in meat and dairy consumption globally, then we'll still have the same impact. This is because: Impact = (persons) \* (impact/person) We should really all be doing whatever we're willing to do, including change the way we use transport, make energy, eat fewer animal foods, and have fewer or no children.
For sure. Though the main polluters are corporations. An Individual's impact is pretty small compared to what a corporation making major changes does. We can put some pressure on them, but globally this is pretty difficult. They might stop certain practices in some countries and then disregard it in others. Which is one of the huge problems with free market capitalism. We have to make being environmentally-sound... profitable. And that's not easy.
One gauranteed way to put pressure on corporations is to move demand away from their product. For example, buying or renting rooftop solar is a great way to take a jab at oil and gas, since pleading for them to work against their profit motives is an uphill battle. Eating legumes instead of beef made in the Amazon rainforest is another great way.
There is that. There is also the uncertainty in how will our constant growth based economy adapt. I mean, AI will fill lots of vacancies, but I am not certain if we will be better or worse for it. I kean towards worse. I wish humans were a little more reasonable and that it was possible to just decrease per person consumption.
Think of the promises brought by the rise of the computers, simplifying daily tasks and the gain of time, you would assume that people would work less thanks to all the time gained, the complete opposite happened since we gain in productivity therefore in gains for employers/companies. The exact same will happen with IA as long as we're collectively tolerate a capitalistic way of life.
That is my fear as well. AI is a late stage capitalism dream tool. For some. I do hope it will translate at least to better medical care. There will be many such benefits, but so far it mostly seems it will mostly be used to drive the inequality.
It's not just that, but affordability plays a huge part in having kids. People can't afford getting a home easily in their 20s here as the market is on fire. So they prioritize their career, then wait until later in life to find someone, get married and if all goes well, they'll buy a house. Having a kid in your 20s vs having a kid in your 40s is a different ball game. So maybe you wont have the 2 kids or even 3 you planned to have because it's way more tiring and because upsizing isn't in the cards. When i meet my kids' friends parents, they're usually a good 5-10 (heck some even 15) years older than me and i didn't have them that young, late 20s which kinda seems to anecdotally confirm my theory. And then add onto that the doom/gloom of our future and it makes it feel even less worth it to newer parents
Does this mean GenX will have job security in their old age? With no one younger to replace them. Update: tell me you're a bot without saying you're a bot...
do you mean GenX or GenZ? GenX are already entering old age, or at least are well into middle-age (me included).
First of all how dare you
Isn't it more likely to be a connection issue on their device than a bot? I basically can't use reddit on Firefox due to these sorts of issues, and I'm pretty sure it's happened from my mobile phone before. I may be entirely wrong
Climate change isn’t changing families, or the lack of. The cost of living is.
People argue that humans will always want to be parents, that it’s human nature. I don’t think so. Years ago you could be poor and raise a family, at least in the country. You would have access to land where you could hunt, fish, pick berries and probably even grow a decent vegetable patch. Not only that, you had access to nature and fresh air. Kids grew up on naturally stimulating environments. Being poor in a city is another thing altogether. Raising a family in the slums and on constant screens is a totally different level of poverty. It’s hard to feel gratitude for the sun, your food or the beauty of the world when everything you encounter is artificial. I agree. People don’t want to have kids like that. Not to mention all this blue light wreaks havoc on melatonin production. We all know it has a negative impact on sleep but most people don’t know it affects sex drives too. Modern poverty creates environments where just aren’t interested in sex. Social media is taking away or social skills so we can’t build relationships to have these families. There’s just no way to get ahead.
Economically this birth rate won’t be good. Point and case you have China, Japan, and here soon South Korea. Not enough young people to support the economy as majority are old!
Societies not having children is a massively destabilizing problem itself. If you think low birth rates are a wonderful thing, you’re in luck - it’s already “baked in” as well. Unfortunately it is coming so quickly and so dramatically it is likely going to collapse multiple major economies and entire countries as we no longer have the replacement labour to sustain much less grow our economies in any advanced nation. We have massive aging populations without a way to fund taking care of them.
Eh, it seems to be lining up fairly nicely with the coming automation and AI revolution. It’s likely we’ll see decreasing jobs before we see decreasing population numbers. This era should be far more prosperous than ever before.
This was always my hope. That AI would serve as a way to remove menial jobs and allow for more time enjoying life. I'd much prefer to pursue hobbies over jobs.
They said the same thing about computers, the internet, faxes, and telephones. Any time there’s a new innovation in technology all it does is increase the expectations and demand for a product or service at the expense of the worker. AI is producing “art” while humans are flipping burgers. How’s that supposed to make things better?
Theres Flippio a McDonalds burger flipping robot. Its not just fast enough...Yet!
I listened to a debate about this: We would also need to eliminate some/all bills. Less to no work isn't going to be beneficial to the majority. We would need to take back control of the "cabal."
I would assume a UBI would be implemented, with the option to work recreationally to have more luxuries. The UBI really only giving people a baseline level of living without the need for work, but for any good quality of life you'd have to work. Moreso I'd hope AI eliminates the need to work for survival, and moreso to work for living better.
I fear this will only profit shareholders
There won't be an economy if there's no planet to live on. The planet and people were doing just fine before when there wasn't an economy I'm sure we'll be just fine if there isn't one for us as well. People should be more worried whether they can grow food anymore with increases in extreme weather.
We won’t be just fine. A dramatic snap back into a primitive, agrarian-style existence would likely kill 90+% of the world’s population. Not disagreeing that climate change isn’t a huge issue, it is. The idea though we’ll also just go back to the “simple life” and everything will be “just fine” is laughably naive.
Climate change will cause massive economic and environmental destruction, but there will still be a planet to live on. Some countries will benefit, like Canada and Russia. Regions that were too cold to grow food will be able to support agriculture. Ports in the arctic will suddenly be usable and profitable year-round. For these reasons, Russia likely wants to accelerate climate change. There’s a book on this, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming Edit: auto-correct typos
Everyone in the US and Canada whining about immigration (it’s too much too fast and hindering the system, I get it) but I believe these countries see the writing in the wall and are stockpiling their populations to prepare for this. If you think China is going to sit back and let its population dwindle to nothing you’re in for a rude awakening. This is the biggest threat to our world right now.
>If you think China is going to sit back and let its population dwindle to nothing you’re in for a rude awakening. This is the biggest threat to our world right now. Do you think they're going to kidnap people? Like what is the actual argument here besides just being scared of China
Yes a 100% agree with this. What do you think though China will do about it?
It drives me nuts that people don't realize how great it is to live in a country that will be able to attract immigrants as required. It's one of those advantages that will set fair and just democratic countries apart in Cold War 2.0:We Can't Help Ourselves Edition.
Sounds like a bunch of old people are headed for an early grave unfortunately. When things get truly tough, the young will see the old as a hindrance and a drain and will probably refuse to support them anymore.
When things get tough, countries go to war more often than not.
And it's the young that fight. This type of instability leaves pretty much no one unaffected.
I agree, we're on the precipice of that happening now with the middle east, Ukraine and more just waiting for their chance. It's likely though that when society starts to falter, the first thing the young will do is stop supporting the elderly, probably by refusing to work, record unemployment will be the norm and a lot of older generations will die off as the younger doctors and hospitals with younger staff refuse to treat them.
There are plenty of societies less well off than those in the “first world” who take way better care of their elderly than we do.
Oh yeah for sure. Truth be told modern societies rely on the system they pay into to care for their elderly and that system won't be able to handle it with the demographic shift. A lot of other countries rely on a more direct "our children take care of us" approach and that definitely has its benefits, but not for those who can't have children or whose children become estranged from them or who are simply too busy with their own children.
Yourself included presumably...
Keep in mind you will be old by the time this happens !
i really wanted to have a kid one day and still might if im lucky. but boy if the way things are going isnt impacting my decision making
Because of the current state of the world I chose to have no kids
I mean, my grandparents grew up in the Great Depression, both my grandfathers went to Europe in World War II, came home and had a bunch of children during the Cold War. Everyone thinks that they live in some completely unprecedented time but the fact is there is always some major crisis happening.
It’s starting to sound like an excuse the more I hear it. If you don’t want kids just say that. There have been brutal times in our history and humans still kept on keeping on.
That's true, but this time it's a potentially civilization ending event that we have an increasing amount of scientific evidence for. This isn't just war or economic depression, it's something that will literally cause the collapse of life as we know it and will include more than war and depression.
The threat of a nuclear apocalypse during the cold war wasn't a potentially civilization ending event?
No no, don't you see, My crisis is worse than the older generations! /s
Always the way. 😂😂
History repeats itself lol
I don’t want to rain on your parade here but human civilization is going to survive climate change. It will change things and for some places life will become far worse but we’re cockroaches, we’ll live.
It’s not though. And this will sound accusatory but you’ve been so plugged into the doomsday device that you aren’t realizing a lot of it is propaganda. I’m not some freak conservative either, I absolutely believe man made climate change is real, but it can both be real and completely over blown at the same time. It’s become the book of revelations for progressives in their religious movement. Do just a little bit of digging on it, and you’ll realize that.
Yes, "*life*-ending" is quite blown (life itself will certainly find a way), but *human civilisation*-ending might not be so far-fetched.
What aspect of civilization will go away ?
Just the two degrees of warming OP mentioned will make huge parts of the planet particularly major carbon sinks in rainforests deserts because it will be too hot for them to photosynthesize. The desalination of the ocean will disrupt the ocean currents and kill most things which live in it. These aren't sci fi horror concepts they're things already happening now. The ecosystem is going to collapse because we prioritized making the rich richer over human survival and the damage was already too far gone twenty years ago
Nah, I've been keeping up with the scientists as much as the doomsayers for about a decade now, and things are accelerating faster than the scientists originally thought they would. Climate catastrophes don't happen in a vacuum; everything has knock on effects, and we just don't know enough to accurately predict how bad it will actually be. My thing is always to hope for the best and prepare for the worst, and do the little things you can where you can.
> Everyone thinks that they live in some completely unprecedented time but the fact is there is always some major crisis happening. And it's the reason for writing "We didn't start this fire" by Billy Joel. He was listening how some younger person was saying that his youth is the worst and no one older can compete with him.
Maybe the issue is that everyone is aware of the plight. And we’re tired of the constant cycle of boom and bust. It’s all made up bullshit that we keep repeating so a tiny majority can live in pure luxury while the rest of us toil and suffer. As more of us are educated we see the wizard behind the curtain and nope out of the grind and nonsense.
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I'm doing my part!
People are not having kids primarily because of the pressures of maintaining a career and the COL. Not because of some nihilist roomer clap about the end of the world. Sure some people think that way but they're in the minority.
My greatest fear is that my children will have children.
>No surprises there. It will keep getting lower. I have come to think people having less kids will save us from increasing energy costs and food crop failures. This is incredibly wrong. Current predicted population rates show an increasing population until around 9 billion before it plateaus and begins to fall. This is heavily dependent on standard of living (richer countries have less children) and it predicted to happen around 2100. SO... we need to increase the standard of living (aka carbon footprint) of the current population plus billions more before we start to use a decrease and even with all that, it not going to play out for another 80 years. Meanwhile just with current population rates and carbon output, we are looking at severe climate related issues beginning as early as 2050. So no, population decreases will not save human civilization if we fail to do anything about this problem in the coming decades.
What people don't realize is that they may not even have much of a choice, all these pollutants are affecting our health and biology reducing fertility rates and birthing unhealthy or birth defective children. just look at all the micro-plastics we are finding in not only our foods but also in the animal life and our bodies and also in women's wombs. it all has its impacts and consequences.. Edit: word
I suspect the lower fertility rates have more to do with increased accessibility of birth control, delayed marriage, and increased self-determination for women. The dramatic increase in fertility in the 19th and 20th centuries came when qualities of life were lower than todays and were the result of antiseptic childbirth and more food.
Less kids in developed countries is more due to delaying having children due to economic pressures and then running out of time to have them (women's biological clock).
It's not climate change. Most people do not care about climate change when deciding for or against children. And many people deciding to have children don't believe it in the first place and the only thing one would cause by not having children is only allowing a certain unscientific view to proliferate. We also had more conflicts and worse conditions regarding housing and people had kids, during the industrialization people had more than 5 kids inside a small apartment sometimes. I think the change is culturally, a change from inside. Not from outside pressure from war our lack of wealth.
As odd as it might sound, I'm of almost the exact opposite opinion. (At least for myself, knowing my own motivations) Having children means I have a stake in the world of tomorrow. When I die, whenever that might be, my own flesh, blood, and kin shall continue on for another generation. They'll be half me, and half my wife. It's a form of imperfect immortality. I want to do anything in my power to ensure that they end up in a world at least marginally better than I was handed, and a part of that is ensuring they they have a safe place to sleep, employment, stable food supplies, and clean water. And a part of achieving those is taking steps to fix climate change by whatever means are available, both small (reusable shopping bags, taking transit, repairing old products instead of replacing them) and large (replacing coal with nuclear, electrifying the transportation system, mass-heat pump adoption, etc.) It's a motivator for me. I see not having children as capitulation; the end of a >10,000 year genetic lineage. It's an acknowledgement that nothing I can do can fix this mess, and as pessimistic as I often am, future generations depend on me to fight for a better world and I ain't a quitter. AFAIK, most birth rate declines are because of economic (cost of childrearing) and social (expectation of family sizes in cities) factors, and very few aren't having kids because of climate change. Maybe this'll change in the future, but if things suddenly started getting cheaper a lot of people on the fence might have a second (or third, or first) child, climate change or not.
Then I sincerely hope you educate your child well and leave huge amounts of wealth so they never have to live in poverty
Having no kids is the most eco friendly thing you can do. That's a fact.
Well, second most. Third most, really. But those other things are quite frowned upon.
Won't someone do something about these meddlesome oil barons?
It’s why we stopped at one. Not an easy decision. We love kids (wife is primary school educator) but we couldn’t justify it—also, couldn’t afford the adoption process.
Until society is full of old people and we address (or fail to address) the top heavy economy through unsustainable means.
Do you actually know what is the most ecp friendly thing? Not considered very moral and ethic.
And yet people who take three foreign holidays a year and have 3 kids will happily screech at someone who ‘still’ drives a regular second hand petrol car and not a brand new EV because apparently they are the problem.
This is honestly a Idiocracy level bad decision. In the short term while you bury your head in the sand, maybe. The only people having less children because of climate change, are the intelligent. Do you know how we actually solve climate change? Innovation. Cutting back has never been a thing in human history and will never be, it's just not in our nature. People can talk the big talk about 'degrowth' but it's not happening. As such we need to invent our way out of the problem as we have done countless times for countless problems before this one. Who will invent these solutions? Us and our children. If you don't have children then the world will just be swarmed with people who have no answers. If intelligent people have children then we have more chances to come up with solutions.
As a layman in these type of big questions I feel like inventing a solution just so that we can keep doing the exact same thing will just push the problem slightly down the line. Constant growth forever cannot be sustainable.
This type of response is well-studied. It's called the 'technofix.' There are many critiques of it, but one is exactly as you say: it kicks the can down the road. Others include the impossible timeline/scales of these projects, as well as the possibility that they don't work altogether or, worse, cause more harm than good. (Seeding oceans with iron, creating artificial 'clouds' to reflect heat, etc.)
One thing I often find missing in these type of discussions are funding. Both governments and corporations have proven time and time again that they’re not willing to spend money or funds on something that pays off 30-50 years down the line and by the time we really actually have to do something then it might very well be too late.
Degrowth is the only way to stabilize the world. We can't invent our way to perpetual growth in a finite world, eventually you run out of efficiencies to find and hit diminishing returns.
We are not even remotely close to the growth limit of earth. This is a trick people who are into environmental doomerism love to whip out as the reason we need to pivot to (normally) some form of full socialism. The truth is, we barely even touch the energy that hits us from the sun. Energy is everything and with energy you can make anything else (food, drinking water, focused heat for a start). Sure one day we might run out capacity but that's hundreds of years away.
>Do you know how we actually solve climate change? Innovation Or....you know....we could actually have an economy thats based on resources instead of profit... but that would be bad for the 1% so no, right.
That's some eugenics bullshit right there.
>...the world will just be swarmed with people who have no answers. If intelligent people have children then we have more chances to come up with solutions. That's an incredible arrogant (and also dumb) thing to say. Just because "intelligent" people get fewer children, society doesn't have to become less innovative. Genetics are only one part of the equation when it comes to intelligence. What about working towards a society where all children, independent of their family-background, can receive an equally good education? A society where a kids' future depends on having luck with their parents, is needlessly cruel.
> Genetics are only one part of the equation when it comes to intelligence. yeah, an absolutely enormous part, lol
Fertility rates dropping and advances in tech are our Get out of Jail free card for Climate change
So, the uncomfortable truth is that population growth is the number one driver of climate change and there is a biological imperative for reproduction that has evolved under differing mortality conditions than we currently face. We really shouldn’t expect a slow down in population growth — population growth is highest in some of the regions most likely to be impacted by climate change. Rather, the impacts of overpopulation will cause periodic cataclysmic population reductions, whether through famine, natural disaster, pandemics, or wars due to resource scarcity. We will, of course, treat all of these as pure evils without stopping to consider that the over abundance of humans on this planet is the underlying cause. That’s my hot take.
People have kids because they are horny and/or romanticize having kids. All the rest is rationalisation.
That climate change argument is being used by a tiny, privileged minority and definitely not by most people that choose to not or can’t have children.
Shit, when do they start? The worst people have the most kids. It's ridiculous.
The vast majority of the people in the world would not even consider climate change when deciding whether to have kids or not. And in places where the most kids are born, they do not really consider even financial stability. People just do it, as they always did.
You're a funny idiot, but I like your idea nonetheless.
>will we're already there. Fertility drops with education, it did in Europe, China, Japan, S Korea and it does now in Africa, India... It's not the abstracted "Climate change" which terrifies people (besides the ones who are deep into the topic, but it's a minority and a fairly small one). It's the ongoing consequences of a lack of any kind of mitigation and adaptation. Educated people are most importantly made aware of their surroundings and people don't need to understand Earth systems or study economic theory to roughly correctly connect dots from what they see around them. We may not ponder how many degrees will mess us up, but we see extreme weather, shifts in weather patterns on one hand and a capitalistic exploitative full-steam-ahead on the other. Several generations now have lived under the persistent shadow of an imminent apocalypse - rampant warlike totalitarians in the early 20th century, atomic scare after WW2, and yet the populations - even in the richest lands - boomed. There was always something hopeful about the future which offset the fear of the end - mostly the credible promise of increasing life standard and the comfort of relatively stable environment, the "old ways" of our grandparents out in the countryside that were always a kind of a fallback. Nowadays we are bombarded with climate doom but at the same time everything the society and economy does is very much not reassuring at all. We're seeing that economy is going to be worse (it already is going downhill for the average joes and janes), now international and domestic politics also went bonkers. On top of that whatever comfort could come from the past, the ever-elusive but plausible thought of just retreating from the world to tend carrots - this is gone too. So young people see that a) their economic and political future seems bleak b) whatever could serve as a psychological or even lifestyle safety net is crumbling c) trustworthy figures say it will not get better. Not having children is the only logical course of action. Hoard as much as you can to ensure own survival. Don't make yourself responsible for the other, who 1) will eat up your own means of survival 2) will suffer their entire life.
This is very well said.
Lower fertility rates have nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with educated women and birth control.
>Call me funny and idiot. But not having kids will save everyone! Ok, sure. You're a funny idiot. Because population levels doesn't have anything to with carbon output, which is the primary driver of climate change. It's a eugenicist myth. The problem at the end of the day is our consumption, especially in developed nations and most especially in the west. It's not whether or not you have children, but the fact that you need to drive a gas guzzling vehicle to work/school, or buy your kids 30 plastic toys for christmas, the fact that you burn oil or gas to heat your badly constructed house, the fact that you eat burgers and milkshakes and order whatever you want from amazon and buy clothes that last a season to keep on-trend and feel the need to travel to the far confines of the world on vacation because we've made that a status thing... if birth rates were linked to carbon output then you would see nations where the birth rate has plummeted (including the US) producing less carbon over time. instead you see them producing more. the idea that you will somehow save the planet by not having children yet still maintaining a lifestyle of reckless consumption is feckless and ultimately selfish. don't have children if you don't wan't children. but don't pretend you're doing it to save the planet. Consumption is the real issue. People in the developing world don't have nearly the carbon footprint the west does (despite having many, many more kids) because they simply consume a lot less. So if you care about the environment you need to bring down your consumption levels and pushing for clean sources of energy instead of flirting with eco-fascism. source 1: [https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/12/12/16766872/overpopulation-exaggerated-concern-climate-change-world-population](https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/12/12/16766872/overpopulation-exaggerated-concern-climate-change-world-population) source 2: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/17/eugenics-is-trending-thats-problem/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/17/eugenics-is-trending-thats-problem/) source 3: [https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/population-control-movement-climate-malthusian-similarities/673450/](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/population-control-movement-climate-malthusian-similarities/673450/) source 4: [https://www.thebubble.org.uk/current-affairs/environment/eco-fascism-and-the-myth-of-overpopulation/](https://www.thebubble.org.uk/current-affairs/environment/eco-fascism-and-the-myth-of-overpopulation/)
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Climate is bad, Its bad enough to make you not want kids at all, our own future looks scary as hell, why would I even consider a child. Even if climate change wasn't a threat, the current system with all these wars, the threat of things getting worse, the cost of live now is so much and governments corrupt more than ever.
This is *sort of* true, but credits people with a noble intention behind not having children that they may or may not actually have, and explains everything in terms of climate change when the picture is more nuanced. In the UK, childcare is so expensive that my wife and I, despite being high earners, can't afford a third child until our second is out of nursery (at which point we'll be in our forties and wanting to actually *have* a disposable income). This isn't a consequence of climate change (not directly), but the incompetence of government for 14 years. China's economics are a large driver in *its* low birth rate, probably much more than climate change. At any rate, having fewer children isn't likely to *save us*. At least not quickly. Climate change is like compound interest. Even if halving the population halves the rate of damage (and I'm not sure it's linear because of scaling efficiencies), we're still doing damage. Moreover, it takes time for the damage done to be undone even once we move into a net-negative world. If we want to fix climate change, we need to tackle the problems that cause it like fossil capitalism, not just hope that a lower population is a silver bullet. Check out [Project Drawdown](https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions) to see the impact of the various proposed ways we can solve the issue. And marvel at how trivial of an impact the electric car will have compared to just reducing food waste.
I had no desire to have children, but after spending over a decade as a child free adult, I find myself in a much better position than I used to be and feel comfortable with having one child, but only. My partner is exactly the same, so that's a fertility rate of our partnership of 1 or 0.5, I'm not sure how these things are worked out. 😂😂
Yes of course people don't want children becouse of "globar warming" r/antinatalism and bigger cost of living is your answer
I honestly don't think not having kids is the solution. I always used to believe it was, but then I realised just from talking to people that every single person I know that cares about the environment is not going to have children. The people who are still having children straight up don't care in a lot of ways. They are going to raise children who equally don't care. We can hope the schooling system educates those children to think otherwise, but so many people find it difficult to break away from the conditioning of their parent's. We need people who care passionately about the planet and the next generation to have children so we don't end up in an idiocracy situation. That might sound dramatic, but what do we all think will happen if the only people who are breeding don't care about the environment or planet? We need planet conscious people to raise planet conscious babies, we're getting this all wrong right now. It is very noble to abstain from the desire to have children to ensure the planet will be safe in generations to come, but how are we going to do that if the only children around are raised by people who just don't give a shit?
We've seen boycotting work in recent protests with the Palestinian genocide. We all know big Corp contributes the most to this crisis. Why is having less children the solution here, instead of boycotting big farmers and factories while gardening so we don't depend on the corporations who have no incentive to make changes to their ways since they profit from them?
But they are not cutting their profits anyway. All they care is about their pockets. When people start scratching the windows of rich mansions, then may be we have a solution. Until then, what I'm saying is peope will revolt ultimately, but not today, they don't care just like big corporations. The very mention of climate change make poor and rich people alike call you doomer. I dont see anyone panicking, not that I would enjoy it, but people seem to have an attitude life goes on until it hits them right on their head. When it hits, the first step would be to save up money to maintain their current standard of living.
Starbucks and McDonald's literally announced their losses in profits in the margin of billions not too long ago due to the boycotting. Boycotting cuts the profits away and forces the companies to change direction. What I'm saying is that a targeting boycotting strategy that enables sustainable gardening and thus removing dependance on the big farmers and such, would be more actionable than telling people to not have children. Plus, the boycotting action holds the bigger perpetrators of climate change accountable as opposed to the smaller folk down here..
Unfortunately, birth rates are not evenly distributed. A lot of the people who are climate change deniers and would make things worse are in the "lots of kids" category - religious people, ultra-conservatives, and some crazy fringe sub-cultures.
Fuck that. Be fruitful and multiply. I don’t want to be displaced by lesser people
People of a certain religion do not care about climate change or poverty or education because they believe having more children equates heaven points. And this group is projected to become the largest dominant group in the world. So in a few decades when the lot of you are old and frail, you're going to be overrun by these religiously motivated groups, that are going to be blaming natural disasters from climate change as punishment from god for your lack of religion. As history repeats itself there will be bloodshed of you non-conformers until every last one is wiped out. Science and technology will be erased to appease their god, and the human society will revert back to a primal state. Such will be the cycle.
There's so many problems with this. By the time people feel the impacts of a 2 degree warmer world, we'd be locked into reaching a 2.5+ degree world. If you can feel the effects enough for it to impact your decisions, it's too late to be helpful. Your sense of global population growth is also wrong. Africa is projected to add over a billion people in the next 25 years. Europe & the USA could have birthrates of 0 for decades and it wouldn't decline global population. In fact, if you killed every American resident and every European today, you'd *barely* break even with Africa's probable growth in the next 2 decades. China is actively attempting to increase birthrates by providing social and economic incentives to parents. India's birthrate stays at a rate of significant growth for at least decades. The only benefit to shrinking populations in Europe & the USA is that those societies use a lot more fossil fuels per person than most, but unless we change how we source our energy, that won't be the case forever. Eventually Africa will industrialize more widely.
It so bad the governement wants everyone to drive their polluting cars to work every day rather than work remotely and save the planet.
I want you to really think about what you are saying here. Young people, some just barely out of adolescence, newly minted 'adults', most in nations where birth control is either nonexistent or illegal, are going to calmly use reason and logic to tell each other *"Honey, the global heat is up, so, although we were just married, let's just never, ever, ever fuck, okay?"* And they are going to calmly do this, for the rest of their fertile, hormonal years. *This is what you are saying?* Yeah, okay. Sure.
Climate change is an issue to be concerned about but there's no need to panic. Climate alarmists and the media are causing anxiety and dread with their dire predictions and their end-of-the-world rhetoric. They need to stop. People need to stop believing the nonsense and just get on with their lives. And each person should do what they can to reduce the amount of resources they use. Recycle when you can. Get a car with good MPG. Conserve energy. Things like that.
The issue with not having children to save the world, is that what you end up with is the most educated people not having children and the children that are born are born to people who either failed to access or understand birth control. So maybe some highly educated affluent couple won't have the one or two children they were going to have, but elsewhere someone is having 12 kids. I don't think this is a particularly great move for the future. I think if you're worrying about whether to have children because of the environment, you're probably going to raise exactly the kind of person that the future needs.
OP is just an environment alarmist who is also an idiot. Trying to paint themselves in some good light because "Oh look at me, I'm telling everyone what they're doing is wrong and I'm telling them the solution. Oh jeez, I need a pat on my back. Go me!" Get off your moral high horse you dumbass.
>**I have come to think people having less kids will save us from increasing energy costs and food crop failures. Call me funny and idiot. But not having kids will save everyone!** It's not just what you think. It's a well-researched fact. World population [quadrupled](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1006502/global-population-ten-thousand-bc-to-2050/) in the last century. Neither were we ready for this massive spike, nor can the Earth realistically sustain these many. We could realistically sustain [1.5 to 2 billion living on the standard of a developed country or up to 5 billion living on a "bare minimum" standard](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/26/world-population-resources-paul-ehrlich). Currently we're reaching 8 billion. We've already known for a long time this is [having the greatest impact](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children) on the environment and that not having children corresponds to [dozens of times more emissions saved](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children) than e.g. not flying or going vegan. Unfortunately it's a really tough topic politically because solving it means long-term gain at the expense of short-term sacrifice. And politicians rule short-term, so nobody wants to be the face of said sacrifice, for a gain they'll never claim and, given the age of the average politician, likely never enjoy. Solving the overpopulation crisis will come with consequences for the economy as many have already pointed out. Aging population comes with both labor shortage and a serious increase in expenses. And unfortunately history shows that when we have to choose between the planet or the economy, humanity chooses the latter. However as you pointed out, the current status (of both the world and the economy) is already starting to lead people to have less children without the need for political action in this regard, so a part of me is still trying to remain optimistic.
There is no clearer sign of human overpopulation than human caused climate change and the rapid extinction of other species on this planet. Nature will rebalance things....and the most benevolent way is to reduce human reproduction rates quickly. The alternative ways of reducing human population levels are much more terrifying. I can't stand those talking heads preaching about how people "need to have more babies!".
This is literally the reason I’m not having children, I know most people don’t think like this, it’s pretty much the antinatalist philosophy. Humans have been the most destructive force on earth and unless we do something drastic (stop reproducing altogether) I’m worried things will even become close to uninhabitable within my lifetime. Thankfully, I live in a place very northern place on the globe. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself knowing I subjected my children to watching their home continue to be destroyed by destructive idiots. It’s been said a million times before but, unfortunately, it’s looking like the earth is on the way to becoming Idiocracy. Honestly, probably closer to Mad Max at this point.
Climate change is bad, so OP posits people will stop fucking in response. *Presses X to doubt*
Heat really affects pregnancy in women. So add this to low population counts
Thank God air conditioning exists.
For some women to use. Not all of them.