Save the Planet: Have More Babies

T he anti-baby impulses of some environmentalist whackos have increasingly inspired progressive elites to arrive at the scientifically unmoored conclusion that having kids is “irresponsible,” given their potential environmental impact. This is both factually wrong and fundamentally anti-human.

“Over the past few years, I’ve been asked one question more than any other. It comes up at speeches, at dinners, in conversation. It’s the most popular query when I open my podcast to suggestions, time and again. It comes in two forms. The first: Should I have kids, given the climate crisis they will face? The second: Should I have kids, knowing they will contribute to the climate crisis the world faces?” Ezra Klein recently wrote in the New York Times.

Polling shows an estimated 39 percent of Americans think it is likely that global warming will cause literal human extinction via food shortages and other disasters, even though that is scientifically absurd. This isn’t what the scientific consensus says, of course, but the “follow the science” crowd is, increasingly, ignoring the science.

Canadian writer Britt Wray epitomized the irrational fears dictating the course of so many progressives’ lives when she wrote recently, “Many of us are balancing the marrow-deep desire for a child against an awareness that as they grow up there may be constant food and water shortages, social division and wars.” Jill Filipovic also expressed it well recently when she tweeted that “having a child is one of the worst things you can do for the planet.”

So called “eco-reproductive anxiety” is highest in younger demographics. In a 2020 study of Americans in their prime reproductive years, nearly 97 percent said they were “very” or “extremely” concerned about the well-being of their real or hypothetical children because of global warming. And a poll last year found that 39 percent of young people “feel uncertain” about having children because of their fear of global warming, arguing that the future will be so awful it would be wrong to bring children into such a bad world. That is slightly up from a prior 2018 survey for the New York Times finding that a third of the 20- to 45-year-old Americans surveyed who either had or expected to have fewer children than they would like cited climate change as a reason.

Morgan Stanley has even issued a warning that the “movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline.”

These concerns are meritless. The current scientific consensus, as per leading scientific organizations such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that global warming won’t be even close to civilization-endingly bad. Those who claim otherwise are going directly against “the science.”

The IPCC predicts sea levels will rise roughly half a meter by 2100, so about twice as much as they have since 2015. In other words, we’ve already gotten about 30 percent of the global warming we’re likely to see by 2100. This is an amount so minuscule it literally will not be noticeable to the average American. Even the worst-case scenarios aren’t close to being as likely or as damaging as more conventional doomsday scenarios, such as nuclear war. That threat didn’t stop Ezra Klein’s parents from bringing him into the world in 1984, a year when the Soviet Union conducted 29 nuclear tests and had almost 40,000 nuclear warheads aimed at America.

But we can’t really blame the folks polled for holding this opinion, either. After all, they’ve clearly just been listening to the constant predictions of apocalypse (which never quite materialize) that overpopulation alarmists have been spreading for decades with some truly horrific results. Climatologist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who has advised both Pope Francis and former German chancellor Angela Merkel, once claimed the Earth can support a maximum number of 1 billion people — as opposed to the roughly 8 billion alive today. Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich once similarly declared that “100–200 Million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years” and that “population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make.” (He said this in . . . 1970.)

Public figures ranging from Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Prince Harry to comedian and political commentator Bill Maher have all questioned or decried the morality of having kids in the face of global warming. Speaking on a panel, Bill Nye “the Science Guy” seemingly innocuously asked the ridiculous question, “Should we have policies that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?” (One of his co-panelists said yes.) Dave Brower, first executive director of the Sierra Club, the self-proclaimed “most enduring and influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States,” was much more direct. “Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license,” Brower famously stated in an interview. “All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

Despite the grim predictions, civilization is still kicking and widespread, and mass famines of the sort that doomsayers predicted never occurred even as the world population reached new highs. In fact, the number of people living in poverty has significantly declined, and the amount of food per person has steadily increased. The world’s gross domestic product per person has immeasurably grown despite — or, more likely, because of — population growth. As the late economist Julian Simon noted, people are the ultimate resource. We generate productivity; we’re not just passive consumers of the planet’s resources. The evidence that Simon was right continues to mount.

Not everyone who worries about the planet is anti-human. Some environmentalists, such as Kelsey Piper writing in Vox, acknowledge the problem-solving potential of the next generation to tackle challenges like global warming. She says that she tells her daughter “that today there is climate change, and solving it is going to require new inventions and new ideas — and she can be the one to invent them.”

Klein, to his credit, also rejects the view that children are inherently destructive, a net negative to the world. He figures that having children is acceptable because his kids could potentially provide a political boost to environmentalists’ goals. “Over the past decade, rising generations have transformed climate politics,” he notes. “Much of the progress we’ve seen comes from their relentless advocacy and energy. The world they will inhabit is changing because they are changing the world.”

And Klein isn’t alone in thinking about how who has children today will shape tomorrow’s policies. “Imagine Greta Thunberg,” a political scientist told Klein. “Should [her mother] not have had her child because some model said kids are bad for the planet? At some point we’re asking whether we believe in the continuation of society and the possibility of young people to be an engine for change.” The psychologist and commentator Scott Alexander has similarly noted, “If you take the few percent of people most committed to stopping climate change, and remove them from the next generation, that doesn’t look good for the next generation.”

Klein and Alexander are right that environmentalists’ philosophically motivated reluctance to having children could ultimately cause the movement to suffer political setbacks. The association between fertility rates and voting patterns is clearly trending against their hopes. Evidence from recent elections proves the association between areas becoming more Republican and high fertility rates relative to the national average: The top eleven states with the highest birth rates are all red.

According to one study, a random sample of 100 conservative adults will raise 208 children, while 100 liberal adults will raise a mere 147 kids. In the 1970s, there was little or no difference in fertility rates between liberals and conservatives. And much smaller differences in kid-having can make a serious difference in elections. If around just 5 percent more Democrats hadn’t had children in the previous generation, that could have switched the popular-vote outcome in the 2020 presidential election from Biden to Trump. Since children tend to share their parents’ political beliefs, this can skew elections toward whichever political tribe has more children, particularly if the election is close. Some progressives are now waking up to this fact too little too late, given the stranglehold that anti-child sentiment has on a large swath of the environmental movement.

In the long run, policies around global warming and every other issue, for that matter, will be determined by the descendants of the people today who don’t give up on having a family — or on humanity’s future.