Massacre of the (future) innocents

Two key papers form the theory behind today’s anti-natalism. They are junk science.

I’m very grateful to Prince Harry. Though I’m a republican, his commitment in Vogue to have a maximum of two children, because of the damage that such beings cause the planet, has performed a public service. It has brought out from under a stone all those eco-Puritans who hate humanity… right down to babies.

What is their argument? It’s concise, memorable, brutal, and runs like this.

Primarily caused by man-made CO2, climate change is the only game in town. Society is composed of individuals. These individuals consume things, and in the process, create more CO2. Therefore more babies can only be a bad thing – QED.

The broadminded among us might cavil, and observe that society contains not just individual consumers, but groups of workers producing goods and services, as well as the knowledge and tools that scientists and technologists have accumulated over centuries. Yet once environmentalism came down to the kindergarten logic summarised above, it was only a matter of time before it began to calculate just how much CO2 each new child is to blame for. And that’s exactly what happened, beginning in 2008, a key year for climate hysteria.

At that moment, a statistician and an oceanographer at Oregon State University in the US did some sums, estimating ‘the extra emissions of fossil carbon dioxide [sic] that an average individual causes when he or she chooses to have children’. Importantly, they factored in not just the CO2 associated with each new child’s birth, but that associated with that child’s descendants. In a gesture of fairness toward parents, they qualified their ‘basic premise’ – that ‘a person is responsible for the carbon emissions of his descendants’ – by weighting each descendant by their relatedness to that person. Describing that they called a ‘simple idea’, they wrote:

‘For a descendant that is n generations removed from the focal individual, the weight is (1/2)n. So, for example, a mother and father are each responsible for one half of the emissions of their offspring, and 1/4 of the emissions of their grandchildren’.

Did you get that?

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

Note, first, that in this framework, technologies such as nuclear power, renewables of carbon capture and storage have no role to play in cutting emissions. They are simply omitted. Everything comes down to personal culpability.

Second, this methodology is a very convenient form of double-counting: any mother and father are not only each ‘responsible’ for their own emissions, but also, in aggregate, for all of the emissions of each of their children, plus further fractions of their children’s descendants.

Last, might rich Prince Harry and his jets just have a larger carbon footprint than the less-than-equal man on the Clapham Omnibus?

Yet our friends ploughed on. They looked as far forward as the year 2400. They factored in current and future fertility rates, rates of mortality, and CO2 per head – as estimated by the US Environmental Protection Agency’s entirely dubious Personal Emissions Calculator. And they concluded that while right-on changes to lifestyle ‘must propagate through future generations in order to be fully effective’, an American woman could, by adopting such changes, only save just 486 US tons of CO2 emissions in her lifetime. By contrast, were she to have two children, she would add more than 18,000 tons after her death.

So far, so bad. But it gets worse. In 2017, Guardian ultra-carbonista Damian Carrington picked up the Oregon research to help publicise a second anti-natalist paper by two Canadians based at the Centre for Sustainability Studies, Lund University, Sweden.

Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas used the Oregon methodology. In creepy style, they targeted adolescents, arguing that such people ‘can act as a catalyst to change their household’s behaviour’. In the familiar condescending manner, they worried that ‘even knowledgeable and willing individuals’ might not reduce meat intake if faced with cultural barriers. And, in that regard, they complained that, in terms of recommendations likely to benefit the environment, 10 Canadian high school textbooks ‘overwhelmingly focused on moderate or low-impact actions’.

The chart below, from Lund University, sums up their conclusions. In the usual technology-lite, worker-free and inequality-free framework of purely lowering personal emissions of CO2, having one fewer child beats, by a country mile, even the drastic steps of ending all car travel (including the electric sort), or ending all consumption of meat.

As Wynes and Nicholas summarise it: as an average per year in developed countries having one fewer child saves 58.6 metric tonnes of CO2-equivalent a year; eschewing the car, 2.4 tonnes; avoiding that roundtrip transatlantic flight,1.6 tonnes, and eating a plant-based diet, 0.8 tonnes. In the home, ‘comprehensive’ recycling is four times less effective than a plant-based diet, going over to the right lightbulbs (eight times less), and avoiding that tumble drier, virtually useless. So not just Canada, but the US, Australasia and the EU must ‘improve existing educational and communication structures’ to match this reality – in other words, indoctrinate teenagers at school to have as few children as possible in later life.

This, then, is the theoretical inspiration of the Birthstrike movement. They ignore every aspect of contemporary capitalism. Indeed, they echo Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement that there is ‘no such thing’ as society: that its ‘real sinews’ are merely ‘the acts of individuals and families’.

These two papers expose the pseudoscience behind today’s Malthusians. Like Thatcher, they are glib, myopic, anti-human and reactionary. Instead of progress, we are asked to go brainwashing youth – when, that is, youth are not co-opted to tell their parents how to behave.

These papers are, finally, Old Testament. In terms of CO2 emissions, they visit the iniquity of fathers – and, even more, mothers – upon their sons, ‘to the third and fourth generation’ and beyond.

As the New Testament also has it, Herod, King of the Jews in Judea, ordered the massacre of all boys aged two and below around Bethlehem, in an attempt to rid himself of the new-born Jesus.

These papers draw no blood, but lie fully in Herod’s tradition.

Photo by Getty