A fifth of female climate scientists who responded to Guardian survey said they had opted to have no or fewer children
Ihad the hormonal urges,” said Prof Camille Parmesan, a leading climate scientist based in France. “Oh my gosh, it was very strong. But it was: ‘Do I really want to bring a child into this world that we’re creating?’ Even 30 years ago, it was very clear the world was going to hell in a handbasket. I’m 62 now and I’m actually really glad I did not have children.”
Parmesan is not alone. An exclusive Guardian survey has found that almost a fifth of the female climate experts who responded have chosen to have no children, or fewer children, due to the environmental crises afflicting the world.
…
An Indian scientist who chose to be anonymous decided to adopt rather than have children of her own. “There are too many children in India who do not get a fair chance and we can offer that to someone who is already born,” she said. “We are not so special that our genes need to be transmitted: values matter more.”
Title could have said majority of millennials
The population is actually tipped to massively reduce on the next 100 years due to a large portion of people not have babies simply due to crappy economic conditions, inflation, war the lying flat movement in china and the ever increasing destruction of the middle class into the homeless poor. Aside from rich people destroying peoples ability to have happy lives, there’s also the plastic problem that’s quite literally made every male living thing have a reduced sperm count and it continues to drop as plastic is in the air, our clothes carpet and oceans. Endocrine disruptors in our bodies are being effected by chemicals found in vinyl products, thermal receipts and Tupperware releasing chemicals when heated in microwaves. These things are so small they enter the bloodstream and pass through the blood brain barrier… Fuuuck
So if you want to save the future start by sniping off rich oligarchs and ban plastic completely
i agree with your general idea, but not with all the reasons. war, crappy economic conditions and inflation have all happened multiple times before (and much worse that the current situation), but I’ve never heard that there were large portion of people choosing not to have kids before (please, correct me if I am wrong)
i think that the current mental health crisis (which is caused by all those problems + the housing crisis, destruction of middle class, climate change concerns + social media) makes it different this time
war, crappy economic conditions and inflation have all happened multiple times before
And they’ve all been paired with downturns in new births. The Thirty Years War, the Bengali Famine, and the Great Depression all resulted in sharp declines in birth rates.
i think that the current mental health crisis (which is caused by all those problems + the housing crisis, destruction of middle class, climate change concerns + social media) makes it different this time
I don’t think its limited to mental health. Two big changes from historical periods have been the sharp decline in dying kids and introduction of effective contraception. Historically, the only thing that countered a human’s innate horniness was malnutrition, massacre, and high rates of infant mortality. With vaccines and contraception, the idea of family planning isn’t “Have five kids and hope two live” but “Have two kids and hope you can pay for their college”.
A big contribution to the 40s-era Baby Boom was the fertilizer revolution, which dramatically boosted crop yields. This, combined with early vaccine technology, saw a drop in maternal deaths and infant deaths, leading to parents with enormous family sizes who all lived to adulthood. These adults arrived just in time to start taking The Pill. Consequently, the Millennial second-tier Boom was much smaller than the first. And now Millennials are having even fewer kids, because contraception is trivial to obtain and large families are stigmatized against.
But as to mental health? I think that’s tangential and hardly unique to the modern moment. If we didn’t have fertilizer and contraception and vaccination, we’d have just as many mentally ill people running around and making babies who died before they turned three years old. And the population downturn would look the same as any other 18th or 19th century trend line.
It’ll start to level off around 10 billion, in 35 years.
The thing about a growing population is that fewer people having babies has a diminished effect when there are so many more people. Each new pair having a slightly smaller chance of reproducing doesn’t matter when there are twice as many new pairs.
The population won’t decrease dramatically, save for some catastrophic event.
The population very well might drop suddenly. Clearly that 10B is too many, but what happens after that. Some projections have a very steep decline, looking at developed countries approach an average closer to one child instead of closer to replacement value. What happens when most of those 10B age then pass, but there are only 5B to replace them? In the time of one generation, we could see a very serious depopulation in places
I always thought my children, if I’d have them, might die a horrible death due to climate change.
Now, knowing that humanity with climate change in mind, only increased spewing CO2 in to the atmosphere, I think I actually eillmdie a horrible death due to climate change.
The no children thing for the climate is multiple generations too late already.
Also, keep the idiocracy effect in mind. Only the good and caring people decide not to have children, the idiots and selfish assholes will have ten for them.
Getting snipped this week!
How do you have fewer than no children? (=P tongue in cheek purposeful misunderstanding, not true pedantry)
Edit: (Damn, even being clear I was being cheeky I still managed to piss someone off xD)
Someone’s gotta have that half child from the 2.5 average!
But that would be like going to the gym 3.5 times a week! How do you go 3.5 times?! Do a half workout or something?
That’s where this originated from, the forum is still online, a highlight of human history:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://m.piped.video/watch?v=eECjjLNAOd4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I knew when I was 12 I never wanted children. I got married at 20. I got fixed at 24. I am almost 40 and have no regrets other than not getting fixed sooner, but finding a doc to fix a lady at 18 is damn near impossible.
no or fewer children
So… they killed other people’s children?
Gotta fight climate change somehow
I decided that I personally felt unethical bringing people into this world nearly a decade ago
What if your kid was going to be the one to fix everything though? Lol now we are doomed
We’re not in a movie. Climate change isn’t going be solved by one brilliant scientist. It’s not even a scientific/technology problem at this point, it’s a political one.
Maybe his kid was going to assassinate a bunch of billionaires.
Cool, now you, an educated, well intent person with good morals won’t have any offspring to pass those values to, and thus won’t have any representation in the next generations. Meanwhile redneck Terry will make 7 children with 3 different women and teach them to hate the libruls and that the earth is flat.
It is your decision not to have kids, I chose so myself too. But your line of thinking is in discord with the argument.
Have you met the kids of those rednecks? A lot are estranged from their parents.
Especially with the internet, parents have a limited amount of control over kids, the more important part is education.
Oh ok I guess we should stop trying and lose all hope then
Lmao…
Your two ideas are…
- “Someone’s child will solve the problem”
- Well there’s nothing we can do
?
No my ideas are that I’ll live my life and be the best person I can.
It was a joke when I said his kid could fix it. That guy’s obviously an idiot and his kids would be too
How do you people not know sarcasm? So I need to dumb it down for you with the /s like back in the day on Reddit? I thought we moved past that
Yes, it’s obvious that you were joking about the other commenter’s kid fixing the problem.
The issue is that it embodies the sentiment that it’s “not our problem” and it’s for the future generation to figure out…and then when that was called out, the first alternative you brought up was defeatism, as if that’s the only alternative to someone in the future fixing the problem, lol
The defeatism was obviously sarcasm too though. So stop making all these assumptions about me.
I obviously want the issues fixed and have hope that they will be since I said that I have my own children. I do my fair share as well.
Also you talk about “defeatism” and that’s all I see in this thread. People give up on the chance to have kids not because they don’t want them but because some rich assholes have started to destroy the environment, things cost too much, the pay isn’t right, etc… that’s defeatism. The rich assholes are still having plenty of kids and they will be the ones to inherit the world.
We don’t have time to wait for kids to grow up before doing what we can. Ah, sorry. Before putting all of that responsibility on them and screaming “NOT IT!”
Starting
Lol
1/5th want no or fewer kids… so 4/5 were pushing forward like normal.
Ohe of the 4/5. I have 3 kids under 13. You gotta.be optimistic that they’re the generation to finally fix the mess we made.
If everyone stops having kids then hope disappears.
When we have exhausted all other options, we will do the right thing.
Edit - I love that having hope and optimism for a future is downvotes lol
Have them. Just raise them to be resilient little cockroaches.
Or better yet, adopt!
1/5th is low, and doesn’t appear very different to the general female population.
This really just highlights the underlying problem and why our “efforts” are destined to amount to little more than shuffling deck chairs on the titanic — humans are selfish, and most of us are not willing to make major sacrifices to avert disaster; hell, most struggle to accept minor inconveniences.
humans are selfish, and most of us are not willing to make major sacrifices to avert disaster
I am sick and tired of this cynical bullshit argument. It’s wrong in two ways (and neither are the way you think):
- It assumes that we have to reduce our standard of living in order to reduce our fossil fuels consumption, instead of innovating
- It presumes that the lifestyle changes that we do have to make (e.g. higher density zoning and walkablity) represent some kind of deprivation, rather than the improvement they would actually be.
most struggle to accept minor inconveniences.
This is the really jaw dropping thing whenever I see it. I just have no idea what to say and don’t get how people don’t have an instinct for when there might be a bigger picture.
Some are really cruising through life just trying to maximise convenience and comfort.
COVID lockdowns demonstrated that we could kick climate change with enough will power. Id start by mandating work from home where possible.
COVID lockdowns weren’t sustainable and while they reduced pollution to some extent they didn’t come close to eliminating it. Like in my country we turned off coal, but only because we don’t have much coal to begin with. We were still using plenty of gas power, as that’s our second largest energy source. Here in the UK our largest energy source is Wind, and we aren’t even doing that well compared to France or Spain on the energy front.
Things also still got manufactured and sold, and that’s where a lot of pollution comes from. Food and goods production. Eliminating transport pollution would help for sure, but it’s like 14% of the problem. Electricity generation, heating, and agriculture are the things we need to fix the most. Fixing electricity generation would also help with transport emissions as we could use more electric vehicles and trains.
You’ve thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world
For threatenin’ my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain’t worth the blood That runs in your veins
Oh no! Think of the hypothetical children!
This is a powerful lyric from the song masters of war by bob dylan.
It is a song about how the Rich and powerful use and abuse normal people as Grist for the war mill or in this case Grist for the oil mill.
How the fuck is this being downvoted?
Because on face value it looks like an anti-abortion lyric.
I didn’t recognize it.
Something something literally Idiocracy (2006)
At least the president in Idocracy had the humility and self awareness let the smartest guy in the room advise him on policy.
Yeah, you quote that meme! Don’t go having any original thoughts there champ!
Hmmm, what would Krishnamurti do?
Even 30 years ago, it was very clear the world was going to hell in a handbasket.
And 30 years before that. And 30 years before that.
I mean, if you don’t want to have kids more power to you. I get it.
But what I’m reading is far more a consequence of a social stigma against having kids without sufficient economic independence. And extraordinary rates of inflation in housing, food, health care, and education make kids utterly unaffordable even if the climate situation looks great.
“We are not so special that our genes need to be transmitted: values matter more.”
I think that’s true up until a point. When I see the genocide in Gaza or forced sterilization policies aimed at black and Hispanic women in police custody in the US or caste violence in India or Myanmar or the Bill Gates Foundation’s effort to quash population size in West Africa…
What values are we transmitting when we’ve got a policy of eugenics? What does it say about the western impulse to homogenize and euthanize everything it comes into contact with?
I can very easily see a world in which the impulse towards mass extermination gets us before the heat pushes us all into the upper reaches of Canada and Russia. And I’m loathe to see anti-natalism harnessed as one more tool in the bigot’s bag of tricks, to justify why a population with high birth rates is an efficient target for population rightsizing.
lol… so wait, what you’re saying is, believers of the climate change doomsday scenario are less likely to have kids?
Climate change is real! And we only have 20 years left… again. And again. And again… Annnnd again.
Bruh, we practically only have 2 seasons where I live now.
