In recent years, I have been asked one question more than any other. It appears in speeches, dinners, conversations. It’s the most common question when I open my podcast for suggestions. And it comes in two forms: 1. Should I have children since they will face a climate crisis? 2. Should I have children, knowing that they will contribute to the climate crisis facing the world?
It’s not just me. A 2020 Morning Consult survey found that a quarter of childless adults say climate change is part of why they made this choice. Morgan Stanley analysis found that the decision to “not have children due to fear of the climate crisis is impacting fertility rates faster than any previous trend”.
But one thing I noticed, after years of reporting on the topic: people who have dedicated their lives to fighting climate change continue to have children. So I started asking them why. “I unequivocally, scientifically and personally reject the notion that children are somehow doomed to an unhappy life,” Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Columbia University, told me.
I worry, as I write, that this is interpreted as a rejection of the suffering that climate change will unleash. Is not. An appreciation of how bad the past was should deepen our anger at the recklessness with which our future is treated. We’ve done so much to build a dam between us and the merciless world, so much to make the future better than the past. Giving back any part of it or preventing progress we might otherwise have is worse than a tragedy. It’s a crime.
But that, and not the apocalypse, is the most likely path we are on. That, strangely enough, is progress. As Zeke Hausfather notes, many reliable estimates from a decade ago put us on the path to an average global temperature 4°C or 5°C higher than pre-industrial levels by 2100. It would be a cataclysm. But the falling cost of clean energy and the growing ambition of climate policy have changed that.
The Climate Action tracker puts our current policy trajectory at about 2.7°C of warming by 2100. If the commitments world governments have made since the Paris Agreement hold, we are on track for a 2°C increase. or even less.
And there is more reason for optimism. One of the really exciting articles I’ve read in the last few years was titled “Predictions of Empirically Based Technology and the Energy Transition.” The authors analyzed more than 2,900 predictions of how fast the cost of installing solar energy would drop from 2010 to 2020. The average prediction was 2.6% per year, none were more than 6%. But costs actually dropped by 15% a year. Other technologies have seen similar declines. If these curves hold — and they could sharpen if supported by better policies — then we are, even now, underestimating the possible path of progress.
But hope is not a plan. And no one should mistake 2.5°C warming (or even 2°C) for success. We will cause incalculable damage to ecosystems, there will be worsened droughts, floods, famines, heat waves. We will have bleached coral reefs, acidified the ocean, led to the extinction of countless species. Millions, perhaps tens of millions, of people will die from the increase in heat and more will be killed by indirect consequences of the crisis. Many more will still be forced to flee their homes or live lives of deep poverty or suffering. We will have robbed you of all possibility of flowering.
All of this, however, describes the world we inhabit, not just the one we are creating. Climate models force us to face vast expanses of future suffering that, if it were happening all around us, we might miss. As my colleague David Wallace-Wells—father of two and author of “The Uninhabitable Earth”—wrote to me, “What looks like an apocalypse in perspective often seems more like grim normalcy when it comes to the present.” Ufa.
This is not mere abstraction or prediction. The evidence that we ignore mass suffering is all around us. We are ignoring it today, just as we did yesterday and will do tomorrow. “An estimated 20 million people have died from Covid and now we’re over it. What do we do with it?” Wallace-Wells wrote to me. “Ten million people a year die from air pollution. What do we do with it?”
This reflects a facet of our future that conversations about the life prospects of affluent children in the US obscure. It is true that climate change will affect rich and poor alike. It is not true that it will affect them equally. Rich Californians who breathe the smoke from wildfires are not facing the plight of Bangladesh’s poor whose homes are in the cyclone’s path.
Climate change is and will be a driver of global inequality. Richer people and countries will buy their way out of the worst consequences, often using the wealth accumulated by burning fossil fuels. Fear about the future our children will face, when expressed by affluent residents of wealthy countries, sometimes feels like a shift from guilt to terror. Facing what we have done to others is unimaginable. It is easier, somehow, to imagine that we did it to ourselves.
This leads to the second version of the question: is it immoral to have children knowing that residents of rich countries are responsible for so much carbon emissions? This argument recasts childlessness as a form of climate compensation. Populations of rich countries use more resources than those of poor countries. Less population means less use of resources.
Fredric Jameson, the Marxist literary critic, is often credited with observing that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than that of capitalism. A similar limit to our political imagination lurks in the conversation: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than that of carbon pollution.
“Almost all pollution is determined by the structure of society,” Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, told me. “The goal is to undo this structure so that children can be born into a society that does not emit carbon pollution. That is the project.”
And it’s doable. Per capita carbon emissions in the US have dropped from more than 22.2 tons in 1973 to 14.2 tons in 2020. And they could fall much more. The Germans emitted 7.7 tonnes of carbon per person in 2020. The Swedes 3.8. “In a net zero world, nobody has a carbon footprint and we could stop tabulating blame by counting babies,” said Wallace-Wells.
Decarbonizing society is embracing a better world, for reasons far beyond climate change. “The immediate benefits of climate mitigation actions are spectacular: better air quality, better health outcomes, reduced inequality,” Marvel wrote. “I want those things. I also want reforestation, coastal restoration. I’m excited, but not counting, about amazing new technologies like low-cost carbon removal and nuclear fusion. I’m more excited about bland but effective technology. , such as heat pumps and transmission lines.”
I don’t just prefer a world of net zero emissions to a world of net zero children. I think these worlds are in conflict. We face a problem of politics, not physics. The green future has to be welcoming, exciting. If people cannot see themselves in it, they will fight to stop it. If the cost of worrying about the weather is giving up having a family, it will be too high. A climate movement that embraces sacrifice as a response or temper can do more harm than good. It may accidentally sacrifice the political appeal needed to make the net-zero world a reality.
My children will live a story that I cannot write and cannot control. It will be their story. Becoming a father is feeling, every day, the weight, hope and terror of this fact. I can’t say if it’s the right choice for you, but no climate model can, either.
