NY Magazine Writer "Confronts" Parenthood In Climate-Flattened World, Exudes Panglossian Goo

[hatrack]

EDIT

Others wrestle with different questions — not whether to have children in a time of global warming but how to talk to them about it. One climate writer I know has, in the last few years, taken his teenage children to see the Great Barrier Reef, which was once a natural wonder of the world, with the complexity of a great city, and which is now inarguably dying, and Glacier National Park, so named because it once held 150 glaciers; today all but 26 have melted. It’s a beautiful gesture, almost mythological — a parent giving a simultaneous tour of the past and the future to his children. But there are also those parents I know who wonder whether it would be better to spare their children memories like that, memories that will be carried forward for many decades as reminders of what has been lost — or, rather, destroyed. One scientist and mother recently described the book she was working on to me as “Between the World and Me meets The Road.” And when you find your young child crying over a treacly photograph of a skinny polar bear stranded on a tiny melting ice floe, do you tell her the tragedy is far away, in the Arctic; that the world is a complex place, that nature has always been a theater of cruelty, and that the fate of one polar bear is not a reason to shed tears; that it’s a distraction from the climate crisis faced already by millions of people the world over, with whom she might feel a stronger kinship; or that, however trivial and marginal, it is still a powerful sign of the further degradation to come?

Here is what I plan to say, when Rocca is old enough to ask: Further degradation isn’t inescapable, it is optional. That is what I say today, when people ask me about children, including my own — wondering how my wife and I could have even countenanced having a kid, given all we know to fear about the future. But each new baby arrives in a brand-new world, contemplating a whole horizon of possibilities. The perspective is not naïve. We live in that world with them — helping make it for them, and with them, and for ourselves. A new clock starts with every birth, measuring how much more damage will be done to the planet and the life the child will live on it. The horizons are just as open to us, however foreclosed and foreordained they may seem. But we close them off when we say anything about the future being inevitable. What may sound like stoic wisdom is often an alibi for indifference.

Part of our choice was delusion — the same willful blindness that allowed us to grow into our mid-30s, in America, mostly blind to the way our lives and purchases and travel and diets were polluting the futures of our children and their children, and indeed the futures of everyone they might ever meet on this planet. I now know there are climate horrors to come, some of which will inevitably be visited on my kids — that is what it means for warming to be an all-encompassing, all-touching threat. But I also know that those horrors are not yet scripted. We are staging them by inaction, and by action, can stop them. Climate change means some bleak prospects for the decades ahead, but I don’t believe the appropriate response to that challenge is withdrawal, surrender. I think you have to do everything you can to make the world accommodate the life you want to have for yourself, and your family, rather than giving up early, before the fight has been lost or won, and acclimating yourself to a dreary future brought into being by others less concerned about climate pain. The fight is, definitively, not yet lost — in fact will never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction, because however warm the planet gets, it will always be the case that the decade that follows could contain more suffering or less.

And I have to admit: I am also excited for everything that Rocca and her sisters and brothers will see and do. Yes, she will hit her child-rearing years around 2050, when we could have climate refugees in the many tens of millions; and, yes, she will be entering old age at the end of the century, the end-stage bookmark on all of our very bleak projections for warming. In between, she will watch the world doing battle with a genuinely existential threat, and the people of her generation making a future for themselves, and the generations they bring into being, on this planet. And she won’t just be watching it, she will be living it — quite literally the greatest story ever told. It may well bring a happy ending.

Ed. - What. The. fuck.

EDIT

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/parenting-children-generation-of-climate-change.html#comments

[Delphinus]

1. I do not get it.

And it is so hard for me to find people I can talk to about it. There's always the thought that this child could be the one to save the human race - they will be the next Einstein or Mozart.

This writer is truly delusional - bought into the hopium. Come 2050 he will likely still be alive. He and his wife can enjoy the changing of the planet along with their children.

I want to not dread what is coming, but am also realistic.

Your edit says it all: What. The. Fuck.

[hatrack]

2. "Man, it must have been really EXCITING during the Black Death! It'll be AWESOME!!!"

Cowabunga, Dude!!!

[Auggie]

3. Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children

It wasn't a matter of fewer to children to me. It was matter of NO children.

Over population was a top story in the 1960s and 1970s, it just wasn't linked to carbon yet. But it didn't take a rocket scientist -- or a dumb 22 year old like me -- to understand the world did not need me to procreate. And I didn't.

[sharedvalues]

5. No. American overpopulation is not the major problem

The major problems of our time in America relate to takeover of our government by billionaires and corporations. Not population. In fact our birth rate is falling near replacement.
I’m happy you chose not to have children. But others can make their own choices.

[Auggie]

7. You incorrectly modified the issue by adding the word "American." Population is a global problem.

It's too easy to blame billionaires and corporations. That's passing the buck.

[sharedvalues]

9. Right. Americans should have more babies.

Nm

[NickB79]

10. No, Americans should not have more babies

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428120658.htm

An MIT class has estimated the carbon emissions of Americans in a wide variety of lifestyles -- from the homeless to multimillionaires, from Buddhist monks to soccer moms -- and compared them to those of other nations. The somewhat disquieting bottom line is that in the United States, even the people with the lowest usage of energy are still producing, on average, more than double the global per-capita average.

[sharedvalues]

11. Americans should have more babies: ask experts

Economists are sounding the alarm about the effect the falling number of American babies will have on the future labor force. They sometimes refer to this effect as a demographic time bomb. When the economy shrinks, people often opt to have fewer kids. When there are not enough young people growing up, entering the labor force to replace workers, and paying into social security, that can become a big problem. The phenomenon can build over time, leaving old people in need of care without youngsters to help.

Kathy Bostjancic, an economist at consulting firm Oxford Economics, told the Associated Press that falling birth rates have already had a crippling effect on the US economy over the past 10 years

[progree]

12. Um, immigration

There are billions who would love to live in our developed countries if they were welcome.

But but they are brown and black and yellow.

Yes they are. All the arguments that we must start reproducing more, rather than welcome immigration, boil down to racism.

[Auggie]

13. +1

[sharedvalues]

14. Americans should have more babies AND welcome immigrants

We need both.

[progree]

15. Americans needs to have fewer babies. Do you not take what is posted in this group seriously?

Is the CO2 emissions stuff some hoax to you? We all contribute to that and other pollution, Americans more than most, certainly on a per capita basis.

You worry about the American economy. Do you not think the American economy is not affected by global warming and other pollution already?

We are battling more frequent hurricanes and wild fires.

I watch U.S. and world ground water being depleted and the land sinking. What happens when the Ogallala Acquifer is gone? The Colorado River is already dried up before it reaches the gulf. Melting glaciers and snowpacks reducing river flows used for irrigation in the spring and summer. (I farmed in the San Joaquin Valley in California. It gets very expensive to drill deeper wells and pump water from deeper and deeper).

And the quality of our waters declining. Salt pollution from road salt is increasing in our groundwater and rivers, and nobody knows what to do about it.

Nitrate levels in ground water and rivers are ever increasing, and farmers are having to change practices, which come at a cost and reduction in yield. And costs water plants a lot to reduce the levels of.

Declining fish yields and decreasing quality. Ever rising levels of mercury and other metals in our fish.

Oceans full of plastics and bleached coral, getting ever more acidic, and ever-rising, already an expensive problem for many coastal communities. The phytoplankton population of the oceans have declined by over 40% from 1950 levels.

Massive and rapid species extinction and loss of biodiversity.

We probably are near, at, or already past a real tipping point in the climate. Then what happens? Tens of feet in sea level rise and seriously lower crop yields? And you worry about a few tenths of a percent reduction in U.S. GDP? We're already having that from the ever rising cost of dealing with pollution and climate change.

And we need to be having more babies? What about the country and world we are leaving them?

And what's with the American American American crap? It's one planet and we share the atmosphere and the oceans and drain the resources of many other countries. I don't come here to listen the the Rush Limbaugh show about American exceptionalism. What we've been particularly exceptional at is depleting world resources and contributing to world pollution.

[sharedvalues]

19. You're preaching the gospel of despair.

Where are you going to have babies? In another country, or in America?

If it’s the latter, then we are talking about the American economy and birth rate.

And you’re making up GDP numbers.

Here’s what we need to do:
Have children if you want.
Fight Republicans and the billionaires that own them.
Then, work to fix climate change.
The way to do this is: Elect Democrats.
Go. Fight. Win.

[progree]

20. What happened to immigration?

"Where are you going to have babies? In another country, or in America? If it’s the latter, then we are talking about the American economy and birth rate. "

Huh? What about immigration? IT'S A GLOBAL problem.

"Then, work to fix climate change. "

LOL, with an ever increasing population and ever increasing levels of consumption? Good start.

If you think ever higher costs of dealing with ever higher levels of pollution is not costing us, then you are delusional. I saw it as a farmer. I saw it dealing with ever higher costs of meeting ever more stringent (but necessary) pollution control standards at an electric utility. And there are estimates of the number of early deaths, something like 70,000 in the U.S/year, from air pollution, and the associated medical costs.

The main problem is our level of consumption.

"You're preaching the gospel of despair."

What I said in my previous post isn't happening and getting worse?

[progree]

22. "You're preaching the gospel of despair."

Like I asked in my previous post, #15 - the problems I outlined are serious and getting worse.

But no, I'm not despairing. I gave my farm away to Population Connection, http://www.populationconnection.org

They do education on the link between population and the problems we are having, but I get that that doesn't get through to some people, particularly those who see everything through a narrow nationalistic lens.
https://www.populationconnection.org/magazine-archives/

They also push for laws that make contraception and abortion more obtainable here and abroad, And for getting rid of the Global Gag Rule, increasing U.S. Support for UNFPA, repealing the Hyde and Helms amendments, promoting the Global HER Act and the #FightforHER Campaign, Title X funding, fighting Trump’s Domestic Gag Rule, among others. And educating on these matters.
https://www.populationconnection.org/rwanda-reproadvances/

That is not despair. That is doing something.

[sharedvalues]

26. All those things are good. Good for you.

I’m glad you have found a cause you like. Good for you. Keep working for what you believe in.

Just don’t tell other Americans to avoid having kids.

I would also go on to say that Ehrlichs book was wrong. How do we know?
#1, his predictions were wrong, after 50 years.
Here’s a good debunking.
https://www.aier.org/article/why-population-predictions-bomb

That’s not to say population growth is never a problem. China got richer by their extreme one-child policy.
But in the West, no parents have to choose to avoid kids to protect the country. Au contraire. The opposite is true.

[progree]

29. Americans need to have fewer kids if they wish to reduce the problems in post #15

Likewise in the rest of the world.

A good debunking my ass. Its happening slower than what Ehrlich predicted but its happening, though in somewhat different ways.

Anyway, I'm not at all interested in how a prediction someone made 50 years ago turned out. Let's talk about the merits of more recent and much larger (thousands of scientists) assessments like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest report, which incidentally only deals with the effects of one of many classes of pollutants -- greenhouse gasses.

[NickB79]

32. Expecting infinite growth on a planet of finite resources

What could possibly go wrong?

https://news.sky.com/story/earth-overshoot-day-planet-consumes-years-worth-of-resources-in-just-seven-months-11456250

Humanity is now consuming the Earth's natural resources at around 1.7 times faster than they can be naturally replaced - essentially this means an increasingly unsustainable way of life.

[Bluepinky]

6. I really wish Donald Trump's parents hadn't procreated (or Donald himself).

Their procreation led to the existence of really bad people.

[sharedvalues]

4. Optimism is a choice-- optimism is an ethic

[progree]

16. So is sticking one's head in the sand.

[sharedvalues]

17. I prefer truth

Today we know that in developing countries, young people need to be present to keep the countries economically stable. Japan proved that.
So no one should feel bad about having babies. Have kids if you want. It’s good for the country!
(And if you don’t want to have kids that’s fine.)

Although people believed other things in the 70s, they were wrong. Having kids is good, if you want to.

[progree]

23. Japan is finally embracing immigration. You keep brushing immigration off

Last edited Sat Dec 22, 2018, 02:04 PM - Edit history (1)

Today we know that in developing countries, young people need to be present to keep the countries economically stable. ... Although people believed other things in the 70s, they were wrong. Having kids is good, if you want to.

"We know... they were wrong". OK. (As he blew off everything in post#15 except that it is "the gospel of despair"

About the gospel of despair. And nobody in the 70's or now that I know of said that we didn't need young people. We can have fewer children and more immigration and still have plenty of young people and have a healthy economy.

[sharedvalues]

24. Both. Kids and immigration.

I’m just saying people should go ahead and have kids if they want. It actually helps others economically.

In the 1970s there was an overpopulation scare. We now know that doesn’t apply to the West, and no one should feel bad about having kids. Everyone can choose what works for their family: have kids, don’t have kids. But if you want to have kids — go forth and procreate!

[progree]

25. It's one planet. Adding 1 billion people every 13 years.

In the 1970s there was an overpopulation scare. We now know that doesn’t apply to the West,

The impacts on the atmosphere, oceans, and resources apply everywhere and is caused by too many consuming too much -- particularly in the West on both a per-capita and a total basis.

Do you feel the same about grossly excess consumption -- just do what you want to do and be optimistic that what's in post#15 isn't really happening or that we're causing only an insignificant part of it?

[sharedvalues]

27. No, they do not.

America has the infrastructure to handle more kids. In fact, more kids are NEEDED to sustain our economy.

Ehrlich was wrong 50 years ago and he’s wrong today.

[progree]

28. We need to decrease population growth

A lot of what is happening in post#15 is in the U.S. and the infrastructure is crumbling. Our water resuources are declining in quantity and quality -- see post#15 which you pooh pooh as "preaching the gospel of despair" but can't dispute.

Again we all share the oceans and atmosphere and use a disproportionate share of others resources as well as our own.

It's happening slower and in different ways (so far) than Ehrlich predicted but its happening.

[NickB79]

33. What infrastructure is that again?

We're draining the Ogallala aquifer so fast, the central US won't be farmable in 30 years.

The US Southwest is in a megadrought that, if history is any reference, won't end in our lifetimes. Their forests are dying and burning with horrific ferocity. In our lifetimes, we'll see a mass migration from there as water resources run out and irrigated farmland goes dry.

Midwestern farmers, even the best-managed ones, are losing topsoil faster than they can replace it, and turning the Gulf of Mexico into a dead zone from runoff.

Climate change is predicted to severely cut crop yields in the Midwest in 20 years due to heat waves and insect damage.

Last I checked, food and fresh water we're kinda important for sustaining children.......

[violetpastille]

31. I have one American kid.

Who is 15 years old. She's taking Physics 1 online from the University of Wisconsin and going to public HS.

She's college bound. We hope she will be employable in the future and be able to pay income tax and SS.

But she's not going to be a home health aide. If it were the last job on earth she wouldn't take it.

We need immigrants, not more American kids.

[NickB79]

8. We're going to lose half the species on this planet

And a few billion people to boot.

There are no happy endings, only shitty, really shitty, and extinction.

[sharedvalues]

18. No, our outlook is ok

We need to deal with climate change, of course.
But the future is bright.
The problem of our time is dealing with wealthy people who buy our politics. If not for that, we’d have fixed climate change by now.
So get on the progressive and Democratic train.
Go. Fight. Win.

[Loki Liesmith]

30. I don't see the problem.

I have kids. I hope for the best for them too.

[The_jackalope]

34. IMO the Earth's biosphere can support very few humans over the long term.

At least "very few" relative to the number alive now.

My best guess is that 10 to 100 million humans could live on the planet long-term without doing significant harm to other life and the systems that support it. But that's only if their standard of living did not exceed that supported by Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherer economies. In general terms that means an average per capita power usage of about 300 watts, compared to today's average per capita consumption of about 2500 watts.

To meet my long-term sustainability criteria, we would need to reduce the human population by about 99%, and the per capita energy consumption of the remainder by around 90%. More people and/or higher energy consumption would lessen the period of sustainability by some indeterminable amount.

I view our predicament as being ecological, not an as an economic or political problem. And my definition of "sustainability" is a lot stricter than most people are comfortable with.

The only "engineered solution" I can come up with that might get humanity from here to there is a genetically engineered form of Marburg or Ebola, that is easily transmitted through the air and is environmentally persistent. But that's the stuff of nightmares, hardly something that I or any other sane person could recommend. Which means that nature will take its usual course, and that we and the biosphere are screwed, at least over the medium to long term.