Climate change has been blamed on a lot of things: cars, planes, factories and industry in general to start with. Even the food we eat. Now scientists are saying having babies is just as bad.
In a study, published here, they say: "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. Under current conditions in the United States, for example, each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions. A person's reproductive choices must be considered along with his day-to-day activities when assessing his ultimate impact on the global environment."
Now an outfit called the Optimum Population Trust in Britain says parents should be stopped from having more than two kids. It says that even if we cut emissions drastically, it won't help. The population needs to be cut. The Trust's director Rosamund McDougall told press: "Our self-sufficiency in food has fallen, our agricultural land is disappearing under bricks and our energy supplies are dwindling.
"Yet an ivory-tower minority backs yet more population growth. Breed for Britain? Import mass cheap labour? It's environmental suicide. If we reduce emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, the improvements would be wiped out by adding another 16 million climate changers. The answer to supporting an ageing population is not to add more people, it's to encourage more of our 7.9 million economically inactive people of working age back into the workforce."
With the world population booming, oceans rising and the weather becoming more unstable, we can expect this debate to continue. It might be a worrying sign of things to come.
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