Going Going Gone
Predictably facile, the New York Times recently asked "Is It Wrong to Bring a Child Into Our Warming World?" The ethicist's discussion is enlightening, especially given current climate death throes.
This article is a sequel of sorts or an earlier piece, titled Rejoice, The End is Near, which discusses voluntary human extinction and concludes that humanity is soon to be extinct regardless of whether or not we march voluntarily and equitably into that good night, or our inability stop reproducing and wantonly consuming ends up making the decision for us. The manner in which our civilization is annihilated by rising seas, crop failures, wet bulb temperatures, superstorms, drought and loss of water access (etc.) is the crucial question: will we share equally in the suffering, or will, as has always been the case, we continue to foist the worst and first of the suffering onto those who had the least to do with its existence? The question is already being answered.
Here, Kwame Anthony Appiah makes an interesting analogy. In the midst of planetary hospice, he compares the most carbon-intensive action a person can make to shoplifting a stick of Chapstick, the most negligible but still technically “wrong” an action possible. His final sentence of the paragraph is the crucial one, though: humanity is on the way out regardless of whether or not we decide to make our exist gentle; he is in effect arguing that not only should be continue to tell a terminal patient that they are going to make it, we should deny them palliative care altogether.
Particularly odious is this comment from the writer named April who sent in the question, trying to talk herself into justifying the act of procreation:
As most actual climate thinkers would be aware, individual action is nigh useless when combating climate change (carbon footprint propaganda was in fact started by big oil companies looking to foist responsibility for their record profits onto the average consumer rather than their extravagantly lavish lifestyles), save for one: abstinence. Having an “green child” in 2023 is as good as raising a particularly polite and gentle murderer. She subsequently mentions that she and her husband are engineers and thus could financially support this child though any such environmental calamity and downturn. The rather obvious implication here is that so long as your little one is a well-to-do-white westerner, one can reproduce in the face of a dying world with little remorse. If that child might have a difficult upbringing or worse due to climate-related stressors, the calculus changes and the inverse becomes true (that having a child under questionable financial privileges is wrong because this child will be less likely to have a decent life—ironically, they will also contribute far fewer emissions in their lifetime; this is indistinguishable to white supremacist Great Replacement theory, in which it is argued that the vulnerable populations the world over have a responsibility to decrease their population numbers and especially not to move elsewhere as climate refugees, though their lives depend on their ability to do so—especially offensive given the fact that we are responsible for creating the conditions that imperil them in the first place. It seems that Lisa is worried about her privileged babies being crowded out by the less worthy. To put it bluntly, the is the most first world of all first world privileges.
This is essentially the pro-natalist argument: we have hogged the resources and committed the lion’s share of emissions, and now we are asking our myriad victims to accept that this renders the lives of their potential children worthless. No where is it wondered whether elevating those lives and ending our exploitative system might change their potential newborns’ status to something more excusably comfortable.
And the excuse of the possibility of optimism about our future cannot justify procreation, simply because it is wrong and supported scientifically by virtually no serious climate scientists. Since my last writing, a torrent of unceasingly and increasingly worrisome new revelations have emerged regarding feedback loops, ocean temperatures, the end of permafrost (a great releaser of methane) and oceanic ice, the further destruction of biosphere and old-growth forest (nominally replaced by new growth forest at a grossly insufficient rate by dishonest companies who do not even ensure the seedlings mature) and the wildly insufficient and corrupt reactions of world leadership:
Wealthy countries have pledged $100 billion a year to help reduce the effects of global warming. But Reuters found large sums going to projects including a coal plant, a hotel and chocolate shops.
Italy helped a retailer open chocolate and gelato stores across Asia.
The United States offered a loan for a coastal hotel expansion in Haiti.
Belgium backed the film “La Tierra Roja,” a love story set in the Argentine rainforest.
And Japan is financing a new coal plant in Bangladesh and an airport expansion in Egypt.
Funding for the five projects totaled $2.6 billion, and all four countries counted their backing as so-called “climate finance” – grants, loans, bonds, equity investments and other contributions meant to help developing nations reduce emissions and adapt to a warming world. Developed nations have pledged to funnel a combined total of $100 billion a year toward this goal, which they affirmed during climate talks in Paris in 2015. The funding helped crown Japan and the United States as two of the top five contributors.
Although a coal plant, a hotel, chocolate stores, a movie and an airport expansion don’t seem like efforts to combat global warming, nothing prevented the governments that funded them from reporting them as such to the United Nations and counting them toward their giving total.
I have collected these extensively in a series titled Cataloguing the Sixth Mass Extinction, the last of which contains links to all previous entries. With facile and offensive defenses of reproductive optimism becoming more frequent as climate change increasingly impacts our lives and it becomes more necessary to adopt an “optimistic” attitude (really a denialist one), it is time to continue that series:
A smattering of recent alarming climate news which puts the lie to the idea that planet earth has a chance to escape the coming calamities intact:
Surge in Air Travel Leads to Record-Breaking Mishandled Bags in 2022
“In 2022, the recovery of air travel surpassed expectations, with traffic surging to 3.42 billion passengers,” said David Lavorel, chief executive of SITA. “This is well ahead of the expectations of industry bodies and experts who were anticipating a full recovery by 2024.”
Air travel is of course a major source of emissions. However the aerosols planes (especially wasteful are private jets) emit have a cooling effect by blocking solar heat, so stopping air travel is a double-edged sword.
There is also the issue of melting ice, which increases ocean temperatures and threatens the ocean’s circulatory system (to say nothing of increasing acidity and heat threating already-decimated marine life):
More alarming news, which recall, is always worse, sooner than expected, and shocking in its ramifications.
Record temperatures, devastating floods and superstorms are causing death and destruction across the planet but humans are failing to cut greenhouse gas emissions fueling the climate emergency, new US data shows.
Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide – the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity that are the most significant contributors to global heating – continued to increase rapidly during 2022, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).
Carbon dioxide levels rose by more than two parts per million (ppm) for the 11th consecutive year: the highest sustained rate of CO2 increases since monitoring began 65 years ago. Before 2013, scientists had never recorded three consecutive years of such high CO2 growth.
Atmospheric CO2 is now 50% higher than pre-industrial levels.
Earth’s ocean temperatures have risen so fast in recent weeks that one indicator shows surface waters have already reached their highest temperatures on record — a worrisome sign ahead of a predicted El Niño climate pattern that could further accelerate planetary warming.
Around mid-March, ocean-temperature monitoring data shows that average surface water temperatures surpassed 21 degrees Celsius (about 70 degrees Fahrenheit) around the globe, excluding polar waters, for the first time since at least 1981, when the data set originated. That is warmer than what scientists observed at this time of year in 2016, when a strong El Niño drove the planet to record warmth.
Separate data also reveals 55 “methane bombs” around the world – fossil fuel extraction sites where gas leaks alone from future production would release levels of methane equivalent to 30 years of all US greenhouse gas emissions.
Methane emissions cause 25% of global heating today and there has been a “scary” surge since 2007, according to scientists. This acceleration may be the biggest threat to keeping below 1.5C of global heating and seriously risks triggering catastrophic climate tipping points, researchers say.
The two new datasets identify the sites most critical to preventing methane-driven disaster, as tackling leaks from fossil fuel sites is the fastest and cheapest way to slash methane emissions. Some leaks are deliberate, venting the unwanted gas released from underground while drilling for oil into the air, and some are accidental, from badly maintained or poorly regulated equipment.
Many thousands of the uncapped wells still exist—capping them would be prohibitively expensive, it is argued.
Agricultural practices and the climate crisis are the main drivers of decline in native plant species, scientists said, as they called for urgent action to tackle the loss.
Changes in farming since the 1950s such as nitrogen enrichment, habitat degradation and changes in grazing pressure have led to the decline of species such as heather and harebell, the research found. Additionally, damp meadows have been drained, leading to substantial declines in plants such as devil’s-bit scabious – a plant fed on by rare butterflies.
Ancient arable wildflowers such as corn marigold fared worse than other species; with a 62% decline. This is because traditional grasslands have been reseeded or over-fertilised.
Craig Bennett, chief executive of The Wildlife Trusts, said: “The decline of our beautiful native plants is heartbreaking and has consequences for us all. The loss of natural habitats due to modern farming methods over the last 70 years has been an unmitigated disaster for wildflowers and all the species that depend on them including insects, bats and birds.
To presume that having a child is an ethical act in mid-2023 is to the ensure that even those relatively privileged kids will grow up to curse your name. Imagine the reactions then of those born of poverty, hardship, and marginalization—perhaps this is the reason April wishes for fewer of such babies to exist.