Don't Pit Children Against the Climate

Degrowth has bad stats and worse values

I really enjoyed reading the book After the Spike, Dean Spears and Michael Geruso’s case for taking the coming population crunch seriously. You can get a quick sense of the demographic trends from Spears’s NYT piece here (from which I’ve pulled the graphic below).

In brief, the global population is expected to peak in the 2080s, and from there, it will fall and keep falling unless and until the global fertility rate rises to at least 2.1. As Spears and Geruso emphasize, there is no reason to expect “automatic stabilizers” for fertility. And you don’t need rock bottom fertility (a la South Korea) to have global population fall and keep falling. Anything under ~2 children per woman will get you there.

In The Dispatch, I focus on one facet of the book: Geruso and Spears’s case against anti-natal, degrowth environmentalism. Even granting many premises of advocates for a birth strike (or those who think you could have up to two children, but I’ve had more than my fair share), Spears and Geruso find that anti-natal environmentalism can’t succeed. As I write:

Global population, the authors argue, is like a massive ship. It has enormous inertia and any shift made now will take a long time to show up in the total numbers. As they explain, we are currently at a global population of 8.2 billion. If births ceased completely, next year’s population would be 8.1 billion people. The authors model the environmental impacts of various fertility decreases, using the highest estimates for the carbon impact of children, and always get the same answer: The number of children being born now won’t change the global population totals or global carbon emissions in time to matter for the Paris Agreement’s mid-century net-zero targets.

In fact, it’s technology growth, not population degrowth, that can make the short-term, high-impact changes to our climate in the critical window. As the authors point out, when Geruso’s son Emmet was born in 2013, his birth had no impact on environmental concerns like the shrinking ozone layer, environmental lead exposure, or acid rain. These threats were major focuses of prior waves of environmentalists, but addressing them didn’t require preventing births. Instead of outlawing or discouraging Emmets, we took the lead out of gas, banned chlorofluorocarbons, and limited sulfur dioxide emissions. We have less pollution without needing to have fewer people.

I go a little beyond Geruso and Spears’s own analysis to think about why degrowth is appealing to people.

To argue against children for the climate’s sake requires making the claim that we are incapable of living well on the earth. In this perspective, humans are essentially a harm to mitigate. Humans are more like hurricanes—unstoppable patterns of devastation—than moral agents.

This worldview relieves adherents of the burden of making political choices and tradeoffs.

Spears and Geruso’s book is pro-children but also scrupulously pro-choice. And, to be fair, I don’t think restricting abortion access is one of the most important levers to raise the birth rate. Being pro-life is about what children are not about how many of them are produced. But the tension was most notable when I read this passage (about father trying to remove his daughter from a kangaroo care ward for underweight babies in Uttar Pradesh):

Seema knows what the problem is. She told her manager that this one is, sadly and despite her best efforts, a Code Pink. "Code Pink" is the nurses' professional way of discussing, within the hospital, the fact that many families do not want to try to save their baby girls because they are baby girls. The project needed a sanitized term and that's what Dean came up with. The nurses have adopted it. Code Pinks usually leave against medical advice for the babies to take their chances at home.

Unfortunately, this is a common story. Today there are about 109 boys aged five to nine in India for every 100 girls. Boys and girls are conceived in proportions that are closer to equal. So these numbers tell us that the lives of girls are more likely to be prevented or allowed to end.

The gap that remains is a terrible loss. If girls in India were as likely to reach their fifth birthday as boys, then there would be an extra half-million lives to be lived, born every year. This gap exceeds the total number of births each year in Venezuela, in Italy, in Zimbabwe, or in Australia and New Zealand combined.

It’s not, strictly speaking, a story about abortion. This is post-natal treatment of some children as extraneous or threatening to the good life of their parents. But I can’t help but see the parallels when some human persons are not treated as fully human and worthy of care.

I don’t see any way to close fertility gaps without a strong faith in the reality and the worth of all children, whatever their sex, age, or disability status.

What (if anything) do you find most compelling about degrowth appeals? What is least compelling?

Where (if anywhere) have you seen serious planning in your communities for the coming population contraction? (e.g. many colleges will close).