Liberty looks at research on climate change, overpopulation, and young adults’ environmental concerns.
In 2019, Millennials and Gen Z agreed on the biggest problem facing their generations for the first time. The problem? Climate change.
So it’s not surprising that young adults are basing more and more of their life decisions on climate change — including whether or not to have kids.
Many young adults are worried that having children will overburden a planet that’s already overpopulated and further damage the environment.
They’re also worried about what kind of environment their kids will be born into.
Is this a valid concern — and if not, why not?
What We’ve Been Told
For most of our lives as millennials and members of Gen Z, we’ve been told our every action will affect climate change. As we’ve gotten older, we’ve been told by some that having kids is one of the worst things we can do for the environment.
The New York Times explored this concern among millennials in 2018. Here are a few quotes from millennials:
“I don’t want to give birth to a kid wondering if it’s going to live in some kind of ‘Mad Max’ dystopia.”
“The human population is so numerous, the planet may not be able to support it indefinitely.”
“It’s hard for me to justify my wants over what matters and what’s important for everyone.”
“My instinct now is to shield my children from the horrors of the future by not bringing them to the world.”
Another article from British Vogue explored the same questions. The headline asks: “Is Having a Baby in 2021 Pure Environmental Vandalism?”
In it the author Nell Frizzle writes:
“Before I got pregnant, I worried feverishly about the strain on the earth’s resources that another Western child would add. … But I also worried about the sort of world that I would bring my child into… Could I really have a baby, knowing that by the time he was my father’s age, he may be living on a dry and barren earth?”
Impending Doom? Not Exactly
These fears about having children and contributing to climate change are based on the worst-case scenarios. And in the media, the most alarming information often gets the most attention. People are drawn to bad news, so that’s what goes viral.
But a key characteristic of millennials and Gen Z is that we’re skeptical. So let’s engage some healthy skepticism and consider whether the climate change alarmists may not have a monopoly on the facts.
Let’s start here: many climate scientists have refuted the idea of a deadline.
“Twelve years isn’t a deadline, and climate change isn’t a cliff we fall off — it’s a slope we slide down… even under a business-as-usual scenario, the world isn’t going to end in exactly twelve years.”
Kate Marvel, Climate Scientist
Axios
A 2019 report from Axios quotes several scientists who agree that climate change is a problem that needs to be addressed, but disagree that the 12-year-doom deadline is an accurate way to frame the issue.
For instance, Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at NASA, told Axios, “12 years isn’t a deadline, and climate change isn’t a cliff we fall off — it’s a slope we slide down… even under a business-as-usual scenario, the world isn’t going to end in exactly twelve years.”
Here’s another quote in the Axios report, from Andrea Dutton, a paleoclimate researcher at the University of Florida:
“For some reason the media latched onto the 12 years (2030), presumably because they thought that it helped to get across the message of how quickly we are approaching this and hence how urgently we need action. Unfortunately, this has led to a complete mischaracterization of what the report said.”
Gavin Schmidt, who also works for NASA, said, “The thing to push back against is the implicit framing that there is some magic global mean temperature or total emissions that separate ‘fine’ from ‘catastrophic’. There just isn’t.”
These are scientists who believe climate change is a severe problem that needs to be addressed. But they reject the idea that we’re going to enter the apocalypse if we don’t reach a certain global temperature by 2030.
Mother Earth: Overcrowded or Plenty of Space?
Even if environmental doom isn’t coming in 12 years, are we going to run out of room and resources to take care of more humans if people keep having kids? In short, no. Let’s examine why.
Overpopulation fears are not new. Today’s overpopulation fears can be traced to Thomas Robert Malthus, an English scholar from the 19th Century.
Malthus believed the human population would grow at a faster rate than food production. This would lead to mass starvation, among other problems. He argued that the only solution was to curb population growth. Overtime, this resulted in cruel population control tactics.
Time proved Malthus wrong. The next century brought important industrial inventions. As a result, food production significantly increased. Sometimes it even outpaced population growth.
Even so, fears about overpopulation reemerged.
In the late 1960s, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. Echoing Malthus, Ehrlich predicted that the world was on the brink of running out of food and other resources. Since then, overpopulation fears have persisted.
Both Malthus and Ehrlich got something wrong. They underestimated our ability as humans to adapt to growth. Thanks to human ingenuity, we aren’t limited to the earth’s natural resources. And we don’t have to fear running out.
Environmental scientist Erle Ellis argued in The New York Times in 2013:
“The conditions that sustain humanity are not natural and never have been. Since prehistory, human populations have used technologies and engineered ecosystems to sustain populations well beyond the capabilities of unaltered “natural” ecosystems.”
In response to that British Vogue mentioned above, Peter Jacobsen, Assistant Professor of Economics at Ottawa University, made some interesting counterpoints.
For instance, he points to research that shows access to food and resources increased as population rose.
He also takes issue with one of the points Nell Frizzle makes in her British Vogue column, that air pollution now kills more people than tobacco, AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. But the truth is that air pollution deaths are actually decreasing, but deaths from all those other causes are also falling, just at a faster rate.
“We found that humanity is experiencing what we term Superabundance – a condition where abundance is increasing at a faster rate than the population is growing. Data suggests that additional human beings tend to benefit, rather than impoverish, the rest of humanity.”
Human Progress
And this is where Jacobsen makes another really key point—a lot of times, air pollution rises as a nation develops out of poverty, but then often decreases.
Here’s a quote from Jacobsen:
Suspended Particulate Matter (SPM) pollution, the deadliest air pollutant which is found in smoke and soot, reached its peak in London in 1891.
As countries develop they tend to pollute more to get out of poverty, but as they grow rich they are able to afford to have even cleaner air than they did before development. … In fact, the above data shows there is less air pollution in London today than in 1700.
He also points to HumanProgress, an organization that publishes data from scholars, academic institutions, and global organizations on the state of humanity worldwide. Here’s what they found when studying the relationship between the world’s population and the world’s resources:
“We found that humanity is experiencing what we term Superabundance – a condition where abundance is increasing at a faster rate than the population is growing. Data suggests that additional human beings tend to benefit, rather than impoverish, the rest of humanity.”
They quote the late economist Julian Simon, who argued:
“Adding more people will cause [short‐run] problems, but at the same time there will be more people to solve these problems and leave us with the bonus of lower costs and less scarcity in the long run.… The ultimate resource is people—skilled, spirited, and hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so, inevitably, for the benefit of us all.”
From Overpopulation Fears to Human Rights Abuses
Throughout history, overpopulation fears have led to atrocities.
Shortly after The Population Bomb was published, the U.S. helped found the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA). The UNFPA now posits itself as an agency for reproductive heath. Historically, however, it has participated in morally repugnant population control tactics.
For example, the UNFPA had a hand in China’s infamous one-child policy that only ended in 2015. For decades it caused major human rights abuses, from sex-selective abortions to forced sterilizations. As a result, China now suffers from a dramatic gender imbalance a rapidly aging society.
Actually, declining fertility is a concern in many developing countries. There are more Americans over the age of 80 than under the age of 2. Other research shows that most U.S. women statistically will have fewer children than they actually want.
Affirming Life
Columnist and author Grace Olmstead, who writes regularly about forming sustainable communities, farms, and food production, wrote in The New York Times arguing that millennials concerned about climate change should have children:
When we are creators and stewards, we become aware of the infinite series of threads connecting us to the world around us — aware of the fragility and beauty of life, the preciousness of it. That is not an instinct, in my mind, which makes us less likely to fight climate change — but rather, more eager to seek to regenerate and heal our planet, and more likely to teach our children to do the same.
Elizabeth Bruenig is an award-winning journalist who made Forbes’ 30 under 30 list in 2019 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist the same year. She wrote for The Washington Post in in 2019:
“Every child is born to risk…it’s impossible to be sure of anything except that life is not permanent and is prone to radical, sudden revolutions.”
In short, if you’re looking for a time to have kids when they are guaranteed not to have dramatic problems to face at some point in their future, you’ll never find that time.
Bruenig also makes another interesting point about respect for life and respect for the planet, and how they’re actually connected:
“It also appears to me that a certain disrespect for human life is how we arrived in the climactic fix we’re in now. … the culprits of climate change are not pro- but anti-humanity, and that it’s their ethos which inclines to nihilism, despair and death. Children are a clear statement of hope, a demand that we claim accountability for the future. They are a rejection of cavalier disregard for the planet we share.”
Olmstead and Bruenig are not dismissing the need to be environmentally conscientious. They simply argue that bringing human life into the world can be part of the solution.
If you’re looking for a time to have kids when they are guaranteed not to have dramatic problems to face at some point in their future, you’ll never find that time.
And interestingly, this is similar to the conclusion that Nell Frizzle reaches in her British Vogue column, despite her dramatic opening about whether having kids is “environmental vandalism.” Nell herself is a mother, and this is what she writes:
I also believe that when it comes to the future health of the planet, the question is not one of whether or not we continue to have babies. People will always have babies. … Instead, it is a question of how we raise those babies…As someone who is attempting to raise a child with an awareness of ecological inequality, who tries to satiate his desires with human interaction rather than material consumption, who helps him appreciate the natural world, I hope that my son might contribute to future humanity, rather than destroy it.
And all of these perspectives from young mothers really align with the arguments of Julian Simon, cited at Human Progress:
.… The ultimate resource is people—skilled, spirited, and hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so, inevitably, for the benefit of us all.
Know Why
Millennials and Gen Z care about causes, care about other people, and are willing to shape our lives around our convictions, including taking care of the planet.
But it’s important to truly know why we’re making a change in our lives. If young adults are resisting having kids when we otherwise would just because of environmental concerns, we may not be basing that major life choice on legitimate evidence.