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As we consider the full range of what we as individuals can do, then, we
cannot remain content with the options I outlined in the previous chap-
ter. We must examine the issue of bearing children as well, for it is central
to any serious look at the question of how best we can make reparation.
Even the briefest consideration would tell us what a huge impact bear-
ing a child must have on an individual's contribution to climate change.
If you have a child, you've added another entire lifetime's worth of green-
house gas emissions to the biosphere. You can basically assume that
your child's impact on the environment will largely replicate your own,
or what yours hypothetically would be over the lifetime of that child. At
the very least, then, you will have increased your imprint by half (since
you will share the responsibility for conceiving the child with your part-
ner). But because that child might well have further children, who may
have further children in turn, that imprint is likely to be much larger
still. Under what they call the constant scenario—the assumption that
individual greenhouse gas emission rates of the parents will continue
indefinitely for their children—Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax, in a
paper published in 2005, estimate that an American woman (on whom
they focus, rather than a man, for technically statistical reasons) who
drives a more fuel-efficient car, reduces the number of miles she drives
each week, installs energy-efficient windows, uses low-energy light bulbs,
installs an energy-efficient refrigerator, and recycles will over her lifetime,
using the emissions averages of that year, keep about 486 metric tons of
carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, but a woman who reduces
her offspring by one child will over her lifetime save 9,441 tons. If emis-
sion rates rise or fall over the course of the child's life, the picture changes
dramatically. But this estimate fairly represents the ethical choice facing
a potential parent today. It's worth emphasizing what these researchers
have found: an American woman who has two children will add “nearly
40 times” as much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as she might save
through her eco-friendly activities. 135
All this follows from a fairly straightforward look at an individual's
environmental footprint. But if we consider as well the fact that humanity
as a whole now vastly exceeds this planet's carrying capacity, the case for
not reproducing becomes even stronger. As I argued in an earlier chapter,
if we manage to shift to renewable energy sources on a scale vast enough
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