“Standing before several dozen students in a college classroom, Travis Rieder tries to convince them not to have children. Or at least not too many.”J. Ludden, NPR

ESL Voices Lesson Plan for this post with Answer Key

Excerpt: Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change? J. Ludden, NPR

“He’s at James Madison University in southwest Virginia to talk about a ‘small-family ethic’ — to question the assumptions of a society that sees having children as good, throws parties for expecting parents, and in which parents then pressure their kids to ‘give them grandchildren.’ Why question such assumptions? The prospect of climate catastrophe.

For years, people have lamented how bad things might get ‘for our grandchildren,” but Rieder tells the students that future isn’t so far off anymore. He asks how old they will be in 2036, and, if they are thinking of having kids, how old their kids will be.

‘Dangerous climate change is going to be happening by then ,’ he says. ‘Very, very soon.’ There’s also a moral duty to future generations that will live amid the climate devastation being created now.

‘Here’s a provocative thought: Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them,’ Rieder says…Scientists warn that a catastrophic tipping point is possible in the next few decades. By midcentury, possibly before, the average global temperature is projected to rise by more than 2 degrees Celsius, the point scientists and world leaders agree would trigger cataclysmic consequences.

Last year’s historic Paris climate agreement falls short of preventing that, so more drastic cuts in carbon emissions are needed. Adding to that challenge, the world is expected to add several billion people in the next few decades, each one producing more emissions… ‘It’s gonna be post-apocalyptic movie time,’ he says.

The room is quiet. No one fidgets. Later, a few students say they had no idea the situation was so bad.

Still. Even given the apocalyptic scenarios: Can you actually expect people to forgo something as deeply personal as having children? To deny the biological imperative that’s driven civilization?

Rieder and two colleagues, Colin Hickey and Jake Earl of Georgetown University, have a strategy for trying to do just that. Rieder is publishing a book on the subject later this year, and expects to take plenty of heat. But he’s hardly alone in thinking the climate crisis has come to this…Meghan Kallman is a co-founder of Conceivable Future. ‘I can’t count the number of times people have said, ‘Oh, my God, it’s so nice to know I’m not the only person that worries about this,’she says. In November 2014, Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli created Conceivable Future to make these personal struggles public.

The group’s ultimate goal is ending U.S. fossil fuel subsidies, though its immediate role seems one of commiseration…For activists of childbearing age, Ferorelli says, climate change isn’t just an intellectual problem but ‘a heart problem.’

At the New Hampshire meeting, 67-year-old Nancy Nolan tells two younger women that people didn’t know about climate change in the 1980s when she had her kids. Once her children were grown, ‘I said to them, ‘I hope you never have children,’ which is an awful thing to say,’ Nolan says, her voice wavering. ‘It can bring me to tears easily.’

One woman looks a little stunned. She’s not a climate activist — just tagged along with a friend — and says she had no idea that deciding not to have kids because of the climate was even a thing.

Not everyone is as pessimistic about the future. Becky Whitley still plans to have a second child. She’s with the advocacy group Moms Clean Air Force and says becoming a parent is precisely what motivated her to care about the climate.

Back at James Madison University, Travis Rieder explains a PowerPoint graph that seems to offer hope. Bringing down global fertility by just half a child per woman ‘could be the thing that saves us,’he says.

He cites a study from 2010 that looked at the impact of demographic change on global carbon emissions. It found that slowing population growth could eliminate one-fifth to one-quarter of all the carbon emissions that need to be cut by midcentury to avoid that potentially catastrophic tipping point.

Rieder’s audience seems to want an easier way. A student asks about the carbon savings from not eating meat.

Excellent idea, Rieder says. But no amount of conservation gives you a pass. Oregon State University researchers have calculated the savings from all kinds of conservation measures: driving a hybrid, driving less, recycling, using energy-efficient appliances, windows and light bulbs.

For an American, the total metric tons of carbon dioxide saved by all of those measures over an entire lifetime of 80 years: 488. By contrast, the metric tons saved when a person chooses to have one fewer child: 9,441.

A student asks: ‘What happens if that kid you decided not to have would have been the person who grew up and essentially cured this?’

Again, great question, says Rieder, but the answer is still no. First, the chances are slim. More to the point, he says, valuing children as a means to an end — be it to cure climate change or, say, provide soldiers for the state — is ethically problematic.

So how do you persuade millions or billions of people around the world to sacrifice that? To avert climate disaster, the fertility rate would have to fall much faster than it has been. It would require more than educating women and expanding access to contraception, as aid agencies have been doing for decades.

Rieder and his Georgetown collaborators have a proposal, and the first thing they stress is that it’s not like China’s abusive one-child policy. It aims to persuade people to choose fewer children with a strategy that boils down to carrots for the poor, sticks for the rich.

Ethically, Rieder says poor nations get some slack because they’re still developing, and because their per capita emissions are a sliver of the developed world’s. Plus, it just doesn’t look good for rich, Western nations to tell people in poor ones not to have kids.

He suggests things like paying poor women to refill their birth control and — something that’s had proven success — widespread media campaigns.

For the sticks part of the plan, Rieder proposes that richer nations do away with tax breaks for having children and actually penalize new parents. He says the penalty should be progressive, based on income, and could increase with each additional child. Think of it like a carbon tax, on kids. He knows that sounds crazy.

‘But children, in a kind of cold way of looking at it, are an externality,” he says. ‘We as parents, we as family members, we get the good. And the world, the community, pays the cost.’

Of course, there are ethical concerns. Rebecca Kukla of Georgetown University worries about stigma, especially against poor and minority women. If cultural norms do change, she says, there could be a backlash against families with more children than is deemed socially appropriate.

Kukla appreciates that Rieder’s penalty on procreation would be progressive. But since it could not be so high as to be coercive, she says it would inevitably be unfair.

‘What that will actually translate into is it becoming much easier for wealthy people to have children than for other people to have children,’ Kukla says.

An even bigger hurdle is the sheer unlikelihood of it all. Rieder has no illusions. In fact, he says, some countries that have successfully reduced fertility rates have since reversed course, afraid that falling population will hurt their economies…‘The situation is bleak, it’s just dark,’ he says. ‘Population engineering, maybe it’s an extreme move. But it gives us a chance.’

Still, Rieder wonders: Is it really so crazy? Scientists have proposed incredibly risky schemes to geoengineer the clouds and oceans. They’re researching ways to suck carbon out of the air on a mass scale. Some have even called for overhauling the global system of free-market capitalism. Compared to all that, Rieder says, bringing down the fertility rate seems downright easy.

‘We know exactly how to make fewer babies,’ he says. And it’s something people can start doing today.”