If you're worried about having kids because they will contribute to climate change, you shouldn't be

There’s a literature of people in philosophy arguing that people should refrain from having children due to concerns about climate change and other environmental degradation, specifically the concern is that their children (and their children’s children) will consume resources.

There are, as I see it, four primary possibilities regarding the solution to climate change:

1. The solution to climate change will be largely political

2. The solution to climate change will be largely technological

3. The solution to climate change will be a mixture of political and technological

4. There will be no solution to climate change, civilization will collapse and return to a less technologically advanced state.

Whichever case we pick, from the point of view of global utility, it’s best for you to have more children if you’re worried about climate change.

The political case

If the solutions will be largely political, then bringing new people into the world who care about climate change is one of the most impactful things you can do. Now, if you are worrying about climate change in relation to such an important life choice, you care deeply about climate change. This means your children will be much more likely to care about climate change than the population average.

A lot of people will try to resist this. They’ll point to cases where children reject the beliefs of their parents, and, to be sure, they’re are many, but it’s not the average. You’ll also find a lot of pop science articles on studies that show that many children reject their parent's beliefs, and are more likely to do so when those beliefs are very strong- this is true, there are important exceptions to political transmission and they are worth studying. People seem to delight in these studies and seem to want to think that parent-child political correlation is low. On average though, children tend to believe what their parents believe, regardless of the strength of those beliefs. See the above study on teens for example:

The technological case

The kind of parent who worries about the environmental impact of having children is also much more likely than the population average to have a kid who works on technological solutions to climate change. An overwhelming majority of environmental engineers (72%) lean liberal and scientists are liberal. The percentage of these categories concerned with climate change would likely be even more stark. I don’t know what the exact stats are for how much more likely you are to go into looking for technological solutions for climate change if your parents are deeply concerned about climate change, but I bet it’s very high.

Of course, it’s unlikely that your child will play an instrumental role in any technological fix to climate change, but the likelihood, if you are this climate-focused, is well above that of the general population, meaning that conditional on assuming a technological fix will be found at some point, the expected contribution of your child to finding that fix earlier justifies their resource consumption.

The mixed technological & political case

If the solution to climate change will have to be both technological and political, both cases we outlined apply.

The no possible solution case

What if there’s no solution and civilization is doomed?

I don’t think this case is probable, but even if it is, I’d still rather we go into it with more far-sighted and humanitarian humans than fewer. If there’s no solution to climate change, and civilization is going to collapse, then one of the primary questions will be how many will survive that horrific collapse and which values will they keep from our civilization. Frankly, I think it’s important that they keep the good values- the values that tried to shepherd them away from that disaster- so humans can live as good a life as possible in the hellscape, with as little suffering as possible.

A different kind of worry

Perhaps your worry is not so much that having kids will consume resources, but that life will be bad for your children due to climate change.

Personally, I think that’s unlikely. I think if you’re the kind of person who’s worrying about this you will be largely insulated in the affluent West or in a wealthy enclave outside the West- even as conditions degrade your family will likely not suffer the worst.

But even if you’re right, and your kids are at substantial risk, think of all the children of the world. They’re going to need advocates for their interests fighting against continued carbon output. Your children are vastly more likely to become that than the typical person.

Isn’t this all a bit alienating

Some readers are going to look at this post and say that there’s something wrong, creepy, about viewing having children in a strategic way. I have some sympathy for that view, but my response would be that as soon as we started thinking about them in terms of resource consumption and expected utility, we’d already opened that door, and so we had better take a complete look at what is behind it.