Having Less Children Will Lower CO2 Emissions 29%. What Does God Say.

                                    By: Don Caldwell


Another argument for telling us not to have children. OVERPOPULATION.


Excerpts italicized:


To meet goals of reduced emissions, we may need to look no further than our own populace, according to a study published in PNAS. By analyzing a few different data sets and projections for population and emissions growth, a group of researchers found that a concerted effort to slow population growth could contribute as much as 29 percent of the emissions reductions needed to avert dangerous levels of climate change. They also found that a more urban population causes a significant increase in emissions, while an older one lowers emissions.


Instead of many small changes, one group of scientists decided to take a look at how our emissions would drop if the entire world's population could be swayed into slowing its growth down. They ran population and emissions projects from the UN and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change through an energy and economic growth simulation called the People-Environment-Technology (PET) model.


While investigating a lower population growth scenario sounds simple enough, it's not as easy as just cranking down the "people" knob in the PET session and watching the emissions graph plunge. The authors note that population, as well as how people are distributed and how old they are, directly and indirectly affect a lot of factors, including economic growth, labor supply, and savings and consumption behavior. Combined, all these factors can have a dramatic effect on emissions.


However, the authors note that a push for family planning may at least help do the trick: many countries have unmet family planning needs, and implementing them could reduce fertility by about 0.2 births per woman in in US, and by 0.6-0.7 births per woman in developing countries.


What would happen if you needed to get permission from to government to have a child (similarly to the way one does in China)? What happens when you take such an essential part of our human existence, an inherent expression of love marriage religion, perhaps the very meaning of our human lives, and turn it into a form to be filled out. Having children is not some political issue to be debated. 


(ORIGINAL LINK) Slowed population growth could lower emissions by 29 percent