"Tiniest of Baby Booms" A Monster by Julia Whitty

"Tiniest of Baby Booms" A Monster

Julia Whitty

You can't miss it in today's news: US births break record, 40 percent out-of-wedlock. Frankly, my dear, who cares about the wedding bands. Though that's pretty much what all the moralizing is about.

No, what's stupefying is the fact that nowhere in this much-traveled article does anyone ever talk about the real impact of more babies being born in the US in 2007 than any other year in the nation's history.

So let's talk about it. And let's start with a really interesting study just published in the journal Global Environmental Change. A couple of statisticians at Oregon State University disengaged their mechanical pencils from their pocket protectors, clicked some fresh lead onto recycled paper (we hope) and came up with this bold analysis into that sacristy of human reproduction—to have or not to have:

A mother and father are each responsible for one half of the emissions of their offspring and 1/4 the emissions of their grandchildren and so on forever or thereabouts.
Therefore, under current US conditions, each child adds 9,441 metric tons of CO2 to the carbon legacy of the average female.
That's 5.7 times her lifetime emissions.
Translation: one child costs nearly 6 times your own CO2 emissions.
In the pessimistic scenario, each American child adds 12,730 metric tons to your carbon legacy.
In comparison, under current Bangladeshi conditions, each child adds 56 metric tons of CO2 to the carbon legacy of the average female.

The bottom line is that absolutely nothing else you can do—driving a more fuel efficient car, driving less, installing energy-efficient windows, replacing light bulbs, replacing refrigerators, recycling—comes even close to simply not having that child. All those good things still add up to less than 500 metric tons of CO2 savings. Not having the kid saves between 10,000 and 13,000 metric tons of CO2.

So why are we still giving tax breaks for having kids? Why are we pretending that because they're cute they're harmless? Little monsters.

[We recognize that some people may be disturbed by this in-your-face response to the burgeoning US birthrate and the "Reproduction and Carbon Legacy" study. We welcome your comments. - The Editor]

This article first appeared as a blog on the Mother Jones website, March 18, 2009. To see the entire blog with responses, and to leave your own comments, go to http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2009/03/tiniest-baby-booms-monster. Reprinted with permission from Mother Jones. subscribe to Mother Jones magazine for just $15 at motherjones.com/subscribe, or sign up for the email newsletter at motherjones.com/newsletter.
Julia Whitty is the author, most recently, of The Fragile Edge, a book on coral reefs, which won the PEN USA literary award for nonfiction, the John Burroughs Medal, and the Kiriamaya Prize. Her book, A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga, a collection of short stories, won an O. Henry Award.