3+ children is an eco-crime??

[morocco]

am a bit depressed to find out that all my recycling/washable nappies/eco lightbulbs etc is all in vain cos i've gone and had one kid too many.story here
sigh
it's all probably true of course but I'm getting a bit sick of reading all this guilt trip eco crime stuff.
anyway, if you've stopped at 2 or less, now is the time to feel eco smug

I agree with others that this is not a simple set amount of carbon per head equation. I know plenty of people who drive loads of miles in big car fly lots of times a year and live in bit houses funnily enouhg they are single (hence houses need heating more!) More kids=less money+more enviromental awareness generally imho.
I'm pleasantly surprised how much is done by so many on here we need advice to take us to the next level of enviromental consciousness I think.
Eidsvold didn't know the gov.paid you for having children are you referring to the 3k/year? Aren't you lot the biggest carbon emitters? (friend of mine told me it was all your cows farting!!)

You know how you can buy carbon credits (if you fly x number of miles then you pay a charity to plant y number of trees)? Well I only have one child so in an entirely unselfish way I am prepared to sell my spare capacity to the highest bidder.

Who wants to start the bidding?

What a pile of shit the OPT are espousing. I come from a very large family and spent almost all my childhood in hand me downs, reusing everything including my amazing mum being very creative with cooking as money was tight and resources limited. This pile of middle class wank really pisses me off. Do as we say not as we do. I suppose it's okay to have a large family as long as you can afford to pay your carbon credits then?

I personally have no desire to have a large family but i wouldn't dream of preaching to someone as to what they should do. There are so many 'isms' to consider in this article. Try telling that - don't have a large family - to some poor bugger in rural africa.

Morocco

I find it hard to take this article seriosuly TBH!

Surely people with kids are more concerned about looking after the planet for future generations, so are more likely to be eco-friendly in other ways in their day to day lives?

Can't believe that yet another way has been found to make parents feel guilty!

bollocks

just shows how crap some of these studies are, still I suppose they keep some people in employment

foxcub, yes people with kids do seem to care about the environment more, but it's a bit late.
I don't think many people become greener suddenly when they have their 3rd kid, the effect (if any) is mostly on the first.
Thus the two extra kids do little for motivation, but triple the effect.

I've got 4 kids but they're to 2 different dads so does that mitigate the crime a bit?

What a load of bollox - it all depends on how you live your life as a family with 0-2 kids could easily have the same or larger a carbon footprint as a family with 3+.

We don't (and won't ever) have a car, we holiday in Scotland & never fly, we recycle, buy locally as much as we can, use cloth nappies (which are mostly line or airer dried), use reusable bags . . . so I refuse to feel guilty about having 'too many' children.

hhhmmm, not sure DC - I guess it depends but people (us and other parents we know) seem to change their lifestyle more, the more kids they have. We've certainly had to adapt our lifestyle drastically with each child. First one kind of fits in, the second changes the balance entirely and with the third - well its changed our life a lot, with all the consequential lifestyle changes following.

TBH the government was concerned previously about people not having enough kids...

I guess as well that DINKYs are more likely to be able to travel more, take more foreign holidays, have a car each etc, just 'cos they have more disposable income than people with kids...

Most families we know with 3 or more kids do car shares to school etc and rarely fly abroad due to affordability issues. I do think that families generally also take a lot of care to recycle etc....

Well my dad was one of three- he had 2 children, one sister had only one child and the other sister had no children. My brother only has one so my five only make up for the missing ones from the rest of the family

What a load of codswallop.

OK. So no-one likes being told they are eco-criminals and I agree the wording is a bit inflammatory perhaps. But it's a bit obvious that the more kids you have the more potential for pollution and resource use there is. You might be greener than green, but it doesn't mean that every large family is. And without a doubt my children have made a huge amount more concerned about the environment they and any putative grandchildren and great-grandchildren ad infiitum will inherit - but it still doesn't make me any more keen to live in a teepee and use an earth toilet. I recycle, I reduce, I reuse, I compost, I cut back on my driving for all I'm worth, I do all the other things that I can without making my life unbearable to me ...but it's still not enough. Most of what we do in the wealthy west is a drop in the ocean - worthy but a drop none the less. And as for not worrying about your large family because someone else won't have any kids...that's beside the point. You can't allow your actions to be dicated by what someone else may or may not be doing.

I don't understand the hosility to this concept. Once you have the kids, enjoy them and do your best to mitigate the damage but why protest at someone pointing out the results of a study.

I do more or less agree with you Ormirian but I don't see that it's necessarily 3 children rather than 2 which tips you over into eco-criminal. I have friends who think it's wrong to have any children, given the environmental impact. For them, 1 child, especially one Western, resource-guzzling child, is too many.

And if we're thinking about replacement levels, going on current demographic trends, our children might have an average of 1 child each, in which case some of us having 3 children will still result in a decreasing population. What's more around 40% of graduate women in their late 30s are currently predicted to be not going to ever have children, and if that continues, those of us with 3 daughters all likely to be going to university will be OK (in eco-criminal terms) as our daughters will be highly likely not to reproduce very much.

am not trying to justify my 3 child eco-crime, but really we all of us in the West have impossibly large use of resources, and the 2 versus 3 children is just a small part of it.

Actually population is just a tricky thing, even if you get past the projective emoting.

Most of us were brought up in a time when it was clear that if population was increasing that so rapidly that bad things were going to happen.
However, it's no so simple now. Britain, like most civilised countries is hitting all sorts of democratic issues now that people are having fewer children, which raises the average age of the population, even if we weren't living longer.
Climate change is going to kill serious numbers of people. Numbers vary wildly but it looks as though we may lose whole countries such as Bangladesh (147 million). Some will escape, but do you really see their "friendly" neighbours letting them in.
As an attempt to visualise how bad that is, there's around 4 million Palestinian refugees. 30 times as big is probably more than 30 times worse.
AIDS has combined with massive cultural failure to mean that population growth is hitting walls big time in many countries.
China and India are still drifting up, but they aren't the out of control breeder farms they once were.
Thus the odds seem to be that in 50 years there will be fewer people on Earth than now.

Demographics is a bit too right-brained male for most greens, but although it's possible to criticise people who have had kids (my mum had 6), fact is that we're in the mess right her, right now and a few feeble attempts to vary the population a tiny amount in civilised countries is simply irrelevant.

Yes I agree to a certain extent. But I suppose 2 children replaces the 2 adults who brought them into the world. Neither an increase or a decrease. There are undoubtedly enviro-nuts out there who hate people enough to want no-one to have any kids

I always think it's one of the paradoxes of the green approach that caring about the world and the environment can lead you to hating people and thinking it would be better if they just didn't exist.

(Am not going to rise to the "right brained male" comment.

Am not

Am not

Am not.

Not even with an emoticon)

Oh dear...we are expecting no 6, I'd better get rid of 4 of them to make room !

The actual replacement rate isn't 2 per couple anyhow, its something like 2.6 (when I did my Sociology years ago anyway- I'm sure figure differs a bit now). So how should we all have the .6 child?

The population of the West, as DC sorta says, is rather a small factor in the whole thing; as long as countries such as India and China \9and indeed the goold old USA) continue to pollute at the rate they do an extra few kids won't make an ounce of difference. Especially as you can largely offset the extra carbon, maybe not for ever but for here and now, with good green living.
We're trying (wiyhout much luck so far) for no.4, at least he'll contribute (I hope) to ds1 and ds3's support system ? disbaility benefits 9though thats not clearly the reason for having another LOL_ although support for NT DS2 is a factor)

China is expected this year to overtake the USA as the single biggest consumer of carbon fuels.

Thing is that exponential curves really annoy greens, who at a deep emotional level seem to want to blame the USA for everything.

Global energy consumption is increasing at such a scary rate, that the favourite green target four wheel drive vehicles, especially US ones, looks irrelevant.
Around 2% of carbon emissions come from US road transport. That's trucks, cars, 4WD/SUVs etc.
Abolish every single one of them tomorrow, and you buy 5 months extra to deal with climate change.
IE it makes SFA difference.

But what possibly riles pseudo-greens more than anything is that the solution to this mess will be American.
I don't know what it is, indeed I am far from certain that we will solve it, but the US drives world scientific and technical research. They're trying slightly scary shit like seeding the oceans with iron, know how to build safe and reliable nuclear reactors, and of course own the satellites that tell us what's going on. They are trying real hard to get around the thousands of technical issues in hydrogen powered vehicles and spend serious money on blue sky tech like superconductors, fusion, and solar cells that actually work.
They do plenty of crap things as well, but let's not kid ourselves that Britain, China, Europe or anyone else are anything other than spectators.
As a comparison, the arts grads who run Britain's science and technology budget took 100 million quid out this year so that they could subsidise the collapse of the British car industry.

As a comparison, the arts grads who run Britain's science and technology budget took 100 million quid out this year so that they could subsidise the collapse of the British car industry.

PMSL DC

Have your eally checked the degree of every one and how much they individually took? I bet you would, wouldnt you?

Peachy you and I both know that the top of the civil service is quite overwhelmingly white male arts graduates. There are a few token non-arts graduates, and I believe the occasional woman is to be found in the second tier (just so long as she did arts and is white).

Actually there were no women in the second tier when I was in the civil service LOL but anyway

yeah probably they proliferate, but I'll never agree that an arts grad is second class. Some are- I see it at Uni-'I took this course coz its easy ' but not everyone, some of us are quite bright actually

Ther needs to be a mix of skill types and peoples at every level.

Is it ok that I've got a 4x4 then, as I only have the one DD!?!

Broon123 why don't you start a thread and ask?

bt can you leave it until next week, as we ahve already ahd P&T spaces with blue badgs this week, and i'm out of popcorn

Actually peachy I've met 2nd tier female artsgrad civil servants (white of course).

Actually I agree we need a mix of backgrounds. However the CS seems to see "mix" as two history grads who did different centuries.
The ratio of science grads to arts is very different from the one observed in the CS at all grades, and particularly the top. If it were not for the treasury, it would be an almost science free zone.
And yes, there is a connection with colour of skin. Coloured kids are vastly more likely to do a science subject than an "indigenous", and that's not just because they are on average brighter.

Oh I agree some exist, just there weren't any in my office (that i can gurantee, as I was a Receptionist at the time so I literally knew everyone LOL)