Eco-zealots are not having children because of the carbon they emit; they are driving themselves into extinction
Environmental absolutists believe a child emits 9,441 tonnes of what they perceive to be deadly carbon. Some green ideologues have argued that a figure should be added to that to take account of carbon-emitting grandchildren.
UK cities with high levels of green politics, such as Bristol, Brighton and Cambridge, have seen a significant decline in fertility rates, with some areas having a Total Fertility Rate below 1. This means they are not replacing themselves let alone their partner.
Eco-warriors are driving themselves into extinction, Ross Clark writes.
Eco Warriors Are Driving Themselves To Extinction
By Ross Clark as published in The Spectator
It wasn’t that long ago when the fashionable gathering place for young couples was a meeting of the National Childbirth Trust. I remember, in the early months of 1995, sitting in our instructor’s front room as she passed around a plastic model of a female pelvis while she asked us: ‘So how do you think the baby gets out?’
Fast-forward three decades and there is a new way for middle-class would-be mothers to spend their evenings: attending sessions of a project entitled ‘Motherhood in a Climate Crisis’ put on by the University of Bristol’s Brigstow Institute. There is no better way to describe it than to quote the academics’ blurb. The project, they write, was designed to use ‘therapeutically informed participatory theatre techniques to collaboratively explore concerns around reproductive decision-making for women in an era of unfolding climate crisis’. There are photographs of women curled up on the floor, or standing arms outstretched as if in religious devotion.
A report of the project reveals that the sessions have led to many couples deciding not to have a child for the sake of the planet. ‘I have this deep grief and anger around not having a second child amid the climate crisis,’ declared one 37-year-old attendee, Rosanna, who added that she spent the sessions writing a letter entitled ‘To the second child I will never give birth to’. Ruby, 31, had made her mind up, saying: ‘I don’t want to bring new children into the world as it currently is. I wouldn’t feel OK making that choice.’
The sessions, which began in 2022, will not have helped Bristol’s collapsing birth rate. Ten years ago, the city was enjoying a mini baby boom. Now, it has one of the fastest-plunging fertility rates in the country. It doesn’t take too much to work out that if a population is going to sustain itself in the long term, women will have to bear an average of at least two children. In an advanced industrial society with a low rate of infant mortality, demographers tend to work on the assumption that a Total Fertility Rate (“TFR,” the average number of children born to a woman during her childbearing years) of around 2.1 is replacement level.
In the early 2010s, Bristol’s TFR was running at around the then national average, at 1.89. By 2023 it had plunged to 1.14. But Bristol isn’t quite the lowest. In Norwich it is 1.09, Oxford 1.07. In Camden, where the Royal Free Hospital announced the closure of its maternity unit for want of business, it is 1.0. In several districts the TFR has dropped below one – in other words the mother isn’t even replacing her place in the population, let alone her partner’s. In Brighton and Hove it is 0.98. Cambridge – where my children were born – comes bottom at 0.91.
There is one thing which links these places: they are hotbeds of green politics. True, Bristol, Brighton et al have high house prices and large numbers of professional women who may prioritise careers over family, but they are also the places where eco-zealotry reigns. People in these green ghettos are likely to be susceptible to the much-quoted figure among environmental absolutists (which can be traced to a paper published in the journal Global Environmental Change in 2009) that a woman who has a child will be responsible for a remarkably precise 9,441 tonnes of carbon emissions. That is 5.7 times the emissions she directly causes during her lifetime. The guilt, therefore, runs to subsequent generations.
For those in thrall to green dogma these calculations are existential. Some have argued that the figure should be amended to take account of cascading generations of carbon-emitting children and grandchildren. To this, in a lightbulb moment which will surely challenge Descartes in its significance, a PhD student at the LSE, Philippe van Basshuysen, has come up with a compromise: parents should be held accountable for their children’s carbon emissions only until the age of 18.
Whatever the risks to humanity from carbon emissions, it is certain that refusing to breed doesn’t help the human race survive. There are some on the extreme fringes of the green movement – such as the self-styled Voluntary Human Extinction Movement – who would welcome a complete collapse of births as a big gain for the planet. But they, and more moderate greens, who think couples should, say, limit themselves to a Maoist single child, are overlooking something: maybe their actions will merely reduce the reproduction rate of eco zealots. This could be nature’s revenge – Darwinism in action, in which people with loony ideas shrink their gene pool before they can do too much damage. Perhaps we should welcome collective guilt sessions for green activists, even make them compulsory. The fewer children to whom they can impart their way of thinking, the better for the rest of us?
About the Author
Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. His books include ‘Not Zero’, ‘The Road to Southend Pier’, and ‘Far From EUtopia: Why Europe is failing and Britain could do better’.
Featured image: The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, an environmental movement that calls for all people to abstain from reproduction in order to cause the gradual voluntary extinction of humankind.
