"Does climate change make it immoral to have kids?" asks Dave Bry for The Guardian.
The answer is no, but that's not Bry's conclusion.
Having a child is indeed a weighty decision and should be carefully considered, but not over false assumptions about climate change. But that's exactly what Bry has done.
"It's not really fair," he says of bringing another human into the planet to contribute to its demise:
For while the world is a wonderful place, one we humans have made nicer for ourselves with wonderful inventions like books and record players, penicillin and pizza, it’s also a really awful place, one we’ve ravaged with deforestation and smog, nuclear weapons and mountains of pizza delivery boxes and other garbage.
And it's only getting worse, he continues, exhibiting that he has bought into the entire global warming alarmist's sales pitch. And because of that, he is questioning the moral implications of having children:
The awfulness seems to be getting worse, especially now that climate change has sped up – sea level rise that was supposed to take centuries has recently been projected as taking just decades. This complicates the already difficult decision of whether to have a kid.
Bry rattles off the latest "evidences" that "we're living through what scientists call the 'Sixth Extinction'" and how this one is different than the others, believed to be caused by asteroids, in that "we're doing it to ourselves" this time around.
It's something Bry, a father of a preteen, asked himself at his son's birth:
How am I going to protect my kid? Was it fair for me to bring him into this world at all? Was it immoral? Was I complicit in the damage?
Besides having visions of his child "growing up in a gray, dying world," Bry pondered his baby's future and felt even more depressed knowing his child might one day have a child and further overpopulate the planet.
But in the end, he believes the best solution is to carry on having children… just in case that future human is the "super-genius to figure out the invention that could save the planet."
Being a liberal is hard.
