A pair of doctors have said that British parents should have fewer children, because kids cause carbon emissions and climate change. The two medics suggest that choosing to have a third child is the same as buying a patio heater or driving a gas-guzzling car, and that GPs should advise their patients against it.
Writing in the British Medical Journal, John Guillebaud (emeritus professor of of family planning at UCL) and Pip Hayes (a GP) raise the spectre of global population explosion, and suggest that the children of the developed world are a particularly severe carbon burden. ……
In the UK, that population should be allowed to stabilise and decrease by not less than 0.25% a year to an environmentally sustainable level, by bringing immigration into numerical balance with emigration, by making greater efforts to reduce teenage pregnancies, and by encouraging couples voluntarily to “Stop at Two” children.
This made me laugh. While I think that the OPT have it pretty much right, and we need to reduce global population, statements couched in these terms aren’t really going to help persuade people.
A little footnote. If the UK continues with current fertility levels, then the population of the United Kingdom will fall at a rate of 0.4% p.a. from 58,689,000 (2000) to 17,260,000 (2300). I think this assumes that we block immigration, and under the same constant-fertility scenario the world population would go up to 134,000,000,000,000. Nevertheless, it looks to me like we are already doing our bit…? UN
Leave a Reply