Combatting climate anxiety: Yes, it’s okay to have children

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The message that the Earth is rapidly decaying has long been evangelized by college professors and other gung-ho Malthusians in the media. It has led some to question the ethical implications of bringing children into a world perceived to be threatened by environmental degradation, including climate change.

If children are taught in school and then later in college that every additional person is a resource burden on the planet, then an issue like climate change can easily become a convenient, morally righteous excuse to delay or forgo having children altogether.

Following that doomerism logic, why should you bring another person into our dying world? Why create yet another drain on resources? Why increase your family's carbon footprint? Why bring another carbon emitter into existence?

In recent surveys, some Americans have cited the environment and/or climate change as reasons to not have children or to havefewer children. However, the survey data is far from clear and generally shows fairly low concern, but still high enough to pay attention to.

This comes at a time when US fertility rates are hitting historic lows. Globally, fertility is falling at a substantial rate, and future projections indicate this trend will continue. As it is, the Earth can handle a growing global population and quality of life will only continue to improve unless governments prevent this from happening.

It's unfortunate that climate anxiety is an issue for some, especially because things are going quite well in terms of energy innovation and resource abundance. This will help to solve any problems that humans will need to address. When humans are allowed to prosper, the result isn't strained resources and environmental problems, it's greater abundance and better environments.

For example, despite population and industry growth in the United States between 1980 and today, we've improved national air quality.

Image source: EPA, https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summar

A metric we can look at to understand the improvement in resource quality is The Simon Abundance Index. The Index "quantifies and measures the relationship between resources and population" and "converts the relative abundance of 50 basic commodities and the global population into a single value." This allows us to understand, generally, if things are better now than they were in the past.

For some history, The Simon Abundance Index, named in honor of economist Julian Simon from the University of Maryland, stems from his observation that as the global population expanded, resource prices tended to decrease rather than rise, serving as a reliable indicator of abundance or scarcity.

Simon famously engaged in a wager with Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich, a proponent of the "overpopulation" catastrophe theory.

Paul Ehrlich, an American biologist, gained notoriety for his book "The Population Bomb," published in 1968, which warned of imminent global famine due to overpopulation. Despite its alarmist predictions, many of Ehrlich's forecasts failed to materialize, leading to criticism of the book's credibility and its simplistic view of population dynamics.

Ehrlich and Simon each staked $1,000 on the future prices of five commodities-chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten-over the period from 1980 to 1990. If the combined price of these commodities increased, Ehrlich would win; if it decreased, Simon would win. Despite an increase in the world's population by 850 million during that decade, the real price of the commodity basket decreased by 36 percent, resulting in Simon receiving a payment of $576 from Ehrlich.

In a nod to Simon's important achievements, including in part this famous winning bet, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) presents an annual Julian L. Simon Memorial Award to an individual whose work promotes the vision of man as the ultimate resource, rather than a drain on the Earth.

According to the latest Simon Abundance Index figures from 2023, which now takes into account 50 commodities, resources have become 509.4 percent more abundant over the past 43 years. According to the Index, "All 50 commodities were more abundant in 2023 than in 1980."

Image source: Human Progress, https://humanprogress.org/the-simon-abundance-index-2024/

Despite constantly being proven wrong, this still hasn't stopped the doomsday mentality from being shoved in the face of the American people, especially young people who are captive audiences in a formative stage of their intellectual development.

Advocating for a future that embraces both environmental stewardship and human flourishing isn't contradictory, but complementary. Having children is a personal choice that shouldn't be influenced by doomsayers, especially those who want to drill their beliefs on such matters into the minds of impressionable young people.

Americans shouldn't be made to feel guilty for wanting to have children, which is essential for humanity. Valuing and respecting humankind is exactly what will safeguard the planet for generations to come.