Encouraging people in general to have fewer children is much less morally dubious.

See: Murtaugh, P. (2009) Reproduction and the carbon legacy of individuals. Global Environmental Change (in press).

Families with more than 10 children are becoming the norm among a group of traditionalist US Christians. The so-called Quiverfull families believe they are carrying out God’s work, and providing a new generation of moral leaders. The BBC’s religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott went to Illinois to meet some of them.

The way Psalm 127 talks about children has an almost military sound.

It describes them as “an inheritance, and arrows in the hands of a mighty warrior,” adding, “happy is he whose quiver is full of them”.

Many Quiverfull families do indeed sense looming battles for Christians, and often see their children as potential future leaders in fighting them.

Rev James McDonald has 10 children, aged between four and 26 – an extraordinary fertility motivated by obedience to the Bible.

“We believe that they are blessings… to be raised up in the worship of the Lord and they will be used by him in whatever way God will call them, to fulfil the Great Commission which we find in Matthew Chapter 28,” he said.

The “Great Commission” – the duty to spread the Christian message throughout the world – is among a number of challenges Mr McDonald sees facing his family.

Among others, he cites divorce, adultery, abortion and internet pornography.

“The societal ills that we have, the challenges we have… we have rampant disease and bankrupt health systems because we don’t know the truth of the Bible. But as these truths are lived out in the lives of God’s people, society changes,” he said.

People who claim that population growth is the big environmental issue are shifting the blame from the rich to the poor

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 29th Septeember 2009

It’s no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be blamed. The brilliant earth systems scientist James Lovelock, for example, claimed last month that “those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.” But it’s Lovelock who is being ignorant and irrational.

A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world’s population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO2. North America turned out 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three per cent of the world’s population growth happened in places with very low emissions.

Even this does not capture it. The paper points out that around one sixth of the world’s population is so poor that it produces no significant emissions at all. This is also the group whose growth rate is likely to be highest. Households in India earning less than 3,000 rupees a month use a fifth of the electricity per head and one seventh of the transport fuel of households earning Rs30,000 or more. Street sleepers use almost nothing. Those who live by processing waste (a large part of the urban underclass) often save more greenhouse gases than they produce.

BEIJING – One of the world’s top authorities on climate change warned Friday that carbon emissions per person in parts of China were higher than in some developed countries.

Nicholas Stern, the British author of an acclaimed review on climate change, told students in Beijing’s People’s University that 13 Chinese provinces, regions and cities had higher per capita emissions than France. Six also overtook Britain.

“There are many parts of China where emissions intensity and emissions per capita are looking much like some of the richer countries in Europe,” he said in a speech that laid out his predictions on global warming.

Stern warned that if the world continued to emit around the same levels of greenhouse gases every year, there was a 50 percent chance temperatures would rise more than five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) within 100 years.

A rise of “five degrees Celsius has not been seen on this planet for 30 million years—we as humans have been here for only 200,000 years,” he said. “This type of temperature change involves radical dislocation, it involves re-writing where people can live, it would involve the movement of hundreds of millions, probably billions, of people. This would result in extended, serious global conflict.”

Perhaps the environmental movement should be focusing more on encouraging smaller families, through policies like reduced tax breaks and subsidies for parents and increased state-provided security for the elderly (so they depend less on their children).

Some people who are serious about wanting to reduce their “carbon footprint” on the Earth have one choice available to them that may yield a large long-term benefit – have one less child.

A recent study by statisticians at Oregon State University concluded that in the United States, the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environmentally sensitive practices people might employ their entire lives – things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.

The research also makes it clear that potential carbon impacts vary dramatically across countries. The average long-term carbon impact of a child born in the U.S. – along with all of its descendants – is more than 160 times the impact of a child born in Bangladesh.

“In discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of an individual over his or her lifetime,” said Paul Murtaugh, an OSU professor of statistics. “Those are important issues and it’s essential that they should be considered. But an added challenge facing us is continuing population growth and increasing global consumption of resources.”

Having kids will not help your child’s overall lifetime carbon footprint, no. We are responsible for the environmental impacts of our child raising, and it is reasonable to consider that we are responsible for the lifetime impacts of any child we choose to birth or raise, as well as our descendants through that child. A recent study out of Oregon contemplated this idea of carbon legacy through childbirth, if you wish to read some interesting genetics and carbon math (and transfer your anxiety from your daughter back to yourself, which is where it might more properly belong).

It is a bit unfair to carry a multi-generation burden of guilt around for child raising, when most of us can buy and sell a car or a toothbrush without thinking too hard about the centuries of atmospheric carbon and landlocked garbage we have created. Think about it all we must, though. Alas.