Is Abortion Now a Carbon Offset for Life? Watch This Argument About Reducing Your Reproductive Carbon Footprint. Oy

March 17, 2009

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Writing for the scientific journal Global Environmental Change, two academics at Oregon State University – Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax – identify this lifestyle change in a paper entitled “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals.” In this treatise they attempt to quantify, in their words, “the carbon legacy of an individual,” and to examine “how it is affected by the individual’s reproductive choices,” based on the premise that “a person is responsible for the carbon emissions of his descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him.” So what did they find?
The two researchers calculated that a woman in the United States would reduce her lifetime CO2 emissions by about 486 tons if she implemented the green-approved household and transportation activities mentioned previously. But they estimate that if she were to have just one child, that child, over its lifetime, would eventually release nearly 20 times more CO2 to the atmosphere than the reductions achieved by its mother via her more mundane green activities.
h/t Steve Cellphone Tualatin

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