Is Having Children Bad for the Planet?

I read something today that perturbed me as I do have quite a few kids but I am not thinking of having any more on purpose specifically because of my environmental concerns. The article was from last year and published last May in The Australian. It was by Sarah-Kate Templeton and all about how having children should be considered to be an environmental misdemeanor. Having too many children leaves a huge carbon imprint the same w ay as not recycling and driving big SUVs does. Most people are going to read this and glaze over. We need the SUVs to cart our large families around.
The original paper done on this concept was put together by the Optimum Population Trust. The idea behind it is that if each couple had two children instead of three the savings in carbon dioxide output would be the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between New York and London. Although this seems impressive I am like so many other humans wondering why I should go to the trouble of not breeding while millionaires are still allowed to fly around the world in their jet planes. I am thinking about people like Tom Cruise and John Travolta who supposedly care about the environment yet charter jet planes. Am I not supposed to procreate before some kind law cracks down on their indulgent behavior?
Does it surprise anyone reading this that the rest of the world thinks we are so selfish for having so many children when we have the birth control available to us to stop it? After the entire problem in so many underprivileged countries is that there is a lack of birth control. The result is too many babies, most of them starving. Many of the children in those countries don't even live long enough to leave a very big carbon imprint on the world. Yet we have these children that grow up to own one or more cars or homes and that insist on continuing cycles of consumerism that support industries that harm the environment. What's a mother to think? Is this survival of the fittest? Or survival of the bullies?
People make a big deal about Earth Hour and shutting off their lights for one hour but really effective change would be accomplished by not having a kid. By comparison the savings in energy when it comes to things like shutting off all of your lights at night or lowering your thermostat seem like spits in the bucket.
John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London said – “The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child.” I would cap that statement off with an advisory to adopt one as well.
According to Guillebaud, The British fertility rate is 1.7. The European average is 1.5. Despite this, Professor Guillebaud says rich countries should be the most concerned about family size as their children have higher per capita carbon dioxide emissions.

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The DNA of Bad Kids

Apparently crime is so bad in Britain that they are now thinking of putting the DNA of kids who are really bad on record. This is the plan according to a story by Mark Townsend and Anushka Asthana in England's The Observer.
The idea is that primary children would be eligible to have their DNA put in the database if they exhibit negative behavior. This is because bad kids sometimes tend to become criminals later in life. Of course not all of them do which is part of the problem of this practice. Many public officials including some at Scotland Yard say a debate is needed to decide how far people should take this program. Some experts believe it is possible to identify future offenders when they are as young as five years old.
Is it wrong to identify those who might become offenders later in society. It may not be wrong if this was a study doen blindly. Otherwise it might just be another form of racial profiling. Also another issue would be who would have access to this information. Could your kid apply for a credit card and then be denied for it because of his or her's potentially criminal DNA? Could a doctor make a lot of trouble for your child and put him or her on anti-psychotic drugs or mood altering drugs because he knows about bad DNA? It's a bit too 'Big Brother is Watching You for Most People.'
One of the organizations supporting this is called Public Policy Research. They have put together a report that suggests that the DNA testing should target certain groups of children such as those who have behavioral disorders like ADD or borderline personality disorders. The age group that would be targeted would be those girls and boys between the ages of ten and thirteen years old as that is the age when most adolescents tends to think of offending for the first time.
Currently the idea is prohibited by logistics and the cost of testing everyone in Britain. To be fair everyone would have to give a DNA sample. Currently there are more than 45 million DNA samples from people who have been arrested on file in Britain. The idea is that if that base of DNA samples is expanded then it will be easier to catch criminals.
There is a lot of outrage about this idea. For instance how would you like the DNA of your troubled kid on file because he or she has ADD and is more likely to offend? Then of course there are the racial implications of all of this. Are the kids of black populations who have higher rates of fetal alcohol syndrome babies, crack babies and autistic children just being penalized with these potential DNA tests. Most people would say that it violates democratic rights and that we are already behaving like characters out of a science fiction film.

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