The new nuclear
Towards the end of last summer, as Australia burned and people fought in the supermarkets over toilet paper, my 23-year-old brother, a software engineer in Melbourne, told me he no longer wanted children. Growing up, he’d always talked about having at least four. “But I realised if they asked why I had them, I wouldn’t really be able to answer in a way that wasn’t selfish,” he said. “There would never be an honest answer I could give where I wanted them to go through life as it’s going to be, or where it would make the world a better place.”
He’s not alone. For decades, the idea of the ‘nuclear family’ with two parents and two kids has been the default, even as more women joined the workforce and started having children later. Millennials feeling ambivalent about reproducing are usually told they’ll change their mind, or end up regretting not having a large family when they’re older.
But as we march on unchecked towards the two degrees Celsius temperature increase scientists have warned about – which is predicted to increase the risk of more regular pandemics – more of us are taking matters into our own hands.
In 2017, researchers looked at 39 peer-reviewed studies and found the biggest thing people can do to reduce their carbon footprint is have one less child. The scientists from Lund University in Sweden showed that this one lifestyle choice reduces emissions by 58 tonnes of CO2 each year – vastly more than living without a car (2.4 tonnes/ year) or
