Source: Timesonline >> Read Full Article and Comment
As the Copenhagen summit gets under way, we meet a large and a small family to assess their carbon footprints
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I wouldn’t exactly call Edie, Agnes, Constance, Gwendolyn, Kitty or baby John “pollution”. Or not to their faces, anyway — living in a family of eight hones your aim in a riotous pillow fight as, during my visit, I quickly learnt to my cost.
But that is the question being asked at the Copenhagen climate summit this week. For the first time the United Nations has blamed big families for global pollution. According to the UN Population Fund, the number of people in the world will increase by two billion in the next four decades. If we could only stop producing more damn babies, bringing the total down by about a billion by 2050, it could save two gigatonnes of carbon a year.
I know. What the hell is a gigatonne? And how do you even imagine a billion people, let alone un-invite them to the party? So instead I visited two British families: one small, limited in part by the father’s desire to preserve the “beautiful wilds” of his native Scotland; the other large, the product of big-family evangelists who believe that population growth is not the problem — in Britain, anyway — and that “it seems like signing our own death warrant to wish away children”.
Rob Holdway, an environmental consultant, and I put them to the test. Rob did the science; I poked around dirty nappies in bins and asked the parents to justify adding another soul to the seven billion or so that jostle to use up the world’s resources … Continue Reading
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