Climate change is and will be an engine of global inequality. Richer people and countries will buy their way out of the worst consequences, often using wealth accumulated by burning fossil fuels. The fear about the future our children will face, when voiced by well-off residents of wealthy countries, sometimes strikes me as a transference of guilt into terror. To face what we’ve done to others is unimaginable. It is easier, somehow, to imagine we have done it to ourselves.That gets to the second version of this question: Is it immoral to have children, knowing how much carbon emissions residents of rich countries are responsible for? This argument recasts not having children as a form of climate reparations. People in rich countries use more resources than people in poor countries. Fewer people means less resource use.Fredric Jameson, the Marxist literary critic, is often credited with the observation that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. A similar limit to our political imaginations lurks in this conversation: It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of carbon pollution. “Almost all pollution is fixed by the structure of society,” Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of Californi …
Opinion | Your Kids Are Not Doomed – The New York Times
