NYT Environment Reporter Floats Idea: Give Carbon Credits to Couples That Limit Themselves to One Child

Monday, October 19, 2009
By Edwin Mora

Washington (CNSNews.com) – Andrew Revkin, who reports on environmental issues for The New York Times, floated an idea last week for combating global warming: Give carbon credits to couples that limit themselves to having one child.

Revkin later told CNSNews.com that he was not endorsing the idea, just trying to provoke some thinking on the topic.

Revkin participated via Web camera in an Oct. 14 panel discussion on “Covering Climate: What’s Population Got to Do With It” that was held at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. The other participants on the panel were Dennis Dimick, executive editor of National Geographic, and Emily Douglas, web editor for The Nation magazine.



At the event, Revkin said: “Well, some of the people have recently proposed: Well, should there be carbon credits for a family planning program in Africa let's say? Should that be monetized as a part of something that, you know, if you, if you can measurably somehow divert fertility rate, say toward an accelerating decline in a place with a high fertility rate, shouldn't there be a carbon value to that?

“And I have even proposed recently, I can't remember if it's in the blog, but just think about this: Should--probably the single-most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the lights or driving a Prius, it's having fewer kids, having fewer children," said Revkin.

“So should there be, eventually you get, should you get credit--If we're going to become carbon-centric--for having a one-child family when you could have had two or three," said Revkin. "And obviously it's just a thought experiment, but it raises some interesting questions about all this.”

When CNSNews.com later followed up with questions about his comments, Revkin responded in an e-mail.

“I wasn't endorsing any of this, simply laying out the math and noting the reality that if one were serious about the population-climate intersection, it'd be hard to avoid asking hard questions about USA population growth,” wrote Revkin.

“By raising the notion of carbon credits for, say, single-child American families,” he continued, “I was aiming to provoke some thinking about where the brunt of emissions are still coming from on a per-capita basis.”

Full article HERE