“She’s trying to decide whether to have children because of
climate change!” Limbaugh said into his mic. “Why even get
married? What’s her name here? Kimberly. Kimberly, why
get married? What is the point if you’re not gonna have kids?”
What prompted Limbaugh’s tirade was a study that Nicholas,
now 41, co-authored with her former graduate student Seth
Wynes, which concluded that the number one thing a person
living in an industrialised country can do to curb climate change
is to have fewer children. Basing their calculations on the
premise that each person is responsible for a measure of the
carbon emissions of their children and grandchildren, they
estimated that not having a baby saves as much carbon annually
as 73 people going vegetarian or 24 people not driving a car
for a year. And Limbaugh’s outrage at the idea that one might
consider the climate when thinking about having kids (as
Nicholas had admitted she’d done in a radio interview) turned
out to be pretty common. More than 1,000 emails flooded the
inbox of Lund University’s vice-chancellor, demanding that he
retract the study. (He refused.) The right-wing National Review
magazine labelled Nicholas and Wynes
“child-averse”, proposing that a better way
to save the planet would be to commission
“a study on the climate impact of a liberal-
environmentalist suicide pact”. Some liberal
feminists cringed at the research, too. “Oh
gosh, it made me so angry,” says Meghan
Kallman, co-founder of Conceivable Future,
a group that aims to raise awareness about
how climate change is impacting people’s
childbearing decisions. “It’s wagging
a finger at individuals who choose to
exercise their human right to have a child,”
she says, instead of demanding that
companies and governments quit polluting.
Nicholas and Wynes had originally set
out simply to quantify how different lifestyle
choices impact carbon and other
greenhouse gas emissions, but their conclusions thrust Nicholas
into the centre of a debate she wanted no part in. “I don’t think
people should feel guilty for having children,” says Nicholas.
Neither would she want women to feel pressured about
motherhood. The irony, of course, was that she was the one
feeling pressured – from all sides.
Nicholas’s fiancé, Simon Rose, a mathematician, had to call
up his mother in Canada to explain why Nicholas was telling the
press about their procreative plans. In the radio interview
Limbaugh had picked up on, Nicholas had tried to highlight other
findings published in the study, but the only part of the conversation
that was broadcast focused on whether one should have a baby,
and, in particular, whether Nicholas herself planned to do so.
“May I ask you a personal question?” US morning radio-
show host Steve Inskeep asked, leaving Nicholas sure that no
matter what answer she gave, it would carry an unintended
weight. It felt, she says, “like, are we so screwed that even this
climate scientist is not going to have children?”
The study had actually suggested three additional lifestyle
choices to lower your carbon footprint, albeit not as much as
being child-free: avoiding flying, ditching car travel and not
eating meat. Wynes, who mostly spoke to the international
media, was asked a lot about these other points. But for
Nicholas, who fielded the American press, babies were “all
anyone wanted to talk to me about”, she says.
When Nicholas answers these types of questions, her
responses are hardly unique. Climate change is only one of the
factors – and not even the primary one – that she and her fiancé
are considering. Like many other potential parents deciding
whether or not to jump in, they’ve also been thinking about what
a child would mean for their relationship and their careers and,
most of all, whether a child would make for a more meaningful
life. “If I had a burning hole in my heart to
have a child and I knew that it would also be
the biggest contribution to climate change
that I would make, I think that I would do it
anyway,” she says.
In that case, the next step would be to
minimise the carbon impact of that choice
by, say, walking instead of driving her child
to preschool and feeding her beans instead
of beef. According to the World Bank,
Americans produce almost 10 times more
greenhouse gas emissions than the average
Indian does, and more than 165 times more
than the average Malawian. (Australia is
guilty, too: by some measures, our emissions
outstrip even the US’s.) Which is why
lowering our fossil fuel consumption, in
Nicholas’s mind, is more important than
forgoing childbirth. “It’s not so much about whether you choose
to have a child,” she says. “It’s about what kind of lifestyle you
choose to raise that child in.”
Nicholas and Rose are still yet to make a decision around
children of their own. In the meantime, they took a wedding-
themed train trip across the US and Canada, where they
stopped to see friends and family in different cities to celebrate
instead of asking them to burn fossil fuels flying to Sweden.
“There are lots of people who make the decision not to have
kids, and they are really happy with it,” says Nicholas. “Who
knows – I might end up being one of them.” Or not. “As one
woman told me, ‘If not for our kids, whom are we saving the
climate for?’” E“It’s not SO
MUCH about
WHETHER YOU
CHOOSE to
HAVE A CHILD.
It’s about
WHAT KIND
OF LIFESTYLE
YOU CHOOSE
to RAISE THAT
CHILD in”#ELLEFUTUREISNOW