Quote from: IanP on November 18, 2022, 08:42:21 amYep, I think we probably agree on this - the figure for an extra child is calculated in a completely different way to the figure for e.g. not driving a car and they shouldn't really be compared on a single chart. I'd say you just need the chart to have caveats, and to make it clear what's going on. Sometimes comparing things that aren't easily comparable is a worthwhile thing to do - this is a perfect example of that. Though I agree it doesn't make sense not to have a taper applied to the future emissions.
Yep, I think we probably agree on this - the figure for an extra child is calculated in a completely different way to the figure for e.g. not driving a car and they shouldn't really be compared on a single chart.
It's just a tool for assessing the likely impact of your future actions/options - obviously the kid option becomes moot once they are born!
I'm not sure what you disagree with? You think that because it's not simple to directly compare these things it's not worthwhile? What if I want a way to gauge and compare the likely climate impact of life choices, and one I want to include is having a kid? You have two options that I can see: either come up with an imperfect method or just say it's too hard and give up. The former is more likely to be useful to me than the latter, even if it requires some thinking on my part and subtlety to interpret. I don't disagree that you need to be careful about how you present the results in that context, but just saying "oh we can't compare them" is no use to anyone.
If you want to compare back assigned future emissions impact surely you can only compare that to back assigned future emission reductions impact.
Perhaps they would have done better to present the data using a metric like "CO2e total" (ie. total impact of the choice assuming that you make it now and then capture all future impact) rather than "CO2e/year"...
Isn't the overall question here (to IanP) whether you fundamentally agree or disagree with the headline that not having a child has the biggest impact?
Perfect, tweak the method to account for emissions declining and we're done!
I wasn't sure whether you disagreed with the idea of comparing the things per se, or only the methodology and metric/unit used. I'm still unclear in that regard - half that post says you shouldn't compare them, half says you can but you don't like the methodology.
It's not 'not having a child', it's having one fewer children. Big difference.
You can't compare them because the methodology is different - one is 100s of years of future emissions divided into the 50 year lifespan of a person (basically), the other is actual emission changes for a single year. They simply mean different things so you have to look at different way of calculating one or the other if you want to compare them.
But people aren't doing that, they're arguing that this is a useful comparison
each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions
Quote each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions I don’t feel I need to explore the methodology here because this so is clearly not a useful answer to any sensible question.
Quote from: Johnny Brown on November 18, 2022, 02:44:37 pmQuote each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions I don’t feel I need to explore the methodology here because this so is clearly not a useful answer to any sensible question.Not useful or not likely to be accurate? It's very useful if accurate... The problem is that it's not likely to be accurate if we assume that we get anywhere near net zero goals!