Twelve Generations of Environmental Damage

by Tony Chavira

When we think about fighting the good fight as hardcore environmentalists, we tend to focus on our habits. For example, we can just as easily recycle that plastic bottle as throw it in the garbage. Once all cars in the fleet become electric, we won’t have gasoline emissions to worry about, and once all fossil fuels are replaced by sustainable sources we’ll have practically no transportation emissions at all. But what exactly does being an environmentalist entail? You might answer anything from “a reverence for the planet” to “a strict adherence to becoming carbon neutral”; but you (individually) wouldn’t be doing anything in your lifetime that radically reduced the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Instead, you’d be worryingly delegating your personal emissions by biking, eating less meat, recycling or reusing stuff, or planting more trees.

But short of learning to breathe CO2 instead of O2, there’s nothing you can do to stop emitting carbon dioxide. What’s worse, every child born in the U.S.A. will be directly responsible for 500 tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. Think about how gargantuan 500 tons of steel is. Or that this Ramadan, over 500 tons of food is being wasted throughout the United Arab Emirates. And in our lifetimes, each of us will release 500 tons of a greenhouse gas into the air.

It’s clear enough at this point that human carbon legacies are the environmental problem, though “carbon legacies” is a strange way to refer to your children. Our science is advanced enough that researchers are able to project exactly how atrocious your carbon legacy is: you are not only responsible for your own carbon emissions, but also for 50% of each of your children’s carbon emissions and 25% of each of your grandchildren’s. With two kids and four grandchildren, that means that you need to negate 300% of your carbon emissions now to prepare for your grandkid’s futures. Way to breed, asshole.

So you might think that simply not reproducing would be your best shot at protecting our environment. Without passing on your genetic makeup, you can live completely guilt-free (or at the very least, you won’t have to take drastic steps to negate thousands of tons of carbon emissions your legacy will surely dump into the atmosphere).

But you’d be wrong. Our newfound knowledge of carbon legacies comes with certain responsibilities: we are not only responsible for our personal emissions, but we are also responsible for carbon emissions released from several generations of our ignorant ancestors. The Industrial Revolution brought on the concept of personal and professional environmental irresponsibility, which roughly began in 1800. Generations are roughly defined as 20 years, so we are 10 generations removed from when our carbon legacy began. So we are each directly responsible for 1,000 percent of our carbon emissions: 10 times the amount each of us will emit in our lifetimes. That’s at least 4,500 tons of carbon you owed the planet the moment you were born, and 500 more since.

You might think too, “Tony, why do I owe a percentage of my children and grandchildren’s emissions, but all of my ancestors’? That’s not fair!” Well, whiner, this model doesn’t explain the full story. I could make you completely responsible for the emissions that both of your parents, all of your grandparents, etc. left to you, but the world population was only about one billion people back in the coal-powered days of 1800. Since the world population isn’t consistent throughout the course of 200 years, it wouldn’t accurately represent how much you owe.

We’re at about seven billion people today. You already owe the planet each previous generation’s carbon emissions, plus you would have to account for a 700% growth in population. Think of it as interest on the debt your ancestors owed because they bred like rabbits in heat. If the world population has grown from one billion people to seven billion in 200 years, this interest on your carbon legacy is an additional 70% per generation. So you not only owe 1,000% of your carbon dioxide emissions to the Earth, but an additional 700% on top of that! The grand total carbon emissions you owe strictly from you ancestors’ legacy is 8,500 tons.

If you average 8,500 tons over 10 generations since 1800, your family actually owes the Earth about 850 tons (or 170%) in carbon emissions per person that no one has ever bothered to pay back. The grand total for your carbon footprint across 12 generations (from 1800 to your grandkids) would be 2,100% of your own emissions, or 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. And that’s exactly one line of ancestors. Twelve people.

There’s only one correct answer to this environmental equation: we need to eliminate people from the Earth somehow, and as many as we can to offset generations of environmental abuse and neglect. The more people on Earth using our resources, the worse off we’ll clearly be. Not having kids is a start, but killing existing people will cut directly to the heart of this environmental issue. All you have to do is cut directly to the heart of a person (or 12).

Good thing most environmentalists are also humanists, or they might take that last joke way too seriously.

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