For the environmentally conscious couple, a dog or cat is an excellent replacement for the exceptionally wasteful human baby. From that perspective, re-directing your baby instincts into a dog instead of another human is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint.
This line seems straight from a dystopian sci-fi novel. A world where humans preferred caring for other animal species instead of reproducing.
Seriously though, I think middle-class white families are already too hesitant about raising children, even without thinking about the environment. They think it's too expensive, and would rather have other luxuries.
The irony is that immigrants and people in developing countries, which already have low resources, don't care that much about status or 'living standards', and are happily generating a lot of offspring.
My theory is that this is natural selection regulating for too much brain size / intelligence: If you believe in the several studies that mention IQ and brain size differences for races, right now the races with lowest brain size / IQ are having the most babies. I think mother nature is preferring - sorry for the language - 'dumb and strong' over 'smart and feeble'. Actually, many people have a reproduction strategy that involves lowering cognitive ability - getting drunk [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778038/ and others]
Whoaaa... i never thought about comparing a human being and an animal on the sole scale of carbon footprint. I guess it's fair in a way.. but what a difference on how much they bring to the world.
The problem with this attitude is the next generation will then only have only have the offspring of non environmentally conscious people.
You shouldn't trade the chance to shape the culture of the next generation to be more environmentally conscious for the short term quick fix of reducing your environmental impact right now.
