I found the article “Can condoms combat climate change?” which made me consider the number of people who are effected by access to contraception. The article suggests that if contraception was available to developing countries, population growth would slow, thus reducing the amount of carbon dioxide released in to the air. The statistic that sticks out in the article is that “every $7 invested in contraception would buy more than 1 ton of carbon dioxide emissions.” To me, targeting specifically developing nations in this plan seems at best morally questionable. One could interpret this as we are going control the number of uneducated and poor people so we can live our comfortable lives. The largest problem with climate change is not so much the number of people in the world, but how we are using our resources. We would be asking the citizens of these developing countries to “control” their reproduction so westerners, especially US citizens can frivolously waste more of the worlds resources. After all, the United States outputs more than 20% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions (2006 data) despite the fact that we make up less than 5% of the world’s population. We need responsibility on many fronts including reproduction but more importantly we need to responsibly use our resources.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2009/09/can-condoms-combat-climate-change.html
I never really thought about combating global climate change through contraception, but I guess it really does make sense. However, when it comes to statistics, I am always kind of skeptical. I didn’t take time to read “Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost” (it’s 42 pages long!), which I am sure explains the logistics behind the statements she made, but how accurate and reliable are the statistics she pronounced? How can they accurately estimate that making condoms more available will decrease the number of people-years by 12 billion?