I don’t necessarily disagree with you per se, but I do think these “EV-lite” type analyses are too broad: environmentally conscious people may be more likely to have children who are environmentally conscious, work on climate engineering, &c.
That’s not to say that we should encourage them specifically to have children either; just that children represent potential in a way that the number of bunker-fuel cargo ships does not.
Even the most environmentally conscious person in an industrialized nation will emit massive amounts of CO2 in their lifetime, provided of course that nobody invents a "quick fix" for CO2 emissions in their lifetime. Of course in theory the child could be that person to invent that quick fix, but the expected value is still that the child will contribute to a lot of CO2 emissions.
It doesn't matter. Climate change is happening. It doesn't matter what we do as individuals, the system can't be changed from individual action and it can't be changed via collective action as that would require full cooperation.
There is no practical way we can achieve the goal of survival for all through reduction of CO2 emissions. It's a farce because we'll never get all parties to agree.
The only path forward is to hope we have some very clever science and engineering that can help us survive this disaster.
> There is no practical way we can achieve the goal of survival through reduction of CO2 emissions. It's a farce
It's a farce because it's already too late for emissions reductions to cut it. We need to pull carbon out of the atmosphere or, as you say, engineer other solutions.
But a robust solution is not going to be limited to the physical/material domain. Societies are malleable and so are people. We need to design ourselves and our activities into a vibrant planetary ecology, not throw up our hands and try to patch around historically contingent circumstances
As Octavia Butler put it, God is change, and change is not to be reacted to, but to be shaped
The earth is on a trajectory for <2.5C just based on current technology and policies. The technology and policy path we're on (including developed but not yet implemented tech and policy) is likely to limit warming to <2C, but 1.5C is nigh-on unachievable. Assuming we don't hit any runaway conditions (which is an unknown unknown that we probably won't realize until we're already there)...the vast majority of the world will be just fine. And if governments can get their heads out of their behinds and pass marginally sensible immigration reform, the people who are displaced can move to locations where there are massive demographic bombs going off (most of the west) to stabilize their workforces.
The point is that "will emit massive amounts of CO2" isn't a complex enough metric: if that's how we're calculating EV (which I disagree with in the first place), then it would be perfectly appropriate for me to go around killing truck drivers and suburbanites.
That’s not to say that we should encourage them specifically to have children either; just that children represent potential in a way that the number of bunker-fuel cargo ships does not.