What's Your Baby's Carbon Footprint?

From Mother Jones magazine...

EXHIBIT: 8lbs, 21 inches, and 3,800 diapers worth of planet-pummeling joy

By Kiera Butler and Dave Gilson

April 28, 2008

What's Your Baby's Carbon Footprint?: Sources TOOLS E-mail article Print article  Digg   del.icio.us   Reddit   Yahoo MyWeb BACKTALK E-mail the editor    StumbleUpon   Newsvine   Netscape   Google

72% of American adults have children.

60% of American children say they're more afraid of global warming than of terrorism, car crashes, or cancer.

Between 2000 and 2050, the U.S. will add 114 million kids to its population. Africa will add 1.2 billion—but their respective CO₂ emissions will be the same.

One American child generates as much CO₂ as 106 Haitian kids.

Zahara Jolie-Pitt will produce 45,000 lbs of CO₂yearly, compared with 221 lbs if she still lived in Ethiopia.

A typical baby goes through 3,800 disposable diapers in her first 2.5 years.

96% of American babies wear disposable diapers. In China, only 6% do. In India, 2%.

China claims its one-child policy has prevented 400 million births—saving 1.5 billion tons of CO₂ in 2004 alone.

For $20, British parents can have 7 trees planted to offset the 1,430 lbs of greenhouse gases generated by their child's first 2.5 years of nappies.

Civil conflict is twice as likely to occur in countries where young adults make up more than 40% of the population.

In 2007, a Hungarian couple had 300 trees planted to offset their newborn's lifetime carbon footprint.

Twin births in the U.S. have risen 70% since 1980. In 2004, 3.2% of newborns were twins.

Uganda (50% children) has been at war for most of the last 30 years. Monaco (13%) has not been at war since 1815.

Citizens of the Russian city of Ulyanovsk get September 12 off to "conceive a patriot."

Due to its low birthrate, Singapore runs a dating program called LoveByte that promotes "the importance of marriage and family, and the need to start early."

Members of the "Quiverfull" movement believe that very large families populate "God's army."

In 2005, Pope Benedict XVI called for tax incentives for large families. Last fall, he vowed to "recreate a strong alliance between man and Earth."

In March, a Vatican bishop announced seven new mortal sins, including causing pollution and being obscenely wealthy. According to news reports, the bishop said the new evils were linked to "the unstoppable process of globalization."

In 1900, 1% of Catholics lived in Africa. By 2050, 26% will.

In 1950, the typical American woman had 3.1 children over her lifetime. In 2005, she had 2.1.

In 1950, the typical new American house was 983 sq. feet. In 2005, it was 2,434 sq. feet.

In 1969, 5% of households had 3 or more vehicles. In 2001, 23% did.

Only 45% of SUV owners in the U.S. have two kids or more.

U.S. school buses—95% of which run on diesel—release 3,700 tons of soot and 11 million tons of greenhouse gases a year. School-bus exhaust is linked to higher rates of asthma and lung cancer.

Letting a school bus idle for 10 minutes creates 3 times more particulate emissions than turning the motor off.

It would take up to 223 trees to offset the CO₂ produced by a child watching 3 hours of TV every day for 18 years.

19% of U.S. children under the age of 1 have TVs in their rooms.

The Ballooning TV Family

1957: Leave It to Beaver (2 kids)

1969: The Brady Bunch (6 kids)

1972: The Waltons (7 kids)

1977: Eight Is Enough (8 kids)

1988: Just the Ten of Us (8 kids)

1996: 7th Heaven (7 kids)

2007: The Duggars (17 kids)

Asked how many times they'd begged their parents for a product they'd seen advertised, 11% of tweens answered "more than 50."

Appetite for Destruction

Over his/her lifetime, each American born in the 1990s will produce an average of:

3.1 million pounds of CO₂ (same as 413 plane trips from New York to Tokyo)

22,828,508 pounds of water waste (the equivalent of 48,060 ten-minute showers)

16,372 pounds of yard waste (enough to fill 442 large garbage cans)

7,249 pounds of food waste (as much as 16 households produce in a year)

S/he will eat 1,654 chickens, 74 turkeys, 25pigs, 11 cows, 2 sheep, and 18,675 eggs.

And s/he will use 1,870 barrels of petroleum (enough to fuel a Subaru Outback for 822,800 miles).

American children make up 4% of the world's population, but they consume more than 40% of the world's toys.

In 2006, volunteers picked up 68,720 lbs of toys and 33,469 lbs of diapers during worldwide beach cleanups.

In order to do as much laundry as Walt Disney World does in a single day, you'd have to do a load a day for 44 years.

By the time she is 18, an American child in a middle-income family will have eaten her way through $33,330 of food.

The average student trashes up to 90 lbs of lunch-box leftovers and packaging each year.

In 2007, Julia Roberts told Vanity Fair that the "highest high" would be "growing our food that I then make, and then composting and growing more."

In 2004, she paid Hollywood's Cedars-Sinai Hospital $1,700 a night for a deluxe maternity suite with valets, a chef, security staff, and salon service.

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT—pronounced "vehement") advocates nonprocreation instead of suicide because "there's no way we could convince enough people to kill themselves.

Celebrity Babies, for Fun and Profit

pics of whose baby?	amount paid/publication	comments
Nicole Richie	$1 million/People	Enough to sponsor 2,976 Save the Children kids for a year
Jamie-Lynn Spears	$1 million/OK!	Enough to buy 2 million condoms
Christina Aguilera	$2 million/People	Enough to buy laptops for 10,000 students in the developing world
J-Lo/Marc Anthony	$6 million/People	$3 million for each twin; enough to send 1,697 kids to day care
Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie	$7.6 million/People,Hello!	Gave some of it to charity, but won't say how much
Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes	$0/Vanity Fair	Fawning profile and Annie Leibovitz shoot? Priceless.