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Do parents counter-balance the carbon emissions of their children?

It is well understood that adding to the population increases CO(2) emissions. At the same time, having children is a transformative experience, such that it might profoundly change adult (i.e., parents’) preferences and consumption. How it might change is, however, unknown. Depending on if becoming...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Nordström, Jonas, Shogren, Jason F., Thunström, Linda
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7159189/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32294098
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231105
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author Nordström, Jonas
Shogren, Jason F.
Thunström, Linda
author_facet Nordström, Jonas
Shogren, Jason F.
Thunström, Linda
author_sort Nordström, Jonas
collection PubMed
description It is well understood that adding to the population increases CO(2) emissions. At the same time, having children is a transformative experience, such that it might profoundly change adult (i.e., parents’) preferences and consumption. How it might change is, however, unknown. Depending on if becoming a parent makes a person “greener” or “browner,” parents may either balance or exacerbate the added CO(2) emissions from their children. Parents might think more about the future, compared to childless adults, including risks posed to their children from environmental events like climate change. But parenthood also adds needs and more intensive competition on your scarce time. Carbon-intensive goods can add convenience and help save time, e.g., driving may facilitate being in more places in one day, compared to public transportation or biking. Pre-prepared food that contain red meat may save time and satisfy more household preferences, relative to vegetarian food. We provide the first rigorous test of whether parents are greener or browner than other adults. We create a unique dataset by combining detailed micro data on household expenditures of all expenditure groups particularly important for CO(2) emissions (transportation, food, and heating/electricity) with CO(2) emissions, and compare emissions from Swedish adults with and without children. We find that parents emit more CO(2) than childless adults. Only a small fraction of adults permanently choose not to have children, which means any meaningful self-selection into parenthood based on green preferences is unlikely. Our findings suggest that having children might increase CO(2) emissions both by adding to the population and by increasing CO(2) emissions from those choosing to have children.
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spelling pubmed-71591892020-04-22 Do parents counter-balance the carbon emissions of their children? Nordström, Jonas Shogren, Jason F. Thunström, Linda PLoS One Research Article It is well understood that adding to the population increases CO(2) emissions. At the same time, having children is a transformative experience, such that it might profoundly change adult (i.e., parents’) preferences and consumption. How it might change is, however, unknown. Depending on if becoming a parent makes a person “greener” or “browner,” parents may either balance or exacerbate the added CO(2) emissions from their children. Parents might think more about the future, compared to childless adults, including risks posed to their children from environmental events like climate change. But parenthood also adds needs and more intensive competition on your scarce time. Carbon-intensive goods can add convenience and help save time, e.g., driving may facilitate being in more places in one day, compared to public transportation or biking. Pre-prepared food that contain red meat may save time and satisfy more household preferences, relative to vegetarian food. We provide the first rigorous test of whether parents are greener or browner than other adults. We create a unique dataset by combining detailed micro data on household expenditures of all expenditure groups particularly important for CO(2) emissions (transportation, food, and heating/electricity) with CO(2) emissions, and compare emissions from Swedish adults with and without children. We find that parents emit more CO(2) than childless adults. Only a small fraction of adults permanently choose not to have children, which means any meaningful self-selection into parenthood based on green preferences is unlikely. Our findings suggest that having children might increase CO(2) emissions both by adding to the population and by increasing CO(2) emissions from those choosing to have children. Public Library of Science 2020-04-15 /pmc/articles/PMC7159189/ /pubmed/32294098 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231105 Text en © 2020 Nordström et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Nordström, Jonas
Shogren, Jason F.
Thunström, Linda
Do parents counter-balance the carbon emissions of their children?
title Do parents counter-balance the carbon emissions of their children?
title_full Do parents counter-balance the carbon emissions of their children?
title_fullStr Do parents counter-balance the carbon emissions of their children?
title_full_unstemmed Do parents counter-balance the carbon emissions of their children?
title_short Do parents counter-balance the carbon emissions of their children?
title_sort do parents counter-balance the carbon emissions of their children?
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7159189/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32294098
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231105
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