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Children come with a high carbon cost

11 March 2009

WHAT is your carbon legacy – not the emissions you are personally liable for, but those of your descendants? Ask , a statistician at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

If you have a child, he says, you and you partner are each responsible for half its emissions. If that child has kids, one-quarter of their emissions are down to you, and so on. How it adds up depends on population trends and emission changes in the future.

Murtaugh used , which say that after 2050, birth rates in all countries will be 1.85 children per woman, on…

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