Cognitive Dissonance: An Illustration

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Last year, the country registered the arrival of 1 million asylum seekers, the near entirety of whom were under 65 and of working age. Nevertheless, whether to restrict the number of arrivals remains a point of debate despite public and business support for Merkel’s stance on refugees, and backing by her party, the CDU. At last month’s congress, only two of the party’s 1,001 delegates voted against her decision not to put a ceiling on the number of refugees to welcome.

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The new study, published in Environmental Research Letters, sets out the impact of different actions on a comparable basis. By far the biggest ultimate impact is having one fewer child, which the researchers calculated equated to a reduction of 58 tonnes of CO2 for each year of a parent’s life.

The figure was calculated by totting up the emissions of the child and all their descendants, then dividing this total by the parent’s lifespan. Each parent was ascribed 50% of the child’s emissions, 25% of their grandchildren’s emissions and so on.

“Population reduction would probably reduce carbon emissions but we have many other tools for getting global warming under control,” he said. “Perhaps more importantly, cutting the number of people on the planet will take hundreds of years. Emissions reduction needs to start now.”

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