Doh! The carbon footprint just got bigger.

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Based on the huzzahs the Surfrider Foundation posted on its Facebook account, the San Clemente-based clean-ocean advocates are apparently down with notion that having fewer children is a more effective way of going green than changing lightbulbs, driving a fuel-efficient vehicle or adopting a vegetarian diet.

"Finally someone has the guts to talk about this. For those of us in the environmental community, this has been the elephant in the room for far too long a time," reads the Facebook message that proceeeds Surfrider's link to Treehugger.com that reports, "If you live in the United States and really want to reduce your carbon emission legacy, perhaps the single largest change you can make to your life is commit to have fewer children."

Treehugger's case is built by LiveScience:

Each Child Increases Your Carbon Legacy 5.7 Times
LiveScience cites a study from statisticians at Oregon State University which shows that in the United States each child ultimately adds about 9,400 metric tons of carbon emissions to the average parent's carbon legacy--about 5.7 times the average US resident's emissions over their lifetime.

Each Chinese Child Has One-Fifth the Impact as U.S. Child
For sake of comparison, researchers found that the long-term impact of a child born in China has only one-fifth the environmental impact as a baby born in the United States.

Ecological & Carbon Footprint Differences Tell the Tale
Ultimately that comes straight down to resource consumption: While the average per capita carbon emissions in the United States are up around 20 metric tons per person, in China that's about 1.3 tons per person.

It terms of ecological footprint, Footprint Network says that U.S. resource consumption requires about 9.5 global hectares per person, while China's use of natural resources requires slightly over 2 hectares per person--which is just what the globe can support. The global average is 2.7 global hectares per person--in other words, we're overshooting global biocapacity by an increasing amount.

Then there is this, from researcher Paul Murtaugh: "In discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of an individual over his of her lifetime. Those are important issues and it's essential that they should be considered. But an additional challenge facing us is continuing population growth and increasing global consumption of resources."

Great. But what would Surfrider do with all the unsold "Walrus & Crab" infant creepers?

$12.95 at Surfrider.org. Hurry!

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