Abstract
As the climate crisis worsens and more people in the United States personally experience the climate change impacts, anxieties about climate change impacts also grow. Two such climate anxieties have received considerable attention in popular press – numerous newspaper articles, blogs, podcasts, and now general interest books link the decision to have children to climate. The first anxiety frames the decision to have children as one of the behaviors contributing to climate change the most: children and their children will contribute greenhouse gas emissions through their life-long consumption (they will own houses, cars, etc.). The second frames the decision to have children in light of the future impacts of climate on children – the world we are leaving to future generations is more uncertain, with more natural disasters, extreme heat events, and other calamities. Despite proliferation of such narratives in popular press, the academic work on the subject has been limited to correlational studies and some simulations about the impact of population growth on climate. In our study, in contrast, we design an information provision experiment to induce random variation in the salience of the two climate anxieties – the impact of children on climate and the impact of climate on children – and causally estimate their effects. While we hear many conversations about climate change and family size in the United States, it is not clear to us to what extent climate change anxieties impact such complex and personal decisions as having children and the number of children. We cannot observe the effects of climate information on actual family size, of course, but we can evaluate its effects on both expected family size and, no less important, ideal family size.