Future climate meltdown was already a theoretical concern for future generations: what kind of world would my great-great-grandchildren inhabit? Now it all feels more pressing. How am I going to protect my kid? Was it fair for me to bring him into this world at all? Was it immoral?

Was I complicit in the damage? I remember every extra paper towel I’ve ever unspooled from the roll, and think about a tree falling in the Amazon, and then think about my son growing up in a gray, dying world – walking towards Kansas on potholed highways. Maybe while trying to protect his own son, like the father in The Road. Will he decide to have a kid? I have foisted upon him a decision even more difficult than my own. It’s all very depressing.

Still, I come down on the side of advocating reproduction. It gets back to the power we have, we humans. Such devastating power, with which we’ve already changed our world so dramatically. Maybe we can change it back, or at least innovate to survive. What if, and this is obviously a huge “if”, some young person, perhaps a certain 11-year-old in a Black Sabbath T-shirt (I highly doubt it, he can rarely remember to take his lunchbox out of his knapsack at the end of the day), perhaps someone who is not yet born, perhaps not yet conceived, is the one super-genius to figure out the invention that could save the planet?