In a recent Instagram live stream from her kitchen, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) raised a dimension of climate change few politicians would dare to touch.

“Basically, there’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question: Is it okay to still have children?” she said.

The criticism from conservatives that followed was predictably swift and hollow. Fox News’s Steve Hilton called it “fascistic” and a “no-child policy.”

But Ocasio-Cortez was voicing a genuine concern of many young prospective parents today who can plainly see that climate change is already here and its worst effects are still to come. These anxieties are beginning to appear in pop culture — they were a major theme in the 2018 film First Reformed.

Business Insider conducted an online poll this month that found that 38 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 agreed that climate change should be a consideration in the decision to have children. For Americans between the ages of 30 and 44, 34 percent said climate change should be a factor in having children.

As we’ve learned from climate scientists in several recent bracing reports, a child born today will be living on a planet that’s likely to be dramatically warmer by the end of the century. We’ve already experienced 1 degree Celsius of average warming since preindustrial times, and we’re currently on track to reach as much as 4 degrees by 2100.

One degree of warming has already delivered rising sea levels, deadly heat waves, wetter hurricanes, droughts, costlier disasters, bigger wildfires, and more illnesses, to name a few impacts, and these effects are only going to compound. So clearly, young people have good reason to be worried, not just for themselves but for their future families.

Many also feel angry that decades of political intransigence on climate change has forced them to make such a calculation at all. “The fact that our generation has to ask these questions is politically forceful and massively fucked up,” said Meghan Kallman, a co-founder of Conceivable Future, a group that frames climate change as an issue of reproductive justice.

The discussion of whether to have children on environmental grounds quickly leads to some important fundamental questions, like what parents owe their children: Are the resources of this planet something we rightfully inherited from our ancestors, or are clean air, safe water, and a stable climate things we are borrowing from our grandchildren?

However, the conversation can also raise controversial ideas like anti-natalism, the philosophy that each birth has a negative value to society. And the idea of limiting births has historically been informed by pseudoscience and leadened with racism and classism, often brought up by the powerful as a way to limit less desirable peoples.

So for families navigating their impact on the world, it’s all the more critical to make a decision about birth that weighs philosophical, ethical, religious, and environmental concerns properly to avoid these pitfalls.

Fortunately, there’s a growing discussion about the ethics of having children, with some groups trying to help parents grapple with their concerns without pushing them in one direction or another. Instead, their goal is to encourage political action. We’re in a make-or-break era of climate change, where our current actions or lack thereof will lock us into a certain outcome. A clear vision of the stakes for our own progeny is a powerful motivator to act aggressively to limit emissions, regardless of our own verdicts on having children.

Among people who have already given this much thought, here are some of their key concerns.

The decision to have children is deeply personal, but some are now addressing it publicly
Kallman and her Conceivable Future co-founder Josephine Ferorelli have collected testimonies from people concerned about balancing their desires to build a family with their concerns for the planet. It’s a way to have a public conversation about the rational and irrational worries of having children. “The nice thing about a testimony is that it’s your own truth,” Kallman said. “It’s a very, very public way to be vulnerable.”

If you think pumping the sky full of chemicals sounds like a weird way to fight climate change, you’re not alone. Solar geoengineering — the idea of injecting aerosols into the high atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space and make for a cooler planet — is very controversial. And not just because it seems so offbeat.

Although geoengineering is not yet being deployed in the real world, past computer modeling studies have suggested it could produce unintended effects like droughts. Some have worried that it might create new climate inequities, worsening the weather in some regions even as it improves conditions in others. It’s incurred so much backlash that until recently it’s been among scientists, and even today, much less attention is devoted to exploring this strategy than to cutting emissions.

But a study published this week in Nature Climate Change argues that the strategy could be highly successful — it’s all a matter of how much geoengineering we use. Yes, spraying a huge quantity of aerosols aimed at totally eliminating global warming can produce unwanted effects. Yet applying the right “dose” — just enough to cut global warming in half — could do the trick without causing negative side effects, the scientists say.

“The analogy is not perfect, but solar geoengineering is a little like a drug which treats high blood pressure,” said lead author Peter Irvine of Harvard University. “An overdose would be harmful, but a well-chosen dose could reduce your risks.”

In the study, Irvine and his co-authors used a high-resolution computer model to simulate what would happen if we deployed geoengineering with the goal of halving global warming, in a scenario where the carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere have doubled preindustrial levels. (Currently, we’re at about 1.4 times those earlier levels.) Whereas most previous research only looked at temperature and precipitation, this study also examined other things that matter to people, like water availability.

The results? Geoengineering cooled the planet and reduced the intensity of extreme weather events like hurricanes. Importantly, this held true across the entire globe. There weren’t regional winners and losers, just winners. If anything, the researchers noted, the regions that suffered most from climate change were the most likely to see it reduced.

Critics of geoengineering have worried that although it may benefit the rich, it could harm low-income people, who may be less equipped to cope with unpredicted weather changes if things go awry, and who won’t get as much say in deployment. But David Keith, a senior author on the study and a Harvard physics professor, told me he believes it would be a net benefit for low-income people.

“The poorest people tend to suffer most from climate change because they’re the most vulnerable. Reducing extreme weather benefits the most vulnerable the most. The only reason I’m interested in this is because of that,” he said.

The study has significant limitations
Don’t get too excited just yet. The study — a collaboration between Harvard, MIT, and Princeton — is based on a highly idealized scenario.

The researchers chose to use a scenario where atmospheric CO2 levels have doubled preindustrial levels by the time geoengineering is deployed. “Double” may sound like a lot, but some climate scientists believe our CO2 levels will be woefully higher than that by the middle of this century. And we’re not even close to ready for any large-scale deployment of geoengineering. So by using this scenario, the study may be setting itself up for an unrealistically optimistic result.

It’s also important to note that the study doesn’t actually model what happens when you shoot aerosols into the sky. It models what happens if the sun’s rays are dimmed. Although that’s a fairly common proxy, Rutgers University climate expert Alan Robock objects that it doesn’t precisely capture the impact of spraying aerosols, which could have other effects, like messing with atmospheric circulation.

The team behind the study agrees that modeling aerosols is also important but believes that asking one model to do everything isn’t necessarily the best option, according to Keith. “The climate models treat aerosols pretty badly, so it’s not clear you can trust the results. In our opinion it makes more sense to use this model, and then separately do models that have very good representations of aerosols. It’s like building a bridge from two sides,” he told me.

A recurring criticism of the Green New Deal resolution introduced in February by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) is that it has too much social justice baggage: Why does a statement of goals to limit climate change and decarbonize the economy devote so much ink to affordable housing, universal health care, and jobs for everyone?

“They are right that the entire energy sector must be reshaped,” the Washington Post editorial board wrote in a sharp appraisal. “But the goal is so fundamental that policymakers should focus above all else on quickly and efficiently decarbonizing. They should not muddle this aspiration with other social policy, such as creating a federal jobs guarantee, no matter how desirable that policy might be.”

Yet the reason the Green New Deal does include social programs is that, as Vox’s David Roberts put it, “It is not merely a way to reduce emissions, but also to ameliorate the other symptoms and dysfunctions of a late capitalist economy: growing inequality and concentration of power at the top.”

And given that decarbonizing the economy would mean jettisoning fossil fuel jobs, the resolution asserts that the transition needs to happen in a just way, mindful of the needs of “vulnerable, frontline, and deindustrialized communities.”

Nonetheless, we haven’t seen much in the way of climate policies that address social justice in this way ever in the United States.

Which is why a new clean energy bill in Illinois may serve as a remarkable test case of one of the Green New Deal’s core principles, at a time when more and more states are adopting ambitious decarbonization targets.

Illinois’s general assembly is weighing a bill that sets an aggressive target of decarbonizing the state’s energy by 2030 and running the state completely on renewable energy by 2050. That includes deploying more than 40 million solar panels and 2,500 wind turbines alongside $20 billion in new infrastructure over the next decade. The bill also calls for cutting emissions from transportation and for vastly expanding the clean energy workforce.

But it also leans into many of the social justice ideas outlined in the Green New Deal resolution.

“In the wake of federal reversals on climate action, the State of Illinois should pursue immediate action on policies that will ensure a just and responsible phase out of fossil fuels from the power sector to reduce harmful emissions from Illinois power plants, support power plant communities and workers, and allow the clean energy economy to continue growing in every corner of Illinois,” according to the text of the Clean Energy Jobs Act (SB 2132/ HB 3624).

Broadly, the bill aligns with the Green New Deal. But the Green New Deal resolution is just that — a resolution — whereas in Illinois, the rubber might actually meet the road.

“This bill is far more comprehensive [than the Green New Deal] and positions Illinois as a leader in the clean energy economy,” said Emily Melbye, chief of staff for State Rep. Ann Williams, a sponsor of the Clean Energy Jobs Act. She noted that legislators were working on this bill for years before the Green New Deal entered the national discourse.

It’s ambitious, but also risky. Clean energy policies have faltered in other states where climate change is ostensibly a major concern among the public. Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee recently launched a campaign for president with climate change as a tentpole. Yet voters in his state last year voted down a carbon tax for a second time.

It’s likely Illinois’ more aggressive proposal, with strong social justice themes, will face even bigger political hurdles. Its fate could also be an omen of whether a national climate policy built off the Green New Deal could get off the ground, so it’s worth paying attention to what’s happening in Springfield.

Justice is a central pillar of the Illinois clean energy bill
Supporters of the Illinois bill are arguing that addressing equity and social justice are required to build a coalition to back tough climate targets. And, they say, injustice is an inherent consequence of climate change: The people who contributed the least to the problem stand to suffer the most. Meanwhile, the people who profited the most from burning fossil fuels are the most insulated from its effects.

An amendment outlining the key provisions of the Clean Energy Jobs Act mentions “environmental justice” at least 30 times.

“We are getting pushback from communities that have coal plants that would be predicted to close under this,” said Jen Walling, executive director of the Illinois Environmental Council, a group promoting the Clean Energy Jobs Act. “They need to see the financial and environmental benefits from whatever we do.”

Illinois currently gets about 31 percent of its electricity from coal, 6 percent from natural gas, and 54 percent from nuclear. That means the 2050 target of getting to 100 percent renewable electricity would require a turnover in the workforce producing 81 percent of the the state’s electricity. That’s a huge social and economic shift.