Babies ruin everything!
Americans and British told
the best way to help the ecology
is to have less children
The truth is more brains will likely mean
cleaner energy technologies.
By WILLIAM MCGURN
August 3, 2009
Forget about the birthers, and the nutty claims that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
More and more, we are hearing from people who might best be described as anti-birthers. Their claims have nothing to do with long- versus short-form Hawaiian birth certificates.
Instead, they advance a simple proposition: that the birth of each additional American child is a kind of calamity for the environment.
The most recent example of anti-birth thinking comes from Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax of Oregon State University. In a study called “Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals,” they suggest that if you truly care about the environment, it’s not enough to trade your SUV for a Prius, use the right lightbulbs, or limit your lawn to organic fertilizers.
To the contrary, you need to start thinking about something way more important: i.e., having one less child.
The “basic premise,” the study reports, is that “a person is responsible for emissions of his descendents.”
When Mr. Murtaugh runs the numbers, he finds some alarming results. Take an American woman who checks all the green boxes: She recycles, installs energy efficient windows, cuts back how much she drives, and so on.
Yet simply by having two children, Prof. Murtaugh reports, she will add nearly 40 times the amount of carbon dioxide emissions she had saved with those lifestyle changes. No wonder the Los Angeles Times Web site reports on this study under the title “Tie Your Tubes and Save the Planet?”
The president’s science adviser, John Holdren, appears to share Mr. Murtaugh’s worries about too many Americans. In a 1973 article, he argued that “210 million [Americans] now is too many and 280 million in 2040 is likely to be too many.” He concluded that we should encourage women to have fewer children.
When questioned about this during his confirmation hearings, Mr. Holdren said he no longer thinks it “productive” to focus on the “optimum population” (possibly because America now has 304 million people). But he gave no indication of abandoning the underlying idea that having more Americans is a big problem.
Little more than a week ago, two British doctors writing in the
British Medical Journal made the same point — this time about British babies. Each new birth in the U.K., they note, will end up resulting in 160 times more greenhouse gas emissions than a new birth in Ethiopia.
Their conclusion?
British couples need to be told that having one less child “is the simplest and biggest gift anyone can make” to a habitable planet.
Britain, they suggest, needs to promote an “environmental ethics” where having fewer children is “analogous to avoiding patio heaters and high carbon cars.”
In some ways, this focus on American and British births is an improvement over the previous bout of overpopulation worries. Back in the 1970s, when the experts complained about people having too many children, they meant Chinese, Filipinos, Latin Americans, Africans, et al.
Many still believe this is so. At least for the moment, however, the American mom who brings a new life into this world seems to be regarded as more of an environmental menace than the Bangladeshi mother who does the same.
There’s a larger trouble with this point of view, of course, and it has nothing to do with the arithmetic. However new-sounding the language about “carbon footprints” may be,
what we have here is the same old Malthusian view of people breeding themselves to destruction.
Mr. Murtaugh may reject this — he stresses in an email that he suggests no policies, offering only “some complicated arithmetic showing the likely effects of an individual’s reproductive activities on future carbon emissions.”
Maybe. But accept his assumptions, and it means that when a friend has a baby, you have to think we’re all the worse for it. It means that instead of celebrating the development that brings things like refrigeration, cars and calories to people who don’t now have them, we fear the day that a child in Manila enjoys enough of the blessings of life to have the same carbon footprint as a kid from Minnesota.
And if we really think the answer is below-replacement level fertility, it should mean taking a closer look at places such as Japan and Europe, where we can see what happens to societies when people stop having children.
The real answer, of course, is to have a little more faith in the creative powers of human beings. Given the freedom to grow and innovate, surely the same people who have licked polio, sent a man to the moon, and given us a revolution in information will sooner or later come up with new technologies that will provide for our energy needs while being friendlier to the environment.
The task is not without its challenges. But we’re not likely to get far with a “science” that defines the problem as American babies.
I've been trying to put together a post on Obama's science czar whose ideas on population control (such as placing tasteless anti-fertility substances in drinking water)- even if he claims he wrote them years ago - are the most far-out one can imagine, and therefore, all the more alarming.
They are ideas any individual is free to have (not thereby right), but if that is the mindset of the man who will, in effect, set science policy for the United States, then God help America!
With the 'embarras du richesse' of Nobel Prize-worthy straightforward, non-ideological, pure scientists that the United States has, why would Obama pick a 'scientologist' with a far-left radical record to be his science czar? Why not someone at least in the mainstream of scientific and ethical thinking?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/08/2009 17:18]