Investor’s Business Daily
10/19/09
Earth: An environmental writer mainstreams an idea floating around the green fringe — save the earth by population control and give carbon credits to one-child families. Are we threatened by the patter of little carbon footprints?
It’s long been a mantra on the left that people are a plague on the earth, ravaging its surface for food and resources, polluting its atmosphere and endangering its species. Now we are endangering its very climate to the point of extinction. Even the result of our breathing — carbon dioxide — has been declared by the EPA to be a dangerous pollutant.
Treaties like Kyoto and the upcoming economic suicide pact to be forged in Copenhagen have focused on the instruments and byproducts of our civilization. Now the focus is shifting increasingly to the people who built it.
New York Times environmental writer Andrew Revkin participated in an Oct. 14 panel discussion on climate change with other media pundits titled “Covering Climate: What’s Population Got To Do With It?” People who need people they are not.
Participating via Web cam, Revkin volunteered that in allocating carbon credits as part of any cap-and-trade scheme, “if you can measurably somehow divert fertility rate, say toward accelerating decline in a place with a high fertility rate, shouldn’t there be a carbon value to that?”
He went on to say that “probably the single most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the light or driving a Prius, it’s having fewer kids, having fewer children.”…
…This brave new world is not too far-fetched for science adviser John Holdren, who has advised taking population control to quite another level. He has at various times advocated forced abortion and sterilization and views people as a burden, not as the ultimate resource, as we do.
In a recently rediscovered book, “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment,” co-authored with Malthus fans Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Holdren wrote that families “contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children” and “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility.”
Holdren envisions that a “Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits … the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.” …
The article continues at IBD.
