Piqued by Alan Weisman's The
World Without Us, a morbid book speculating on Earth's return
to its pre-inhabited primeval state if humans left the planet, comes
Slate's Daniel Engber's call for reducing the population by
5 billion people over the next century.
Yes, you read that right: 5,000,000,000.
The movement is labeled population-based environmentalism. Admittedly
the environmentalists know that switching to wind and solar power won't
make a dent in one's carbon footprint. So these anti-life planet-savers
have theoretically equated the size of families/population with global-warming
which they attribute to CO2 emissions, and they intend to do something
about it.
Steve Schneider, editor of Climatic Change and himself a climate alarmist, Brian
C. O’Neill of Brown University's Watson Institute for International
Studies, and Lee Wexler of the International Institute for Applied Systems
Analysis initially calculated the negative value of a newborn child
in a published report from November 2000. Yes, negative value.
Environmentally, the "externalities" which they define as
"costs or benefits associated with the birth of a child that fall
on society but are not considered in the parents' fertility decisions,"
amount to about $28,200 negative value per child in developed countries. So,
they want parents to decide on their own, or with negative monetary
incentives imposed by government, to have fewer children. They advocate
a type of social planning that calls for imposing taxes on live births
and forcing parents to bear the full brunt of educating those children
in punishment for having given them life — negative monetary incentives
in action.
Engber also cites a frighteningly selfish movement called "The
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement," dedicated to "phasing
out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed." Their motto
is "May we live well and die out." (Note how they don't
volunteer themselves first, but just prevent others from entering the
world.)
In practicing a sort of ungodly nature worship, these anti-life greenies
have placed the health of the biosphere above the dignity and fundamental
rights of human beings. They use phrases such as "voluntary familial
extinction" and "baby emissions" when speaking of the
most cherished gift God bestows upon us, our children. They reject the
commandment and blessing of God to "increase and multiply, and
fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea,
and the fowls of the air and all living creatures that move upon the
earth."
We have seen how, progressively, babies are murdered, and created in
labs and Petri dishes for medical purposes with impunity, so at our
peril we would ignore this incredibly unthinkable notion. Unless restraints
on government are kept in place, then what is already conceived (no
pun intended) ideologically may soon be a regulated reality if that
power is emancipated.
