Children: Bad for the environment?

To all you fine eco-warriors obsessed with going “green,” may I suggest that it’s time for a vasectomy? said Mark Steyn in the Orange County, Calif., Register. Children may be adorable, with their gap-toothed smiles and their animal-print pajamas, but the truth, if you believe the lunatic left, is that the little buggers are miniature SUVs, belching carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and choking the planet with their waste and pollution. Writing in the Medical Journal of Australia recently, a professor Barry Walters called on the Australian government to make parents pay a “carbon tax” every time they have a child and—even creepier—give a “carbon credit” to anyone undergoing voluntary sterilization. Call me old-fashioned, but I have trouble accepting the notion that “the best way to bequeath a more sustainable planet to our children is not to have any.”

It’s true that professor Walters has a uniquely “radical perspective” on this particular issue, said Roger Coombs in the Australian Daily Telegraph. Among scientists, however, there’s no longer anything remotely radical about the idea that “unless we do something pretty drastic pretty soon, millions of us are going to die.” The world’s population is likely to top 8 billion by 2025, and with each of us producing several tons of carbon dioxide a year, that’ll turn severe climate change into an inevitability, with rising sea levels, prolonged droughts, widespread water and food shortages, and more destructive storms. Rewarding couples for not reproducing certainly has a nasty, totalitarian ring to it, but this is a time for tough choices. Sooner rather than later, we may have to decide whether the inalienable, unrestricted “right to reproduce” is worth more to us than the planet we live on.

There you have it, said Gregory Rodriguez in the Los Angeles Times. Final proof that environmentalism has become the new Puritanism, with virtually every pleasurable activity—including having children—as a form of sin. In the new moral order, driving, flying, eating, and reproducing have all become fraught with guilt, while self-denial is the only form of virtue. As one British environmentalist who had herself sterilized recently explained: “Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet.” Enough is enough, said John Turley-Ewart in the Canadian National Post Online. Reducing greenhouse gases makes sense, but not if it requires us to create a dehumanized, Orwellian society that views children as just another form of pollution. If that’s our only option, then “I will gladly endure global warming.”

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