NPR: ‘Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?’ ‘We should protect our kids by not having them’
Climate Depot's Marc Morano comments: 'U.S. environmentalists are taking a page from China's mandatory one-child policy even as China abandons the policy. If these wacky climate activists believed their own literature they would realize that 'global warming' may lead to less kids! (See: Climate Change Kills the Mood: Economists Warn of Less Sex on a Warmer Planet) The warmists have now graduated from regulating our light bulbs, coal plants and SUVs to regulating our family size. Let's keep 'global warming' out of the bedroom! Let's give families the freedom to choose how many kids they want!'
"Philosopher Travis Rieder asks how old they will be in 2036, and, if they are thinking of having kids, how old their kids will be. "Dangerous climate change is going to be happening by then," he says. "Very, very soon."
"Here's a provocative thought: Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them," Rieder says.
"I'm not ready to have children because I don't know what the climate's gonna be like in 50 years'
Bringing down global fertility by just half a child per woman "could be the thing that saves us," he says.
Rieder proposes that richer nations do away with tax breaks for having children and actually penalize new parents. He says the penalty should be progressive, based on income, and could increase with each additional child. Think of it like a carbon tax, on kids.
By JENNIFER LUDDEN – Jennifer Ludden is a correspondent on NPR’s National Desk
Full Audio of NPR program:
Standing before several dozen students in a college classroom, Travis Rieder (a philosopher with the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University) tries to convince them not to have children. Or at least not too many.
He’s at James Madison University in southwest Virginia to talk about a “small-family ethic” — to question the assumptions of a society that sees having children as good, throws parties for expecting parents, and in which parents then pressure their kids to “give them grandchildren.”
Why question such assumptions? The prospect of climate catastrophe.
For years, people have lamented how bad things might get “for our grandchildren,” but Rieder tells the students that future isn’t so far off anymore.
He asks how old they will be in 2036, and, if they are thinking of having kids, how old their kids will be.
Rieder wears a tweedy jacket and tennis shoes, and he limps because of a motorcycle accident. He’s a philosopher with the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and his arguments against having children are moral.
Americans and other rich nations produce the most carbon emissions per capita, he says. Yet people in the world’s poorest nations are most likely to suffer severe climate impacts, “and that seems unfair,” he says.
There’s also a moral duty to future generations that will live amid the climate devastation being created now.
“Here’s a provocative thought: Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them,” Rieder says.
His arguments sound pretty persuasive in the classroom. At home, it was a different matter.
When she imagines raising a child, Ferorelli says she can’t help but envision the nightmare scenarios that have dogged her since she first heard the term “global warming” in elementary school. “Knowing that I gave that future to somebody is something that just doesn’t sit very well,” she says.
Daily Caller: Sierra Club: ‘Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license’– By Andrew Follett – Daily Caller – Energy and Environmental Reporter – There are entire environmental groups dedicated to the view that humans should stop having kids due to global warming and environmental issues. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, for example, claims that “voluntary human extinction is the humanitarian alternative to human disasters” and believes that humanity should commit species suicide rather than continue damaging the environment…Mainstream green groups, such as The Sierra Club, also hold a more limited version of the view that the freedom to have kids should be restricted to save the planet. “Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license … All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing” David Brower, the first executive director of The Sierra Club, stated in an interview.
Skeptics Mock: ‘Having less babies might cool the world. There are no kids in Antarctica, and there’s no warming there either. How many non-babies does it take to stop a flood in Bangladesh? Perhaps the IPCC has an App for that.’