For anyone who doubts the unhinged zealotry of climate change activists, NBC News Think now offers the most cruel, heartless suggestion from one activist that has likely ever been offered: having children is bad for Planet Earth.
This astonishingly inhumane perspective is offered by one Travis Rieder, Ph.D, the Assistant Director for Education Initiatives, Director of the Master of Bioethics degree program and Research Scholar at the Berman Institute of Bioethics.
Rieder has written approvingly about population control, and insisted in September 2016 that he liked “small humans in general,” as he admitted he was “pretty wild about my own kid.” Of course, having more than one child must be problematic for Rieder, who noted, “I, like many philosophers, believe that it’s morally better to make people happy than to make happy people. Those who exist already have needs and wants, and protecting and providing for them is motivated by respect for human life. It is not a harm to someone not to be created.”
Glad for him his mother didn’t feel the same way.
Back to the current rhetoric. Rieder writes approvingly:
Several years ago, scientists showed that having a child, especially for the world’s wealthy, is one of the worst things you can do for the environment. That data was recycled this past summer in a papershowing that none of the activities most likely to reduce individuals’ carbon footprints are widely discussed. The second, moral aspect of the view — that perhaps we ought to have fewer children — is also being taken seriously in many circles.
More: “I believe that the seriousness of climate change justifies uncomfortable conversations. In this case, that means that we need to stop pretending the decision to have children doesn’t have environmental and ethical consequences. The argument that having a child adds to one’s carbon footprint depends on the view that each of us has a personal carbon ledger for which we are responsible. Furthermore, some amount of an offspring’s emissions count towards the parents’ ledger.”
How far is Rieder is willing to go with his addled attack on having children? This far:
If I release a murderer from prison, knowing full well that he intends to kill innocent people, then I bear some responsibility for those deaths — even though the killer is also fully responsible. My having released him doesn’t make him less responsible (he did it!). But his doing it doesn’t eliminate my responsibility either. Something similar is true, I think, when it comes to having children.
From murdering children in the womb to ruining the innocence of children by sexualizing them at an early age to likening children who have been born to murderers, the Left consistently displays its utterly hedonistic and self-obsessed point of view.
Rieder encapsulates his argument against having children this way:
If you buy this view of responsibility, you might eventually admit that having many children is wrong, or at least morally suspect, for standard environmental reasons: Having a child imposes high emissions on the world, while the parents get the benefit. So like with any high-cost luxury, we should limit our indulgence.