I kid you not.
The piece, despicably titled “Having Large Families ‘is an Eco-crime,'” unbelievably began:
HAVING large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags, says a report to be published today by a green think tank.
Amazed? That was only the beginning (emphasis added throughout):
The paper by the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) will say that if couples had two children instead of three they could cut their family’s carbon dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between London and New York.
John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London, said: “The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. An extra child is the equivalent of a lot of flights across the planet.
“The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child.”
Forgive me, but this is an extremely irresponsible suggestion for reasons the Times piece diplomatically addressed:
The world’s population is expected to increase by 2.5 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050. Almost all the population growth will take place in developing countries. The population of developed nations is expected to remain unchanged and would have declined but for migration.
The British fertility rate is 1.7. The EU average is 1.5. In some countries, such as France, the government is so concerned it has introduced financial incentives for women to have more than two children.
Despite this, Guillebaud says rich countries should be the most concerned about family size as their children have higher per capita carbon dioxide emissions.
Let me be less diplomatic: this proposal totally ignores the financial realities of countries like Britain, France, Japan, and many others that are facing economic crises if their populations don’t start expanding soon.
To be more specific, as most of these countries have massive entitlement programs, they’re facing huge budget shortfalls in the very near future if the number of citizens paying into the system doesn’t begin to dramatically increase. This is why countries like France have been giving tax incentives for couples to have more children.
As such, if this global warming derangement changes people's reproductive plans, the financial problems of these countries will become a storm surge significantly more devastating than anything soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore hyped in his schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”
