Posted on 07/17/2017 9:03:21 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Would you like to lose ten pounds of ugly fat? Great! Off with your head.
This old chestnut came to mind as I was perusing the now-infamous new study from Lund Universitys child-averse climate scientists, advising people to save the planet by giving up their cars, avoiding air travel, becoming vegetarians, and having fewer kids. The study got rave reviews from the Guardian and Jill Filipovic, perhaps because the last item is really the primary thing. It turns out that hamburgers and SUVs are smallish indulgences next to that gurgling bundle of CO2-emitting joy.
The studys authors, Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas, compare parenthood with several environmentally unfriendly actions (such as driving, eating meat, and using inefficient appliances), ultimately concluding that childbearing does far more damage to the planet than all the other actions they measured. Actually, its worse than all the rest combined. Parents, how do you live with yourselves?
I have no scientific credentials of any kind. Nevertheless, I can discern through armchair reflection alone, that these scholars are quite wrong. Infertility is not the best way to reduce your carbon footprint. If you really care about the earth, drink the hemlock.
If that assessment seems harsh, read the write-up for yourself. The methodology alone shows why these authors dont deserve the benefit of the doubt. Claiming that they want to consider the maximum possible effect of our lifestyle choices, Wynes and Nicholas calculate a years worth of emissions for most of their evaluated actions. How much CO2 could you save by not driving for a year? How much by eating vegetarian for a year? And so forth.
Parenthood, of course, isnt the sort of thing you can step into and out of on a per annum basis. Thats the excuse for blaming parents for the projected carbon emissions of their childs entire life, and then adding still more to that total based on projected grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Theyre leaning on this cool concept that another team of climatologists dreamed up, called a carbon legacy. Each parent gets credited (or demerited) with half of every childs projected lifetime emissions, a quarter of each projected grandchilds projected emissions, and so forth down the generations. The cumulative total becomes your legacy, which is how we end up at the conclusion that childbearing is orders of magnitude worse than gas-guzzling, air travel, or the consumption of animal flesh.
Parents, on this evaluation, are worse offenders by far than the childless businessman who flies all over the country, sampling steakhouses and taking joyrides in private helicopters. The Lund study is not just a bleg about inefficient family cars or disposable diapers. Its about visiting the emissions of the children on the fathers, ultimately convicting parents of the crime of perpetuating human civilization.
Comparing a years worth of road trips and beef jerky to the anticipated carbon output of your descendants in perpetuity is just silly on its face. That doesnt even resemble an apples-to-apples comparison. Now, lets engage in a little more armchair reflection. Quite recently, our friends on the left were beside themselves over the Paris accords and the Rights refusal to get serious about climate change. We heard about echo chambers, false prophets, and the infamous conservative fact-aversion. Is there a chance that studies like this play some role in widespread skepticism about scientific claims? Perhaps what we have on our hands is a crisis of scientific authority.
Liberals love personal narratives that begin with bad Sunday-school experiences and the rejection of religious authority. That story can be told another way, however.
Think about it like this. Liberals love personal narratives that begin with bad Sunday-school experiences and the rejection of religious authority. That story can be told another way, however.
My own personal memories may be representative. As a kid in science class I was bombarded with Malthusian lifeboat scenarios. I recall one project that required us to generate creative solutions for fitting 8 gazillion people into a square mile. We sat drawing pictures of people standing in pyramid formations, passing shrink-wrapped meals up from conveyor belts, while our science teacher thundered on about how this was not science fiction, people, this was math. We heard endless dirges about the dying rainforest, and when I take my kids to science museums today I feel like Ive walked into a time warp, because the appeals dont seem to have changed a bit. Climate change (née global warming) already has a pretty lengthy string of bloopers to its name. Believe it or not, this stuff wears away at the credibility of the scientific community, at least among those who dont already view the white lab coat as a quasi-sacerdotal garment.
Maybe theres a good explanation for the undying-rainforest crisis. Maybe carbon emissions really are pushing us into a climate crisis. And maybe you have an immortal soul that will suffer eternal torment unless you repent, but its hard to convince people of that when youve already torched your credibility by stamping obvious absurdities with the authoritative seal. People mistrust politicized science for reasons that any principled empiricist ought to respect: Personal experience suggests to them that its unreliable.
The Lund study is very obviously politicized science. Wynes and Nicholas want schools and other state institutions to modify their textbooks and lesson plans, spending less time on lower-impact actions (such as recycling and changing light bulbs) and instead pushing the more dramatic changes that have much greater potential to affect carbon output. Wisely noting that adolescents poised to establish lifelong patterns are an important target group for environmentalists, Wynes and Nicholas want schools to attack the real problem: children having children, or planning to have them at some future time
The discussion reads like the brainlessly logical musings of a sci-fi robot. Mr. Data, what lifestyle adjustments might help to reduce our carbon footprints?
Sir, long-term projections indicate that reduced fertility could reduce CO2-equivalent emissions by approximately 58.6 tons per child, per year.
Thats the point where a real human is supposed to step forward and explain that human children are not properly classified as lifestyle adjustments. Most likely no one in the authors own milieu will do that, though, because climate scientists are used to this sort of thing: the weirdly gerrymandered parameters, the childlike faith in awareness-raising, and the shared presumption that religious traditionalists must be violating some ethical principle with their unseemly fecundity. (If Malthus didnt pan out, perhaps Mann will.) Thats why they wont bat an eyelash at a study that throws perpetuating the human race onto a laundry list of lifestyle choices, along with diet, transportation, and methods of waste disposal.
Do you really want my attention, climate scientists? Commission a study on the climate impact of a liberal-environmentalist suicide pact. Then well talk. If you really want to reduce your footprint, its worth recalling that conservation begins at home.
Rachel Lu is a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.
Sell this idea to the muslims, and maybe it might be ok.
Given the declining birth rates of many of the most civilized countries, these fools are actually calling for national suicide.
RE: these fools are actually calling for national suicide.
Ahhh... but at least they’ve saved the planet !! /s
Sub-Saharan Africa is a sink hole where billions of dollars are dumped with no visible return on investment. Feed them and they breed more of the same.
Europe is just now feeling the tip of the spear. Imagine a billion gibs-me-dats by the end of the century heading for Europe and America.
Europe's future 'son-in-laws"......
They are enemies of human existence. Everything else is just pretext.
All one has to do is watch “Idiocracy “ will see that the wrong people are breeding.
The following is quoted from the Liberty Fund Library "A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation," edited by Thomas Mackay (1849 - 1912), Chapter 1, final paragraphs from Edward Stanley Robertson's essay, "The Impracticability of Socialism":Note the writer's emphasis that the "scheme of Socialism" requires what he calls "the power of restraining the increase in population"--long the essential and primary focus of the Democrat Party in the U. S.:
"I have suggested that the scheme of Socialism is wholly incomplete unless it includes a power of restraining the increase of population, which power is so unwelcome to Englishmen that the very mention of it seems to require an apology. I have showed that in France, where restraints on multiplication have been adopted into the popular code of morals, there is discontent on the one hand at the slow rate of increase, while on the other, there is still a 'proletariat,' and Socialism is still a power in politics.With "Progressive regressive cultists," isn't this the choice we must make--a path to tyranny or a possible path back to freedom in America?
I.44
"I have put the question, how Socialism would treat the residuum of the working class and of all classesthe class, not specially vicious, nor even necessarily idle, but below the average in power of will and in steadiness of purpose. I have intimated that such persons, if they belong to the upper or middle classes, are kept straight by the fear of falling out of class, and in the working class by positive fear of want. But since Socialism purposes to eliminate the fear of want, and since under Socialism the hierarchy of classes will either not exist at all or be wholly transformed, there remains for such persons no motive at all except physical coercion. Are we to imprison or flog all the 'ne'er-do-wells'?
I.45
"I began this paper by pointing out that there are inequalities and anomalies in the material world, some of which, like the obliquity of the ecliptic and the consequent inequality of the day's length, cannot be redressed at all. Others, like the caprices of sunshine and rainfall in different climates, can be mitigated, but must on the whole be endured. I am very far from asserting that the inequalities and anomalies of human society are strictly parallel with those of material nature. I fully admit that we are under an obligation to control nature so far as we can. But I think I have shown that the Socialist scheme cannot be relied upon to control nature, because it refuses to obey her. Socialism attempts to vanquish nature by a front attack. Individualism, on the contrary, is the recognition, in social politics, that nature has a beneficent as well as a malignant side. . . .
I.46
"Freedom is the most valuable of all human possessions, next after life itself. It is more valuable, in a manner, than even health. No human agency can secure health; but good laws, justly administered, can and do secure freedom. Freedom, indeed, is almost the only thing that law can secure. Law cannot secure equality, nor can it secure prosperity. In the direction of equality, all that law can do is to secure fair play, which is equality of rights but is not equality of conditions. In the direction of prosperity, all that law can do is to keep the road open. That is the Quintessence of Individualism, and it may fairly challenge comparison with that Quintessence of Socialism we have been discussing. Socialism, disguise it how we may, is the negation of Freedom. That it is so, and that it is also a scheme not capable of producing even material comfort in exchange for the abnegations of Freedom, I think the foregoing considerations amply prove." EDWARD STANLEY ROBERTSON
When the role of the "Creator" and the ongoing "hand of Divine Providence" and "Supreme Judge of the world," as understood by America's Founders and Framers of its Constitution, is diminished and eliminated by those foolish cultists, what will America have left?
To save the planet, make the muzzies have one child per 1000 families. The planet will become noticeably safer and kinder in about 15 years.
The problem occurs when you PAY people to breed who have no way to raise them on their own, i.e., what Democrats do for votes.
In many African nations aunts and uncles are called 'Brothers and Sisters'...Cousins as well....so the language barrier will allow many more in who are not remotely close relatives....Muslims can have up to four wives....they too will come but because of Europes laws they call them 'sisters'.....Muslim women do not work outside the home so the 'other' wives will all be on the welfare roles....as they are now.
Lining up for food and shelter in Africa.....
To this....in Europe and the US....
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