Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Hating kids to save them

How come the same kind of people who constantly tell us we should do things "for the children" always seem to want there to be fewer and fewer children?

When I was in college, it was Paul Ehrlich and his fraudulent bestseller The Population Bomb.

Now some bunch of Brits called the Optimum Population Trust says couples in "rich" nations shouldn't be having more than two children each because -- horrors! -- a child puts as much carbon dioxide into the air each year as 620 transatlantic flights, and that's really really bad for the left's new fixation du jour, global warming.

Earth to OPT: you want less carbon dioxide? Cancel your next 620 flights to the US. Stay home and watch your own once-noble nation vanish, if that's what you want. We sure don't need you here.

And just in case you OPT folks don't recognize the effect of a fertility rate of 2 children per couple or less, here it is, from later in the article:

The population of developed nations is expected to remain unchanged and would have declined but for migration. [emphasis added]

An average fertility rate of 2.1 children per couple is generally acknowledged to be "replacement rate", below which a population will begin to shrink. For the mathematically-challenged at OPT, an average of 2.1 means that some couples have to have more than two kids, since some couples have zero.

The whole thing reminds me of an incident from the Vietnam war which yielded a phrase that was frequently used as a bludgeon by the left back then. When questioned by the press about the tactics used to defeat the Viet Cong in a particular battle, a general said "We had to destroy the village to save it."

Now the left has adopted the tactics it once said it abhorred. It's destroying kids (or better yet from their point of view, causing them not to exist in the first place) in order to save them from global warming.