Children Environmentally Unsound
Jul 30th, 2008 by Kirsten
This highlights a question I have had for a long time now:
Doctors: Third babies are the same as patio heaters
Writing in the British Medical Journal, John Guillebaud (emeritus professor of of family planning at UCL) and Pip Hayes (a GP) raise the spectre of global population explosion, and suggest that the children of the developed world are a particularly severe carbon burden.
The Optimum Population Trust calculates that “each new UK birth will be responsible for 160 times more greenhouse gas emissions . . . than a new birth in Ethiopia.” Should UK doctors break a deafening silence here? “Population” and “family planning” seem taboo words … isn’t contraception the medical profession’s prime contribution for all countries?Unplanned pregnancy, especially in teenagers, is a problem for the planet, as well as the individual concerned. But what about planned pregnancies? Should we now explain to UK couples who plan a family that stopping at two children, or at least having one less child than first intended, is the simplest and biggest contribution anyone can make to leaving a habitable planet for our grandchildren? We must not put pressure on people, but by providing information on the population and the environment, and appropriate contraception for everyone (and by their own example), doctors should help to bring family size into the arena of environmental ethics, analogous to avoiding patio heaters and high carbon cars.
So as someone who is not having children, why should I hear any flack or lecturing or moral superiority bullshit about my choice to drive one reasonably efficient SUV (~24-25 mpg) with low emissions from anyone who has had children, especially more than one or two?
Because the primitivists at the heart of the “environmental” movement won’t be satisfied until 95% of world population dies off and the remainder live in yurts?
Just a thought…
We get YURTS?!? Wow, they’re more generous than I thought. I’ve always believed that we wouldn’t be allowed to build homes of any kind, seeing as most homes require the destruction of pristine natural resources. I picture the survivors living in caves… natural, not blasted, obviously…