In a desperate ploy for attention to their newish, clickbaity opinion section, THINK (check out the “hot take” rubric on its description of the GOP tax plan as a “dumpster fire”), NBC News has turned to a reliable source of outrage with a column by Travis Reider titled, “Science proves kids are bad for Earth. Morality suggests we stop having them.”
Oh good. This one again. Reider must realize that everyone from NPR to Wired to the Independent to Paul Ehrlich to the racist eugenics movement has already left their carbon footprints all over this topic. Really: People have been making this argument since Thomas Malthus floated it 200 years ago.
(A brief aside: Do you know why Malthus proposed that people were a burden to the environment who consumed too many resources and caused calamity? Because he was an employee of the British East India Company and was attempting to justify the colonial oppression by which England economically exploited India while trying to starve the natives. See, they were doing it for the good of the planet/society!)
Claiming children have a detrimental effect on the planet is not “Science!” It’s not even debatable, really. The macro effects of technology and labor economics are so powerful that even as the number of humans on the planet has increased over the last century, scarcity has decreased significantly, due to human ingenuity. The results are so obvious that even the New York Times now admits how overblown population bomb arguments have been historically.
So whenever you read some new “scientific” claim about how awful new inhabitants are for Mother Earth, consider how foolish these warnings often turn out to be. While Paul Ehrlich was wringing his hands and predicting worldwide starvation, Norman Borlaug was well on his way toward a Nobel Peace Prize for developing high-yield wheat that eliminated starvation as a resource problem. While physicists like Simon Newcomb pooh-poohed airplanes—“Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.”—the Wright Brothers were hard at work at Kitty Hawk.
And climate scientists aren’t just short-sighted—they’re also blind to the network effects across other disciplines.
For instance, when you combine increased longevity with fewer humans contributing to the social safety net, you’ve got a ticking time bomb in terms of health care and retirement for the elderly. Just look at Japan.
And the economic upheaval caused by that grim calculus creates all manner of social upheaval. The Japanese are trying to build robots to get out of the demographic bind they’ve created for themselves by not having children. European countries have responded to the same situation with large-scale immigration from North Africa. These immigrants have not always been welcomed or assimilated perfectly and have created other problems, not least of which is a sense of cultural dislocation so acute that it has given rise to the rebirth of aggressive nationalism on the continent. This weekend’s 60,000-man march in Poland calling for a “White Europe”? That’s a reaction to falling birthrates, too.
And let’s just suppose, for a moment, that the right-thinking readers of Time and Vox.com decide to stop having children for the good of the planet. They’re not going to stop everyone from reproducing; at the end of the day, the fecund will eventually inherit the earth. As of right now, that would mean that the world’s population would become increasingly illiberal and patriarchal. Which is another consequence of falling birthrates in the West.
The earth is going to continue to spin on its axis, with, or without, Travis Reider and his extreme environmentalism. It’s always funny when progressives who make such a show of their devotion to “Science!” fail to understand how Darwinism works.
