Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t JoNova, Marc Morano – Climate philosopher Travis Rieder has been touring the country, trying to persuade university students not to have kids – and promoting ideas for restricting childbirth, including tax penalties against people who decide to have a child.
Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?
Standing before several dozen students in a college classroom, Travis Rieder tries to convince them not to have children. Or at least not too many.
He’s at James Madison University in southwest Virginia to talk about a “small-family ethic” — to question the assumptions of a society that sees having children as good, throws parties for expecting parents, and in which parents then pressure their kids to “give them grandchildren.”
Why question such assumptions? The prospect of climate catastrophe.
…
Rieder and his Georgetown collaborators have a proposal, and the first thing they stress is that it’s not like China’s abusive one-child policy. It aims to persuade people to choose fewer children with a strategy that boils down to carrots for the poor, sticks for the rich.
Ethically, Rieder says poor nations get some slack because they’re still developing, and because their per capita emissions are a sliver of the developed world’s. Plus, it just doesn’t look good for rich, Western nations to tell people in poor ones not to have kids. He suggests things like paying poor women to refill their birth control and — something that’s had proven success — widespread media campaigns.
In the 1970s and ’80s, a wave of educational soap operas in Latin America, Asia and Africa wove family planning into their plot lines. Some countries did this when they faced economic crisis. The shows are credited with actually changing people’s opinions about family size.
For the sticks part of the plan, Rieder proposes that richer nations do away with tax breaks for having children and actually penalize new parents. He says the penalty should be progressive, based on income, and could increase with each additional child.
Think of it like a carbon tax, on kids. He knows that sounds crazy.
…
Read more: http://www.npr.org/2016/08/18/479349760/should-we-be-having-kids-in-the-age-of-climate-change
There is no evidence the world faces a climate apocalypse. All such claims are based on broken climate models which have never demonstrated predictive skill.
But people who act on Rieder’s well meaning but in my opinion scientifically unsound advice may be opening themselves to a lifetime of misery.
The West is full of unhappy couples who waited too long to have a family, thanks to the financial and social pressures of modern life. An entire industry has arisen to try to help desperate couples have a child, many of whom need medical assistance because they are too old to conceive naturally. Adding to the financial and social pressures prospective parents face will exacerbate this tragedy.
When his prophesied doomsday passes uneventfully, Rieder may have the integrity to do what James Lovelock did, and apologise for being wrong. But by then, for most people who listened to and acted upon Rieder’s advice not to have children, it will be too late to undo the harm.
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Setting aside the whole inanity of AGW, the places where this do-gooder needs to do some much-needed work is in Africa and the Middle East. The fertility rate in most western nations, the US is an exception, is below replacement levels. Given the Ponzi schemes we call social welfare, we need a certain population of workers to support the takers. Hence the scramble for immigrants. Stupidly, we think any immigrant will do and find that we often import unemployable people who also end up on the dole, making us working stiffs into even greater tax slaves.
There’s nothing stupid about it. The left kept being thrown out of power in the West, so they decided to import a new people who would vote for them.
The Nazi’s had a population control plan too . They even got very specific however the world including most
Germans weren’t fond of it . Let’s tax university professor’s until they get real jobs .
http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2016/06/21/2016-04-10-family-ethicist-rieder-0029-edit_custom-1a10f9a95f1400982ae78ee8b5d9b5cf0ecf1ec5-s1600-c85.jpg
Travis and Sadiye Rieder read a book with their 2-year-old daughter, Sinem, in their Maryland home. Travis is a philosopher and ethicist who argues against having too many children, for moral and environmental reasons. His wife always wanted to have a big family.
I was hoping this guy’s genes would reach an evolutionary dead end. But apparently not. Population control is what the Greens have always wanted. It has always been their number one goal. Because the early predictions they made in books like “The Population Bomb” bombed, they’re not as outspoken about it as they used to be, but it’s still their goal. This “Climate Philosopher” Rieder tours the country to scare people with statements like this:
“4 degrees of warming would be ‘largely uninhabitable for humans. It’s gonna be post-apocalyptic movie time,’ he says.”
Has he ever thought about giving up his traveling to help save the planet? Couldn’t he do teleconferencing or send out a video? They probably wouldn’t pay him as much to do that, so travel it is. Here’s just one example of the harm his scaremongering tours have caused — a mother telling her children to never make her a grandmother:
At the New Hampshire meeting, 67-year-old Nancy Nolan tells two younger women that people didn’t know about climate change in the 1980s when she had her kids. Once her children were grown, “I said to them, ‘I hope you never have children,’ which is an awful thing to say,” Nolan says, her voice wavering. “It can bring me to tears easily.”
I have a very personal dislike for ‘population control’ authoritarians.
I am one of 13 siblings. And my parents have endured all kinds of horrific insults over the years by these ‘do-gooders’ who believe themselves to be the arbiters of all things ethical.
Who appoints the ‘ethicists?’
Why doesn’t Travis just follow up his beliefs to their logical conclusion and kill himself?
Another manifestation of anti-humanism, which has a long history among the Progressives. Who are the people most likely to listen to this nutter, and voluntarily follow his advice. Oops. Just like the Eugenicists pushing abortion, it’ll backfire on the class they don’t want to thin.
It is not publicized widely, and Climate philosopher Travis N. Rieder apperently have not heard about it yet, but population explosion was over 25 years ago.
Since then global population under 15 is stable, somewhat below 2 billion. So, birth control is the solution for a non issue, the real problem is increasing longevity. This is why world population still keeps increasing.
Therefore Travis N. Rieder should go for restricting health care &. public sanitation, while promoting a healthy dose of lethal contagious diseases. That’s what responsible Bioethics experts do, don’t they?
“Ethicist”: A professional who teeters on the thin line of acceptable truth in order to hold onto a position.
College costs are an existing tax on children. The “philosopher” seems not to know that in every developed country, the birth rate has fallen or is falling to below replacement levels. This is because not everyone finds children fun, they are in fact expensive, and some people feel they can’t afford them. Of course, never mind the facts.
Climate Philosopher is interchangeable with Climate Consultant (a lot of them out there), Climate Evangelist, Climate Psychologist, Climate Meta physicist, and Climate Science Adviser to the President.
These are the same sad old people who never got over the fact that Paul Erlich’s “Population Bomb” turned out to be completely and devastatingly wrong. They also do not admit that European, white populations across the world are in stasis, or declining. (check Germany’s fertility rate, for example)
What Rieder refuses to say is that the real problem he wants to solve is this: How do rich white people across the globe get rid of all the surplus brown and black babies which scare them so???
That is EXACTLY what he wants to do, no matter how many words he may mince about it.
Given the nonsense so many college students are trained to believe. Them having fewer children might not be such a bad idea.
Children are the future of any society. Any society that wants to restrict children HAS NO FUTURE. If Travis Rieder wants to restrict children, then he’s actively trying to get his society to commit suicide. I suggest that when it comes to suicide, he should begin with himself. He’s certainly of less value to society than any random child would be.
Apparenty Rieder has kids: http://grist.org/living/can-you-have-kids-and-still-be-a-good-person/
“Do as I say”?
Slate: “Indeed, according to experts’ best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop growing within the lifespan of people alive today.
And then it will fall.”
Birthrate is dropping even in previously high rate countries. Demographers are uncertain as to cause.
Maybe because we’re all gonna live for centuries? (Unless we die too soon.)