Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Breitbart – Climate Philosopher and parent Travis Rieder is back, demanding that other people refrain from having children for the sake of the planet.
Science proves kids are bad for Earth. Morality suggests we stop having them.
We need to stop pretending kids don’t have environmental and ethical consequences.
by Travis Rieder / Nov.15.2017 / 7:17 PM ET
A startling and honestly distressing view is beginning to receive serious consideration in both academic and popular discussions of climate change ethics. According to this view, having a child is a major contributor to climate change. The logical takeaway here is that everyone on Earth ought to consider having fewer children.
Although culturally controversial, the scientific half of this position is fairly well-established. Several years ago, scientists showed that having a child, especially for the world’s wealthy, is one of the worst things you can do for the environment. That data was recycled this past summer in a paper showing that none of the activities most likely to reduce individuals’ carbon footprints are widely discussed.
The second, moral aspect of the view — that perhaps we ought to have fewer children — is also being taken seriously in many circles. Indeed, I have written widely on the topic myself.
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Consider a different case: If I release a murderer from prison, knowing full well that he intends to kill innocent people, then I bear some responsibility for those deaths — even though the killer is also fully responsible. My having released him doesn’t make him less responsible (he did it!). But his doing it doesn’t eliminate my responsibility either.
Something similar is true, I think, when it comes to having children: Once my daughter is an autonomous agent, she will be responsible for her emissions. But that doesn’t negate my responsibility. Moral responsibility simply isn’t mathematical.
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I am certainly not arguing that we should shame parents, or even that we’re obligated to have a certain number of children. As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t think there is a tidy answer to the challenging questions of procreative ethics. But that does not mean we’re off the moral hook. As we face the very real prospect of catastrophic climate change, difficult — even uncomfortable — conversations are important. Yes, we should discuss the ethics of making babies with care and respect; but we should discuss it.
Travis Rieder travels the USA lecturing at universities, trying to convince students not to have children for the sake of the planet. Rieder frequently speaks of his own daughter in the context of the moral dilemma of having children.
I believe Rieder when he claims he opposes the shaming of parents, but some of the people he preaches to might not be so restrained. If Rieder convinces enough students that parents are destroying the planet, if the small minority of students who are unhinged violent activists get excited about this issue, this anti-child philosophical ugliness could end with far worse than “shaming”.
Humans are in the process of creating an Earthly paradise. Here is Freeman Dyson’s take on it.
The objective evidence is that humans are good for the environment when they are prosperous enough that they don’t have to rape it just to stay alive. What’s good for humans is good for nature. Ergo, fossil fuels are good for nature.
If he really wants to reduce population growth, the easiest way is to allow cheap energy to flood the third world. Sparking economic development and raising people’s standard of living.
Yep. Birth rates are more influenced by economic factors than by anything else. link
Who pays for this guys plane tickets?
UN carbon credits?
Needs rephrasing-
Climate Philosopher and parent Travis Rieder has some of the worse advice or views any human beings should possibly support.
Spending billions/trillions on a non problem that can be spent on more worthy projects … is one of the worst things you can do for the environment.
A startling and honestly distressing view is beginning to receive serious consideration in both academic and popular discussions of climate change ethics
Nothing new here; it has been the animus of enviro ideologues since the Club of Rome garbage.
I do not want to reduce energy consumption as it impoverishes the poor.
I do not want to further impoverish the poor to save the planet.
I do not want to save the planet, it is not under threat.
Rieder is a classic example of Gang Green.
Funny how antisocial our socialist comrades are.
From the beginning the CAGW scheme has had strong overtones of Eugenics Reborn, this fool is most happy to preach his humourless stupidity. However too spineless to practice what he preach.
His daughter has my deepest sympathy, perhaps she can use his public raving to obtain a restraining order.
When will he snap and attempt to rectify his “mistake” in permitting her conception and birth?
Of course before I get too grim on this waste of skin, perhaps what is on display here is basic modern Liberalism, a most progressive disease, a major symptom being the ability to believe 6 impossible concepts at any one time.
I agree. Progressives should be banned from pro-creating.
I have a strong suspicion that Mr Rieder is a dipstick, traveling under pretences of being a self-propagating human.
Population control isn’t new or usually controversial but there is something that must have gone over my head, why is the birth control only for rich?
If you look at the demographics, action on population control can’t avoid being both racially and ethnically targeted. White, European-sourced peoples have negative growth rates.
Like CO2 : national volumes of the developed, European and American worlds are stable to dropping. China is the global problem, and India to come.
The environmentalists and global warming alarmists cannot avoid becoming anti-non-white and anti-non-European-sourced. They are in their facts already. Some must already recognize their dilemma. Only those “in denial” can speak at COP23 on co2 and population growth as things requiring universal effort. One-third of the world has already done its bit. The inconvenient one-third.
I can’t imagine, though, the liberal progressives speaking clearly as to who has to do what. It would make them look like the antihuman, collective, authoritarian elite savages they like to portray skeptical conservatives are. I expect the subject to change to the need to affect an equitable redistribition of the “limited” consumption capacity of the world.
Wait a minute …. isn’t that the socio-economic dream of hardcore Marxists and World Government by the Elites?
Two points:
1) When has it ever been a great time to have children (as least by this measure) ?
2) Who takes advice from people whose own parents were morally corrupted enough to have children ?
without 72 virgins as a prize, he won’t get many takers…
And what do you do with 72 virgins, if you aren’t allow to …. well… you know….. have children !!
Spend your time “talking” with them.. ????
I’m cringing at the very thought !!!!
Seems the “lower realms” could exist after all.
being as how these virgins have 72 distinct pronouns, i don’t think reproduction is even possible.
This is an extremely good idea. I’d even go as far as approving the use of my tax dollars to fund it.
Tbink about it, tbose dimwitted enough to believe this, and foolish enough not to check the validity of these claims, would be dissuaded from breeding. What’s not to like?
There is a point to this article.
When you have 90-100 million more each year you are looking at potential problems.
It is a real shame that the first thing you see in refugee camps is kids.
If you can’t feed one why have others?
Because we can feed our own???
Third World Shit-holes that refuse to embrace the Free Market have starving children…
But why do you think you see kids? Partly it is us because the media love showing them to grab your attention and sympathy and partly because their fathers are fighting in whatever needless conflict has created the refugees.
Using his own logic shouldn’t he consider murdering his own daughter?
As a teacher, it’s not uncommon to have young people in my classes who possess a negative self-evaluation. Their idea being that “the world” would be better off with out them; a forlorn misconception taught by their personal history (a rough ride?) that they are bringing nothing to the trade. You know, life? Me and you, all of us together? The “doom” narrative from the “Environmental Industrial Complex, INC.” is diabolical. The media feeds kids a constant harangue to “do” something, usually stupid, to control things they have no control over.
What’s immoral is for women in 3rd-World countries with per capita incomes of $1~3/day to have 4~8 children, when they can’t even feed 1 child…
This immorality is perpetuated and worsened from the largess of industrialized countries that have sent $trillions to 3rd-World countries over the decades, which simply empowered 3rd-world tyrant dictators to hold power, and allowed people in abject poverty to have far too many children…
There are roughly 100 countries with fertility rates below 2.1, which is the minimum rate required to sustain population growth… The US fertility rate is currently 1.8. In Japan, where I live, it’s just 1.4…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate
I’ll never be able to understand Leftist “logic”…
Well, there is always the time travel thought experiment where Herr Rieder could go back in time and kill his own progenitors, thereby negating his own existance. One zealot less in current spacetime. Good for the planet? Ennh, zealots can be rehabilitated.
I have 6 kids and proud of it. My father had 11 kids, and he was proud of it. We’re all contributing members of society, the world is better off for our existence, not worse off. If you only fixate on the negative impacts of our existence, of course you end up with an incorrect conclusion.
“trying to convince students not to have children for the sake of the planet” Quite frankly I think it is better for society if these addled brained young people do not have any children. They would have made sure their children learned what a burden they are to the earth and they would just end up being miserable.
It’s happening: Republicans’ fertile future / Through the past three decades, conservatives have been procreating more than liberals.
Don’t worry, these young addle-brains can’t afford to have them anyway. They’re too busy sitting in Starbucks in their skinny jeans bitching into their laptops about how no one will pay them what they’re worth.
They’re being paid, right? So, what’s the complaint? One’s monetary worth is what one gets paid. Reality sets this price, NOT fantasy bolstered by bitching.
Philosophical worth is established by philosophical commitments, like doing things the best you can out of principle, or being on time, or being consistent at what you do, caring about how you do what you do, having integrity, pride, dedication to tasks, getting things done right, just because there is a sense of moral/ethical/aesthetic worth that PRECEDES the monetary worth that eventually comes to reward it.
Eventually somebody notices habits based on the practice of philosophical worth, and they will want to pay money for these values PRACTICED already as a standard of who the person is, what their signature is, the type of mark, impression, air that this person consistently leaves.
People who complain about wanting to be somewhere else different than where they are, or who complain about NOT being paid what they are worth often times have no clue what I just spoke of. Their births are a waste of resources and a burden on others who understand such basic principles.
Harsh, you say? Well, I said it. If I offend, then try to look beyond this one post, and tune into others that I might write that resonate better with you.
Humans are part of the planet. The planet created us and our impacts are a result of our existence. We don’t destroy the environment, we are part of it.
Just like the first photosynthetic organisms that created real climate change billions of years ago by filling the atmosphere with oxygen. They weren’t “bad”, in fact they created the ability for life as we know it.
So humans have come about through no fault of anyone. Though our existence and impact will determine what exists in this planet in another billion years after we are long gone.
David P. Goldman published “How Civilisations Die” in 2011. He pointed out that Europe, Russia, Japan & the Muslim world are facing demographic collapse. This is most obvious in the case of Europe, with its rapidly ageing population & a birth rate below replacement level. However, birth rates are declining even faster in the middle eastern Muslim world. The present-day “youth bulge” in the Muslim countries will be temporary (it’s the result of the high birth rates of a *previous* generation, after all), & by 2050 the population of the Islamic world will start to shrink. By 2100, Europe & its Muslim adversaries will both be near extinction.
Geopolitical demography rules! Muslim countries that achieve a high rate of adult literacy jump from infancy to senescence without passing through adulthood. Like their Iranian, Algerian and Tunisian counterparts, Turkish women reject the constraints of Muslim family life as soon as they obtain a high school education. The shock of sudden passage from traditional society into the modern world has produced the fastest-ever fall in fertility rates in the Muslim world.
Iran, whose fertility rate fell from 7 children per female in 1979 to less than 1.8 today, has the fastest-aging population of any country in the world. Turkey has an average total fertility rate of 2.18, or just at replacement, but the split between ethnic Turks and ethnic Kurds will make Turkey’s present geographic configuration untenable.
The Kurds’ courage and military prowess leave Turkey in a quandary. Any effective action against ISIS enhances the Kurds’ political standing and advances the day when they will have their own state including the northwest of Iraq and the southeast of Turkey, as well as the southwest corner of Iran and a large swath of northern Syria. But Turkey cannot abandon the NATO alliance, which stands as a guarantor of its territorial integrity. It has no choice but to play both sides, playing the public role of an alliance member while covertly sabotaging the effort to destroy ISIS.
Spengler at Asia Times
Notice that none of those people advocate for a complete stop to military intervention on the single basis of saving the planet from the military own carbon footprint. Worse, the entire US trillion dollar military industry is geared to confiscate resources, minerals, oil, gas from Eurasia and now Africa while the green agitprop peddles restricting ordinary citizens’ lifestyle.
“Once my daughter is an autonomous agent, she will be responsible for her emissions. But that doesn’t negate my responsibility.”
I feel really sorry for his daughter when she realizes that daddy didn’t really think he should have had a child. Should do wonders for family relationships and her self esteem but then she clearly doesn’t count as he is too busy pontificating to the rest of us peasants.
Thanks eric for this article. Progressives in the U.S. and Germany in the 20s and 30s believed, among other things, that only the fittest should be permitted to have children. Just like Travier, these people were convinced that eugenics was a moral imperative backed by consensus ‘science’. They worked tirelessly to bring about state enforced sterilization programs for those they deemed ‘unfit’. Travier belongs in the trash bin of history along with all the born-again fascists of today.
Don’t forget Svante Arrhenius
“He was the first scientist to describe the greenhouse effect, and is believed to have coined the term, predicting that rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) would cause the earth’s temperature to rise. His equation showing the effect of temperature on reaction rates is still called the Arrhenius Law. He was also a proponent of “racial biology”, part of the then-accepted science of eugenics.”
Source
“Arrhenius involved himself in the eugenics movement by joining the Swedish Society for Racial Hygiene, a group focused on researching and promoting the benefits of controlled reproduction in humans (Broberg & Roll-Hansen, 2005). This society was formed in 1909 in an attempt to popularize eugenics and encourage policy changes to promote eugenics (Bjorkman & Widmalm, 2010). Arrhenius was not only a member; he was on the board for the society (Broberg & Roll-Hansen, 2005). The society gave lectures and handed out pro-eugenic pamphlets to the public,”
Source