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”.
How f’d up do you think his daughter will be, knowing what he really thinks of her existence?
Misanthropic, Malthusian with a hint of genocidal – all the wretched idiocy of of Paul R Ehrlich recycled.
For the truth of global population statistics on a brighter more pro-human note see Hans Rosling:
Hans Rosling fantastic videos. Thanks
If I wasn’t already too old to start a family, I’d make a bunch of kids just to be contrary – because that’s how human nature works. It did with Michelle Obama and her diet ideas, too.
This belief in a ‘finite planet’ and a requirement to limit human numbers was completely disproven in the 1970s by Julian Simon. See https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/
He pointed out that the key thing improving the human condition, and the non-human environment, is human ingenuity. This has enabled us to have an ever-increasing number of humans on a planet, while at the same time improving their living conditions, and improving the environment for all other living creatures.
You would think that this makes no sense. How can a ‘finite planet’ continuously expand to provide more for everybody? But Simon pointed out that it is the raw materials which are limited – resources are what humans can make from them, and human ingenuity enables an infinite number of things to be made. The Ancient Egyptians had a lot of silica in the form of sand – was this a resource they could make computer chips from? Not at that time, but nowadays it is. In this way the condition of everything on the planet improves. And, of course, at some point we will no longer be planet-bound….
I wonder why no one ever remembers Julian Simon nowadays? I assume that the environmentalists have been successful in suppressing all of his ideas…..
Here here! Echoed in Peter Diamandis’ book: “Abundance”.
One of my secular saints, along with Norman Borlaug.
Yes, Simon said that the problem with using GDP to measure things is that when a child is born, it lowers, but when a pig is born, it rises…
Here in the US where divorce was and is popularized, just how much of the GDP depends on divorce?
Recall the popular interpretation of the greatest GDP benefit: a rich old man hospitalized dying of cancer being divorced by his 3rd wife.
So the GDP in the US depends not on materials production but human consumption. The stock market seems to be controlled by wishful thinking abetted by algorthyms underlain by continuous war. The perfect inegma.
The question is who decides who is poor or rich. In the land of the blind One eye is king.
It is to be deeply regretted by all that Mr Travis Rieder’s parents failed to take his well intentioned advice.
“Scientists say……” is a BBC ‘starter’ for an item of invidious crap delivered by a leftist.
If you do what us denyers do and actually LOOK AT THE FACTS AND EVIDENCE, what you find about population growth as shown by Hans Rosling is simple and clear: it is GROWING ECONOMY that slows and stops population growth:
And what drives growth of economy? LOW PRICE FOSSIL FUEL ENERGY.
Stop sabotaging economic growth with global warming politics and energy rationing.
Then population growth will level off and with it energy use.
These enviro-na3is show their true colors more and more every time they open their mouths.
Those of you who intend your progeny to be Earth and land bound can level off your population. My children know the future of their large families is in space colonies and seasteads.
Good plan – I’ll send my mother-in-law to join them!
she will be responsible for her emissions. But …..
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the word “But” negates the previous sentence. he is saying his daughter will not be responsible.
in effect he is saying his daughter will remain a child without responsibility. rather the responsibility rest with the parent.
what about. God’s responsibility? he kicked us out of the Garden of Eden for tasting of the fruit of knowledge. or what about the serpent?
it isn’t like his daughter. has a lot of choice. she didn’t. make battery technology such a difficult nut to crack. nor did she create humans that are unable to survive without. technology due to our almost complete lack of fur or fang.
Actually, before kicking out, God asked Adman and Eve what happened, despite he knew very well. He certainly expected them to take responsibility, but instead Adam accused Eve, and Eve accused the serpent. Hopeless bunch.
And Now, Griff expect to be allowed in Eden again by accusing oil and coal companies, and the whole capitalist system that tempt him into useless stuff like computer, TV, doomsayer in newspaper. Same Hopeless bunch
There are always have been this kind of lunatics around
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathar_Perfect
The new thing is they are taken seriously by moronic medias like NBC, CNN, Grauniad…
how does the author know the child he didn’t have was not the one that would have solved global warming and saved the world?
for all the author knows, by not having that one child, he has condemned the planet.
Travis Rieder would be reviled and his ideas scorned, in any public discussion with sane, rational adults.
That he is given a paid speaking tour, should be a giant clue as to the real agenda of those who are promoting Rieder’s thoughts.
Utter and complete insanity.
Hmmm… the dinosaurs died out because they were too big for their environment, weren’t they? I mean, they didn’t build enormous buildings like we do. All that’s left of them is birds, you know. So is Rieder trying to tell us we’re dinosaurs? (I’m being facetious, y’know.)
Mr. Rieder wallows publicly in hatred of his own species. He gets paid to make these misanthropic speeches, but his hypocrisy (daughter) is obvious.
50 years ago, before the Age of the Internet and World Wide spiderWeb, this kind of thing would only appear in magazines or bookstores, occasionally in a newspaper, but now, it’s all over the place. The more you see of it, the more it seems to show a hatred of species, but to what end?
Mass murderers aren’t something new. The emperor Qin Shi Huang was the “builder” of China’s Great Wall. Anyone who died while working on it was buried in it. Mao Tse-Tung let 32 million Chinese people starve to death because he thought Lysenkoism was a wonderful idea. Stalin followed Lysenkoism first, resulting in the deaths of 20 million++ Russians and Ukrainians from starvation. Pol Pot engineered the destruction of Cambodia’s society by teaching children to murder their own parents – two million ++ of them.
Rieder’s vapid and very offensive attitude promotes mass murder. Let him rattle on. The more we see and hear, the further we can separate ourselves from that insanity. If these so-called progressives (they aren’t really) ant mass population deduction, they should volunteer for it first. Then we can see just how dedicated they are to that cause.
Insights into mass murder of history does not end there: the UN actually subsidizes mass murder. It works like this: a rebel opposed to the power group professes democratic beliefs, gets a river of funds and arms from the western world with the understanding that his government will be more’ western friendly,’ and after a million dead and another million displaced, the UN divides the country and/or installs yet another concentration camp across the border in a neighboring country which gets yet more western funding.
The ‘democratic’ government then divides the spoils among his supporters and gets a two-fold reward: a 20 year relaxing opposition-free reign due to depopulation and unlimited Green Card Visa for family and friends to the US.
I have been banned from posting nearly everywhere.
I’ve been declared a super fund site. I’ve got 5 kids. Sorry planet.
Bless you.
I just want to say that the productive, science-advancing people of the west are the ones who hear this message and may act on it, contributing the demographic disaster currently underway. “The Death of the West” by Pat Buchanan was prophecy. On the bright side, I don’t think the leftist who are most likely to act on this advice will be missed and it is becoming less likely they will be replaced on the voter roles with low-skill foreigners.
Ehi. Give a look at http://www.gapminder.org site. You can find an animation that shows that “expectancy of life” grows even if CO2 emission grows.
So, logically, if we stop reproducing eventually there will be no one to save the planet for. So we might just as well live it up and go out in a blaze of over the top lavish living that would make Caligula blush.
the idea is, if we stop reproducing eventually there will be no one to save the planet FROM.
Well, until some critter eventually find convenient to turn all oxygen back into CO2, inverse reaction of some other critter finding convenient to turn all CO2 into O2 and fossil fuel deposit long ago. Or some asteroid fancy to replay Chicxulub impact.
Twenty years ago I met a young woman a graduate of James Cook University who told me that she would never have children because “Humans are a plague on the planet and I won’t contribute to a plague.” Humans may be divided into two categories. Those who produce more than they consume; and those who consume more than they produce. The members of the latter category had better hope that the members of the former category continue to breed.
If she didn’t end her own life, preferably through the biggest killing of human she could, was it because she somehow wasn’t a plague, or wasn’t human?
Did she support massive weapon distribution to insane people? release of mass murderers ? poisoning of well with abortive (more effective that outright poison, since people dying would quickly stop drinking the water? massive abortion of girls (and of boys as well, but not so much important) ? destruction of all the precaution that now reduce pregnant women death toll from previous “good old” days ?
I bet she didn’t.
Just because something is bad for the environment doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
OR, just because a bunch of eco-fascists say its bad for the environment, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
I have to be somewhat of a contrarian on this issue. I think that preaching the grandeur of human population growth can lead to equally distorted views about human dominance and importance, no less dire than the view that humans are cancerous to the planet.
Frankly, I could stand more spatial consciousness in the design of cities, where fewer people lived, … where roads were wider to accommodate all functions — turn lanes and bike ways, for example, without one’s function ever being used for the other’s function (e.g., bike lane used for parking space).
I would appreciate a world where grocery-store isles were wider, shelves were less cluttered — organized so that your hands could reach to grab products without displacing other products because of how packed together retail shelves are, … where fewer people spent more time maintaining more neat space between fewer pieces of “stuff”, …. where major thinking tended towards clearances that allowed flow of movement, rather than how many objects could be crammed into a given space (because space is typically viewed ONLY as a container of “stuff”, rather than as an avenue of movement and flow).
Yeah, I see red flags, when people start proclaiming the grandeur of human numbers. But I also see red flags, when people think too much of themselves as destroyers. We are BOTH creators and destroyers, and there is a proportion of both these activities that makes the human presence on Earth a positive thing.
More behavior-based extinction mechanisms promoted by progressive greenies.
The re-directed self-loathing of these people has pretty much extended to the entire species.
It seems that this is a worldwide Propaganda!In germany they wrote the same(Im sure that i also read it some months ago).
Look here:
http://www.bento.de/gefuehle/kinderwunsch-warum-wir-der-umwelt-zuliebe-aufhoeren-sollten-kinder-zu-bekommen-1813533/#refsponi
Bento is a part of the most famous german Magazin DER SPIEGEL-Bento is for young people…
Problem with this is that even if you succeed in killing all humans nothing would stop mother nature from continuing her own atrocities. Mother nature has caused unimaginable amount of destruction with mass extinctions, ice ages, asteroid impacts and other crimes. Not to mention the cruel and immoral world of animal kingdom. To achieve total world peace we would need to destroy entire planet, but even that wouldn’t be enough because of the likelyhood of other Earth-like planets in the universe. We would have to find a way to destroy the entire universe. That would be the only way to bring true peace and justice in the universe. It will not be easy, but we must do it. It is the moral thing to do.
So much for “saving the planet” for the children…..