In Australia this week, professor of obstetrics Barry Walters has called on his country’s Parliament to tax every couple with more than two children to offset the children’s carbon emissions. “Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society,” Walters says, and “far from showering financial booty on new mothers and rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behavior, a ‘baby levy’ in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the ‘polluter pays’ principle.” The polluter being made to pay in this instance is the parent, and so, at least implicitly, the pollution is the child. Lovely.
This should come as no surprise. Throughout the 20th century, every fashionable leftwing cause seemed somehow to conclude in a call for population control. The early environmentalist movement was no exception: its proponents called unabashedly for a decrease in the human population to protect the earth’s resources. In his popular 1968 book Population Bomb, the biologist Paul Ehrlich put the matter bluntly:
The first task is population control at home. How do we go about it? Many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size.
In our era of aging societies and below-replacement fertility in the West, you would think this notion of radical population control would be another of those 20th century ideas we might discard. But as it turns out, the latest fashionable cause—the fight against global climate change—concludes for some in just the same bright idea as did the popular causes of the last century. One widely-read recent book, charmingly entitled A World Without Us, dares to dream of ridding the earth of the human infestation. “How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap on it and our fellow organisms?” the author asks, wistfully.
The stupidity of the anti-humanist remedy for global warming is not an argument against the existence of the problem. Like poverty, disease, resource depletion and the other problems the left has tried to solve through population control, the problem itself does call for attention. But humanity is not the problem, and fewer human beings would not be a solution. Like those other problems, concerns about the environment would be best addressed by the energy and ingenuity of free societies. And such free societies in turn would be best served by economic freedom and cultural vitality—both of which would be well served by larger, not smaller, families.
