OPINION:
Is the left re-embracing Malthusian population control to save the planet?
Of all the silly proposals put forward by Democratic presidential hopefuls at CNN’s town hall on climate change last week, the dumbest wasn’t to ban plastic straws, incandescent light bulbs or travel. by plane. It wasn’t the claim that climate change is the greatest threat since World War II. It wasn’t even the fanciful assumption that hurricanes are racist because they target “communities of color” more than white areas.
No, the dumbest (and most dangerous) idea was a revamp of the widely discredited authoritarian idea of the 1960s and 1970s – population control. A school teacher asked Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders if it would even be possible to fight global warming given that “the world’s population has doubled in the last 50 years”. Would the senator be “brave enough to discuss curbing population growth” as part of his climate plan.
Mr Sanders obediently blurted out “absolutely yes”, then launched into a discussion about a woman’s right to choose and better access to birth control.
Here we go again. In the 1960s, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich became the patron saint of the modern population control movement with his mega bestseller “The Population Bomb.” This book – which argued that the world was overpopulated by more than a billion people and that the only way to save the planet from environmental catastrophe was to force people to have fewer children – became the rallying cry of Stalinist measures of population control around the world.
This has led to tens of millions of forced abortions, involuntary sterilization programs, forced contraception and even murderous infanticide – all in the name of saving the planet.
China took the population control crusade to a whole new level when it instituted its notorious one-child policy. To date, tens of millions of women are demographically lacking in China. The homicidal environmental policy has been acclaimed by the United Nations and many of the same left-wing activists and organizations that preach “reproductive freedom” and women’s rights. Similarly, brutal population control programs have been implemented in Africa, India, Egypt and many South American countries. To save the planet, babies had to be avoided.
Fortunately, researchers like the late Julian Simon of the University of Illinois have proven that human beings are not depleting the world’s resources, but helping to discover and create them. More humans – especially when combined with freedom and free enterprise – leaves the planet materially and ecologically better off, not worse off.
Simon also showed that freedom and prosperity are the best forms of contraception. Population growth has happened because we have found ways to defeat early death – with infant mortality rates down 70% and 80% – and eradicate deadly diseases like smallpox and tuberculosis.
The Malthusians were not only immoral; they got their population projections wrong.
All those population forecasting models that only predicted standing places on the planet over the next 25 to 50 years were lies. In the 1970s, the left predicted a population today of more than 10 billion people. The number is closer to 7.5 billion.
These doomsday population models of the future were about as accurate as climate change models predicting catastrophic temperature changes have been.
What the population control mob didn’t see happening was that population growth has slowed drastically – and not because of government decrees. As people become richer and more free, couples have chosen to have fewer but healthier children. In most countries of the world today – including China – the tragedy is not too many children, but too few.
But deep down, radical greens really believe that the fundamental problem with the human race is that there are too many of us. People are pollution. Celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Prince Harry are urging people to have fewer or no children. Rep. Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez questioned earlier this year whether young women should feel ethically obligated not to have children in order to help prevent climate change. In the end, she rejected that idea of madness, but the very idea that liberals should ask the question shows how anti-human the left has become.
It is a fundamentally anti-Judeo-Christian ideology that disrespects human life and – as history proves all too well – can have vile consequences for basic human rights and economic progress. Human ingenuity is the solution. not the cause of. environmental issues and the ever-changing climate of our planet.
• Stephen Moore, columnist for the Washington Times, is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant at FreedomWorks.