Have You Hugged Your Personal Carbon Allowance Today?

If you can possibly still have any lingering doubts that environmentalism is one of the two focuses of evil in the modern world that isn't fundamentalist Islam, Mark Steyn has some tough medicine for you:

The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some eleven tonnes of CO² every year of their lives. In their turn, they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess...

In 2050, 95% of the extra population will be poor and the poorer you are, the less carbon you emit. By today's standards, a cull of Australians or Americans would be at least 60 times as productive as one of Bangladeshis... As Rachel Baird, who works on climate change for Christian Aid, says: "Often in the countries where the birth rate is highest, emissions are so low that they are not even measurable. Look at Burkina Faso." So why ask them to pay in unborn children for our profligacy..?

But how do you reduce population in countries where women's rights are already achieved and birth-control methods are freely available? Could children perhaps become part of an adult's personal carbon allowance? Could you offer rewards: have one child only and you may fly to Florida once a year?

After all, based on current emissions and life expectancy, one less British child would permit some thirty women in sub-Saharan Africa to have a baby and still leave the planet a cleaner place.

You know what's truly remarkable about this quote?  It didn't come from anybody in the Obama administration.  Though one very similar to it from one of Red Barry's "control-freak totalitarian" czars is only a matter of time.

I should probably make full disclosure here: I tend toward a visceral contempt for couples who pump out kids like I pump out turds for no discernable practical purpose.  Century before last I could understand it; in an agrarian society where everybody raises their own food, it makes economic sense to have a large family, as the more hands there are to till the fields or feed the chickens or milk the cows, the easier it is to get the work done.  It also was logical in the light of high infant mortality rates; if you and your spouse needed six kids, you had to have eight or nine to end up with that many living to adulthood.  And, really, in the absence of technology, entertainment options, etc., there wasn't a whole lot else to do in one's off time but churn the baby batter.

Don't get me (completely) wrong; my wife and I conceived three children of our own, the last of which was, um, stillborn.  One couple we know had two, close in age, and then "had an accident" fifteen years later and went ahead on a fourth oven bun on the grounds that they didn't want any of their kids to grow up as only children.  Not that they need my permission or approval, mind you, and I don't go around counseling people not to reproduce; it's just a pet peeve of mine.  But four is, in my view, the absolute maximum upper limit that still maintains some thin strand of connection with reasonableness.

Recently another couple of our acquaintance suffered a miscarriage - of their sixth child.  Wasn't too long ago I would make jokes about their rabbitesque breeding using that figure.  It's almost as if they caught telepathic wind of it and took it as a challenge.  I'm fully convinced that they're already working on #7 to replace #6 and will keep right on humping.

But pre-emptive genocide justified by pagan/Marxist carbon superstitions?  A blatant emulation of the totalitarian state whose one-child-per-family dictation hasn't done jack crap preventing them from polluting themselves into gagging, stinking, coughing, hacking poisotopia? (And which also has this little tic about trying to buy off a critical mass of their slave population with superficial Westernesque prosperity for fear that the peasants might otherwise rise up instead and go all Tianenman-Square-in-reverse on their asses.)  Does anybody know if Alex Renton is homosexual?  Such monstrous ideological grotesqueries against children and families almost requires that level of sheer rabid hatred.

What a hideous contrast with the Living God he and his demonic ilk detest most of all:

³Behold, children are a gift of the LORD, the fruit of the womb is a reward.  ⁴Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one's youth.  ⁵How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them; they will not be ashamed when they speak with their enemies in the gate.