Fewer people means fewer emissions!

On CNN, there’s been a serious discussion of implementing a worldwide one-child policy, and Jack Cafferty is obviously sympathetic.

CNN’s Jack Cafferty all but endorsed a global version of China’s oppressive one-child policy on Friday’s Situation Room. He repeated the argument of Canadian journalist Diane Francis, that population control is the only way to fight global warming, and mentioned the opposition of “fundamentalist leaders” and others only in passing. All but one of the viewer e-mails that Cafferty read endorsed the idea.

If you believe that controlling human emissions will save the planet, it’s a no-brainer that the fewer humans there are, the fewer emissions. So, actually reducing the number of humans would from a purely utilitarian standpoint be the most practical final solution to the problem. As Cafferty notes, the China’s one-child policy makes it a “world leader in creating policy to combat the destruction of the environment”:

The Chinese instituted a policy limiting the number of children each family can have thirty years ago, and they claim that since that time, they have prevented 400 million births and saved carbon emissions to the tune of 18 million tons a year.

As we all know, today’s scientists are more concerned with political advocacy than hard science. So why haven’t they come up with an overwhelming scientific consensus that the one-child policy must be implemented immediately?
Instead, we only hear from CNN and their listeners, some of whom are quite articulate:

Sean in Belvidere, Illinois: ‘Morally, there are better ways of fighting global warming than infanticide. But sadly, this method makes more sense than carbon credits.’
Jay writes, ‘Absolutely. Every year, we have deer hunting season, with the argument that if we don’t control the deer population, they’ll over-breed and starve to death. Why can’t these ‘John and Kate’ and ‘Octomom’ people see that the same biological mathematics applies to humans? On a planet of finite resources, you cannot just keep producing an ever-growing pool of consumers and still expect the whole thing will work.’

I have to say, I never really thought about it this way, but I’m wondering whether a little historical revisionism might be in order. We tend to think of Mao, Stalin and Hitler as the greatest mass murderers of all time, but has anyone bothered to calculate out how many tons of emissions they prevented? Sure, mistakes were made, but might these farsighted men have actually been pioneers acting in the long term interests of the planet?
I’m no post-Modernist historian, but I’m thinking the topic — whether Mao, Stalin, and Hitler weren’t ahead of their time — might be worthy of a doctoral thesis. Moreover, I think that they might be a source of inspiration for youth, especially future leaders in need of role models.
So I came up with an image to inspire them.

Teach your children!