A college student is terrified of having kids because they might contribute to or be harmed by global warming, according to a letter she wrote to the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer Tuesday.
“Carbon dioxide levels have reached 400 parts per million in Antarctica, which had been the last place on Earth to remain under that historic threshold,” Helena Bader, a student at Oberlin College, wrote in her letter to the Philadelphia paper. “News like this keeps me up at night and makes me wonder whether I should have children.”
Bader appears to have a long history in Oberlin’s environmental movement. She is listed as the chief contact person for drafting the college’s sustainable food policy in 2014 and wrote an opinion piece in the college’s paper calling for ecological “food justice.”
Bader claims that “it’s not normal for people like me to be scared about the future of the planet” and therefore “[w]e need to tackle climate change and greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels now so that my children won’t worry about the fate of the world when they are 21.”
There are entire environmental groups dedicated to the view that humans should stop having kids due to global warming and environmental issues. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, for example, claims that “voluntary human extinction is the humanitarian alternative to human disasters” and believes that humanity should commit species suicide rather than continue damaging the environment.
Mainstream green groups, such as The Sierra Club, also hold the view that the freedom to have kids should be restricted to save the planet. “Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license … All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing” David Brower, the first executive director of The Sierra Club, stated in an interview.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who advised both Pope Francis and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, claims that the maximum number of people Earth can support is a mere 1 billion people. As of 2016, there are more than 7.3 billion humans on Earth, making the question of which 6.3 billion people are supposed to die a fairly important one.
The dire predictions of greens have consistently failed to materialize as the number of people living in poverty has significantly declined and the amount of food per person has steadily increased, despite population growth. The quality of life of the average person has also immeasurably improved.
The public has become more skeptical of environmentalists who claim that ecological issues will doom humanity. A 2014 Gallup poll found that 42 percent of Americans say the seriousness of global warming is “generally exaggerated” by the media, compared to 33 percent who say it’s “generally underestimated.” The percentage of Americans who are concerned about environmental threats is declining as the threats fail to materialize. Polling indicates that most Americans agree with the goals of the environmental movement, but don’t see environmental issues as urgent problems.’
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