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Bill Nye: Should Parents Be Penalized For Having ‘Extra Kids?’

REUTERS/Chris Kleponis

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Chris White Tech Reporter
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Comedian Bill Nye suggested that saving the world from climate change might entail punishing people in developed countries for having too many children.

Nye asked one of the panelists on the Tuesday episode of his Netflix show “Bill Nye Saves The Earth” if it would be a good idea to have the government penalize having “extra kids.”

“Should we have policies that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?” Nye asked Travis Rieder, an academic for Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University.

“I do think we should at least consider it,” said Rieder, who believes that limiting the size of families is paramount to fighting global warming.

“Well, ‘at least consider it’ is like, ‘do it,’” Nye replied. Conservatives have had a field day lampooning the former children’s TV host over the content of his new show, which is directed toward adults with a layman’s understanding of scientific issues.

“Bill Nye Saves The World” purports to look at various problems through a more scientific perspective, according to the International Movie Database, but one of the show’s most recent episodes promoted transgenderism and other social science concepts.

“My Sex Junk,” which was published on YouTube, featured actress Rachel Bloom singing a song about how sexuality is a fluid concept. The song also laments a world in which there are only two gender identities: male or female.

Rieder and Nye’s fellow panelists appeared to push back against the academic’s suggestions. One said that Americans should be able to have as many or as few children as they pleased without fear from the government – it’s about human rights, she said.

Nye, who has a degree in engineering but no professional background as a science, has a history of making provocative comments directed at people he calls “climate denialists.”

“Was it appropriate to jail the guys from Enron?” Nye asked in a video interview with Climate Depot’s Marc Morano last April. “We’ll see what happens. Was it appropriate to jail people from the cigarette industry who insisted that this addictive product was not addictive, and so on?”

“In these cases, for me, as a taxpayer and voter, the introduction of this extreme doubt about climate change is affecting my quality of life as public citizens,” he said at the time. “So, I can see where people are very concerned about this, and they’re pursuing criminal investigations as well as engaging in discussions like this.”

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