Man vs. Nature: the Inhuman Agenda Behind the Fight Against “Climate Change”

At Inside Catholic, Joe Hargrave writes on the Malthusian assumptions underpinning current efforts to curb carbon emissions blamed for causing "climate change":

... One year ago, a study conducted by Oregon State University concluded that "having one less child" would be the best way for a family in the United States to reduce their impact on the environment, even more so than all of the energy-efficient cars and appliances that they could use in a lifetime. But it is the researchers at the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) at the London School of Economics who consistently make strident arguments for population reduction as the most effective way of combating global warming.

Their decision to look directly at how contraception would affect carbon emissions should be unnerving enough for Catholics: For every $6.63 spent on birth control, it would cost $31.48 to reduce carbon emissions with low-carbon technology by the same amount, in their estimation. But it is the shift in language that we ought to find more disconcerting. To quote the chairman of the OPT: "It's always been obvious that total emissions depend on the number of emitters as well as their individual emissions." Is this how we are to be seen by those who have arrogated to themselves the task of rescuing the planet? As "emitters"?

Those who think that the very question is alarmist would do well to consider the praise some of our Western intellectuals offer the Chinese population-control regime, which includes regimented family size as well as forced abortions and sterilizations. At the Copenhagen summit last year, Chinese officials proclaimed that, due to such policies, "China has seen 400 million fewer births, which has resulted in 18 million fewer tons of CO2 emissions a year." Of course, the majority of those prevented births were not caused by forced abortion; rather, they are largely attributable to the fact that the Chinese government has promoted contraception to the point that "85 percent of the Chinese women in reproductive age use contraceptives, the highest rate in the world."

Around the same time, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman expressed his admiration for the Chinese authoritarian regime, lauding it as "a reasonably enlightened group of people" that can, without any checks or balances, impose whatever policies it sees fit "to move a society forward in the 21st century." While this did not directly praise China's population-control measures, a column in the Financial Post by Diane Francis caused quite a controversy for doing exactly that. In the midst of her alarmist screed forecasting the immanent doom of the planet if governments did not take sharp measures to reduce the population, she identified the main obstacle to this goal: "Leaders of the world's big fundamentalist religions preach in favor of procreation and fiercely oppose birth control."

Used in this pejorative sense, there is of course nothing "fundamentalist" about the largest religious organization on the planet that also happens to preach these unpopular ideas with the most resolve: the Catholic Church. But there is something quite fundamental about the Church's teaching on the sanctity of human life and the true purpose of sexuality. In Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II wrote that, "to defend and promote life, to show reverence and love for it, is a task which God entrusts to every man, calling him as his living image to share in his own lordship over the world" (42). In bringing new life into the world, men and women take part in "a certain special participation" of spouses in the "creative work of God" (43)...

[Read the whole thing]

(Hat tip: The American Catholic)


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Obama Culture of Death Update™: President's "Science Czar" Supports Forced Population Control Measures [UPDATED]

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