At least Bernie Sanders is an equal-opportunity misanthrope. He doesn’t like rich people, and it turns out he doesn’t necessarily like poor people, either.
At the CNN town hall on climate change, a questioner asked the socialist senator if he’d be “courageous” enough to endorse population control to save the planet.
Sanders answered “yes,” and then after referring to abortion rights, endorsed curtailing population growth, “especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies.”
He’s looking at you, sub-Saharan Africa.
The Sanders riff is the latest instance of a rising anti-natalism on the Left, which has gone from arguing that carbon emissions are a problem to arguing that human beings are a problem. They release carbon emissions, don’t they? QED.
When a proposition has the support of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who questions the morality of having children, and Bill Nye, the science guy, who has discussed punishing people for having children, it’s on the way to universal assent among a certain segment of soi-disant thoughtful progressives.
A headline in The New York Times even asked, “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?” Thus proving that, whatever our other virtues, we are at times the most ridiculous and self-loathing species.
Undergirding the anti-natalist position is the belief that we are facing a global catastrophe, such that additional babies will tip the planet into being uninhabitable for everyone.
This goes beyond the best evidence and discounts the human capacity for adaptation that is one of our chief attributes.
The view that human beings are an unsustainable drain on limited resources goes back to the 18th-century thinker Thomas Malthus and, more recently, the Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich. In his 1968 book “The Population Bomb,” Ehrlich thunderously pronounced, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.”
In the end, we figured out how to make agriculture more efficient and have been feeding people just fine (when not prevented from doing so by wars and other man-made calamities).
Nonetheless, Ehrlich hasn’t stopped predicting the explosion of his population bomb ever since, telling The Guardian recently that the collapse of civilization is “a near certainty.”
In his original work, Ehrlich put an emphasis on overly fertile Third-World countries, just as Bernie Sanders did the other night.
But if consumption and carbon emissions are the concern, it’s rich people in developed countries who are the bigger problem and should be dealt with accordingly (a task for which Sanders is dismayingly well-suited).
What are we to make of an agenda that seeks to diminish the number of human beings overall and to make those who enjoy material prosperity less wealthy?
Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute notes how rising incomes — considered an unalloyed good by anyone who experiences them — invariably increase energy consumption.
Insofar as a sweeping anti-development anti-consumption program like the Green New Deal is “diametrically opposed to the aspirations of nearly all individuals,” he writes, it is “anti-human.”
At a more fundamental level, the anti-natalists have a gross materialistic view of humanity. For them, we are a series of inputs and outputs, and if one particular output is considered undesirable (in this case, carbon emissions), it reduces the value of human beings altogether.
No one who isn’t a cracked ideological extremist or perversely blinkered economist actually looks at people this way. It doesn’t account for relationships or for joy, for the wondrous distinctiveness of every person, no matter how poor or humble.
People aren’t a burden, they are a resource and a gift. Any movement that regards them any other way is profoundly misguided and deeply anti-humane.
Build windmills if you must, but don’t try to scare people out of having children, or much worse, facilitate abortions, in your zeal to shave some fraction of a degree off the global temperature 80 years from now.
Read more at NY Post
150,000 abortionist per day and the eco anarchists demand more .
Whats next mass sterilization , maybe slip something in the water ?
Why Africa Bernie ?
Blacks didn’t leave the Democrat Party the Democrats left them . In fact the truth is the Democrats have done SFA for blacks but assumed they automatically were Democrats .
Wrong . Very Wrong as the Democrats are about to find out .
When the Democrat Party was taken over by eco-anarchist Greens they kissed at least 15% of their base good bye . In addition , Labor union executives that support a party out to openly destroy workers jobs are not doing their jobs .
The Worshipers of the Earth Mother must have their sacrifice of Virgins and Children and the skeptics who refuse to worship at the Church of Gaia
I’ll be long gone by the time AOC and her cohorts are getting old but if nobody is making babies who does she think will be there to provide for her old age. Doesn’t matter how much “retirement money” she may think she will have but if there aren’t people to earn income to keep the economy going she’ll be Sh* Out Of Luck.
It was about eight years ago – a group was researching birth rates in India. They stumbled over something they didn’t expect. Birth rates dropped in areas that had color TV. It took some interviewing to make the connection. The women were getting to see, in living color, just how their sisters in the cities were living, and noted there were few children shown. Fewer children, more money, a better life – that was the thinking…..
Bernie has admirers. So does Charles Manson and Che Guevara. Bernie creeps me out. It’s so obvious to me. Is it a generation gap thing? All Bernie offers is revenge against the successful, same as Charlie.
Don’t promote anarchy without a viable replacement for what we have now.
Some how people like AOC seem to do OK . One step ahead of being revealed
and an eye for a personal ATM or plumb assignment .
If CNN still exists in 11 years I see a future there for her or maybe on a diesel spewing yacht in Monte Carlo .
She will be just fine .
If the leftist greens think that humans are their imaginary climate problem, why don’t they lead by example?
The mother ship is waiting for them.
Sanders is a typical Socialists and Globalists and probibly belongs to the sinister CFR or some other group of those who serve the Devil