National Public Radio (NPR) featured an academic philosopher Thursday who says morality requires Americans to stop having kids, because they will only cause more global warming.
“Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them,” NPR Travis Rieder, a philosopher at Johns Hopkins University, told NPR. “The situation is bleak, it’s just dark … Population engineering, maybe it’s an extreme move. But it gives us a chance.”
Rieder said America produces a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) per person, and the world’s poorest nations will be most affected by global warming. He suggests rich nations should stop having children to remedy this. Reducing the current birth rate to 0.5 kids per woman could be the “thing that saves us,” he said.
He does, however, acknowledge that slowing population growth would only achieve 20 to 25 percent of the cuts necessary to meet President Barack Obama’s global warming goals.”Richer nations [should] do away with tax breaks for having children and actually penalize new parents,” reports NPR, summarizing Rieder’s
“Richer nations [should] do away with tax breaks for having children and actually penalize new parents,” reports NPR, summarizing Rieder’s argument. “The penalty should be progressive, based on income, and could increase with each additional child.”
Rieder even dashed his own wife’s dream for a large family by only having one child.
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.
