I&I Editorial

The global warming true believers are convinced of their moral superiority. In their minds, they’re just better people. But better people don’t advocate thinning of the human population. The alarmists do.

A group of “more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world” has declared “clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” and recommends leaving fossil fuels “in the ground,” replaced by low-carbon renewable energy sources.

Nothing new there. Crackpots have been predicting the end of the world for probably as long as man has existed.

This group, though, also believes that because the global population is “still increasing by roughly 80 million people per year, or more than 200,000 per day,” it “must be stabilized — and, ideally, gradually reduced — within a framework that ensures social integrity.”

By what authority do these scientists believe they have the right to reduce the number of humans? And through what mechanism do they propose to use to reach their goal?

Henry I. Miller, a physician, molecular biologist, and Pacific Research Institute senior fellow, as well as a contributing editor on these pages, says “the scientists’ assumption of a ‘climate emergency’ requiring policymakers imminently to introduce not only radical changes to energy, food, and economic policies but also population control, verges on the hysterical.”

Others have already crossed that line.

The urge to control human reproduction is more common than one might think. Wikipedia’s page for “population concern organizations” lists 12 groups just in the U.S., and another 11 around the world, with one network of academic researchers called Population Europe. These groups, and our 11,000 or so scientists, seem to have a common bond with the nasty people throughout history who have wanted to improve the genetic quality of humanity by selecting out less-desirable groups. In modern America, those groups might be the “deplorables” and “deniers” among us.

Don’t think it couldn’t happen here? In our not-so-long-ago past, the 20th century, in fact, “roughly 70,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized” in the U.S., says Chelsea Follett, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute. It was done under the authority of “‘eugenic’ legislation,” and the horrors were justified as a means “to improve the population by preventing people thought to have inferior genes from having children.”

This makes us wonder: Who would the 11,000 scientists target for population control? Their manifesto tells us they “stand ready to assist decision-makers in a just transition to a sustainable and equitable future.” Do they already have a gene pool in mind that they wish to pare down?

Columbia University professor Matthew Connelly compiled a history of the population control movement that became “Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population.” Published in 2008, it is the story, says the author, “of how some people have tried to control others without having to answer to anyone.”

“They could be ruthless and manipulative in ways that were, and are, shocking,” Connelly wrote.

One striking example of the heartlessness behind population control comes from Garrett Hardin, an ecologist who supported sterilization. In 1968, he wrote an essay in which he declared “the freedom to breed is intolerable.” Decades later, he held out China’s population-control policy as something the U.S. might be able to learn from.

“There is no talk in China of a woman’s ‘right’ to reproduce or of married couples’ ‘right to privacy,'” he wrote. The coercion used in that country to slow population growth — when “a woman who gets pregnant without permission is pressured by her sisters to have an abortion,” for example — “should be compared to forcing a Westerner to pick up the litter he or she has dropped on the ground in a public park.”

Readers can draw their own conclusions as to whether or not he saw humans as no more than garbage dumped on the planet.

Naturally the 11,000 will deny that their methods will be “ruthless and manipulative,” and at the same time swear their motives pure. But population control has been historically sought out of “kindness,” says climate justice activist Simon Butler, who reviewed Connelly’s book. Its traffickers insist it’s “a benevolent measure that can lift people out of poverty, hunger and underdevelopment.”

But as H.L. Mencken famously said, “the urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.” And we know that is exactly what drives the global warming alarmists.

— Written by J. Frank Bullitt

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