CANCUN, Mexico, December 6, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Media billionaire Ted Turner called on world leaders Sunday to institute an international one-child policy akin to that being enforced in China.

The CNN founder said that under this scheme the world’s poor could sell their fertility rights and thereby profit from avoiding procreation, reports the Globe and Mail.

Radical solutions are needed, he said, because of the environmental crisis facing the planet. “If we’re going to be here [as a species] 5,000 years from now, we’re not going to do it with seven billion people,” he explained.

China’s coercive approach to implementing their policy includes forced abortion, imprisonment, and fines many times greater than a family’s annual income. The policy has faced strong criticism from human rights organizations, such as the pro-abortion Amnesty International.

Turner, however, who is renowned in pro-life circles for using his massive wealth to promote abortion and population control, raised eyebrows last year when he claimed that China does not use “draconian steps” in enforcing the policy.

When the interviewer pointed out that in enforcing the policy China has “done more than encourage on several occasions,” the media mogul admitted he was “not intimately familiar with everything.” He nevertheless did not retract the comments.

Turner was a featured speaker this past weekend at the World Climate Summit in Cancun, a conference for business leaders staged during the UN’s Climate Change Conference in the same city to ‘accelerate solutions to climate change.’

He made the comments during a luncheon on Sunday where economist Brian O’Neill of the U.S.’s National Center for Atmospheric Research presented his new study on the impact of demographic trends on greenhouse gas emissions.

O’Neill argued that promoting access to “family planning” could be a major boon to those seeking to reduce greenhouse emissions. O’Neill, however, advocated voluntary approaches.

Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, said today that instead of China’s coercive brand of population control, Turner instead “wants to pursue a less populated world by bribing women into giving up their fertility.”

“There is ... something despicable about offering a poor, hungry woman food, money, or clothing in exchange for her surrendering her fertility,” said Mosher, who has studied China’s one-child policy for over three decades.

Yet while Turner has not advocated coercion, Mosher explained that the population policy he is promoting will inevitably lead that way. Population control programs are all voluntary “until someone refuses to submit to the knife, at which time the pretense of ‘voluntarism’ is abandoned, threats start being made, and forced sterilizations follow,” he said.