Help Save the World…Get Rid of Humans
By John Stossel
In my first FBN show last week, I played part of this repulsively irresponsible video that opened the Copenhagen Conference:
The video could easily make an entirely different point: How relentless scare campaigns teach kids nonsense about what global warming would actually mean in their lifetimes.
That’s why it was refreshing to read Anne Applebaum’s column today:
There is no nihilism like the nihilism of a 9-year-old. “Why should I bother,” one of them recently demanded of me, when he was presented with the usual arguments in favor of doing homework: “By the time I’m grown up, the polar ice caps will have melted and everyone will have drowned.”
Watching the news from Copenhagen last weekend, it wasn’t hard to understand where he got that idea. Among the tens of thousands demonstrating outside the climate change summit, some were carrying giant clocks set at 10 minutes to midnight, indicating the imminent end of the world … Near the conference center, an installation of skeletons standing knee-deep in water made a similar point, as did numerous melting ice sculptures and a melodramatic “die-in” staged by protesters wearing white, ghost-like jumpsuits.
Applebaum and I don’t agree on what to do about climate change. She favors a carbon tax. While I think that would be better than cap & trade, it still hurts the poor to protect the planet from an unproven future. As Applebaum recognizes, cheap fossil fuels have been essential to creating the high standards of living that billions of human beings enjoy.
Of course, some climate alarmists would simply wish those billions of people away:
Look, for example, at the Optimum Population Trust, a mainstream organization whose patrons include the naturalist David Attenborough, the scientist Jane Goodall and professors at Cambridge and Stanford — and that campaigns against, well, human beings. Calling for “fewer emitters, lower emissions,” the group offers members the chance to offset the pollution that they generate, merely by existing, through the purchase of family-planning devices in poor countries. Click on its PopOffsets calculator to see what I mean: It reckons that every $7 spent on family planning generates one ton fewer carbon emissions. Since the average American generates 20.6 tons of carbon annually, it will cost $144.20 — $576.80 for a family of four — to buy enough condoms to prevent the births of, say, 0.4 Kenyans. The assumption behind this calculation is profoundly negative: that human beings are nothing more than machines for the production of carbon dioxide.
Related posts:
- Thatcher Adviser: Copenhagen’s Real Goal is a One World Government
- Top UN Climate Official Resigning
- ClimateGate Hoax Ignored by Obama and the Elite Media
- Al Gore Could Become World’s First Carbon Billionaire
- You’re About to Sign a Check For $100 Billion
