Dave Bry is the author of Public Apology: In Which a Man Grapples With a Lifetime of Regret, One Incident at a Time.
I suspect he is going to have one more regret to add to his list: Writing a column in The Guardian asking if its immoral to have children… because “Climate Change.”
…For while the world is a wonderful place, one we humans have made nicer for ourselves with wonderful inventions like books and record players, penicillin and pizza, it’s also a really awful place, one we’ve ravaged with deforestation and smog, nuclear weapons and mountains of pizza delivery boxes and other garbage.The awfulness seems to be getting worse, especially now that climate change has sped up – sea level rise that was supposed to take centuries has recently been projected as taking just decades. This complicates the already difficult decision of whether to have a kid….Was I complicit in the damage? I remember every extra paper towel I’ve ever unspooled from the roll, and think about a tree falling in the Amazon, and then think about my son growing up in a gray, dying world – walking towards Kansas on potholed highways. Maybe while trying to protect his own son, like the father in The Road. Will he decide to have a kid? I have foisted upon him a decision even more difficult than my own. It’s all very depressing.
While I personally am not a member of the Environmental Justice Morality Police, I assert that it is immoral to base such a profoundly important decision on a lie. And the lies perpetrated by climate alarmists are perverse, indeed.
I contend that the depraved propagation of “environmental science” lies has already claimed the lives of millions of innocent people. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, made an eloquent but completely false case that DDT was endangering bird populations.
..In 1971, the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency responded by holding seven months of investigative hearings on the subject, gathering testimony from 125 witnesses. At the end of this process, Judge Edmund Sweeney issued his verdict: “The uses of DDT under the registration involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife. . . . DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man.” No matter. EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus (who would later go on to be a board member of the Draper Fund, a leading population-control group) chose to overrule Sweeney and ban the use of DDT in the United States. Subsequently, the U.S. Agency for International Development adopted regulations preventing it from funding international projects that used DDT. Together with similar decisions enacted in Europe, this effectively banned the use of DDT in many Third World countries. By some estimates, the malaria death toll in Africa alone resulting from these restrictions has exceeded 100 million people, with 3 million additional deaths added to the toll every year.
This politically-imposed ban that led to the death of so many innocents is 9th-level of hell immoral, whereas the use of a few extra sheets of paper towel might warrant a raised eyebrow.
I attest that forcing millions to live in poverty by imposing meaningless carbon-dioxide emission restrictions is also immoral. India is nowexperiencing an economic boom, with growth outpacing that of all other large nations at around 7.5%. In part, the success can be attributed to Prime Minister Modi, who rejected Obama climate-change-based regulatory temptations that would have limited his nation’s fuel options.
Bry concludes that he comes “down on the side of advocating reproduction.” That is a good thing.
And while the decision to have a family is deeply personal, I would also encourage Bry to be like India: Ignore the climate alarmists.
As American author Kate Douglas Wiggin notes:
“Every child born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever-fresh and radiant possibility.”
(Featured Image from Youtube).
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