From the Oregonian:
Some people who are serious about wanting to reduce their “carbon footprint” on the Earth have one choice available to them that may yield a large long-term benefit – have one less child.
And why should we have fewer children?
The average long-term carbon impact of a child born in the U.S. – along with all of its descendants – is more than 160 times the impact of a child born in Bangladesh.
“In discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of an individual over his or her lifetime,” said Paul Murtaugh, an OSU professor of statistics. “Those are important issues and it’s essential that they should be considered. But an added challenge facing us is continuing population growth and increasing global consumption of resources.”
In this debate, very little attention has been given to the overwhelming importance of reproductive choice, Murtaugh said. When an individual produces a child – and that child potentially produces more descendants in the future – the effect on the environment can be many times the impact produced by a person during their lifetime.
Under current conditions in the U.S., for instance, each child ultimately adds about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average parent – about 5.7 times the lifetime emissions for which, on average, a person is responsible.
Moving past the junk science-fueled notion of the “carbon footprint” and the discredited population-growth and resource-scarcity fearmongering of the likes of Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich, Western birth rates are already falling precipitously — the U.S. replacement rate is barely at break-even. Having fewer children is tantamount to cultural suicide. Just who would we be saving the planet and its resources for?
Click here for study author Paul Murtaugh’s bio.
Simple solution:
Have your kid in Bangladesh.
Problem solved. Now light some candles and turn on the Al Green. It’s baby making time!
Yeah, I had to post this idiocy too–assclowns of the week.
Is it that Murtaugh’s too young to think there are those of us who remember Erlich’s 1968 Multhusian mess?
Oh yeah, we were supposed to have been eaten by wandering bands of cannibals by now.
The innuendo appears to be that we already have too many kids, and that the world would be better off if we each just got rid of one of our kids. Are we to go back to the sacrificing of our firstborn to appease Ba’al of the Green?
We were going to stop at 3 kids. Now I may have 4 just to spite these nut jobs…
Hey, I have a thought! Let him have one less kid. In fact, if he has none at all, maybe we will all be safer for it. In fact, maybe we can do away with him!!
The perfect gift for Professor Murtagh?
http://www.cafepress.com/rightwingstuff.120452674
Oh and a couple of other things:
Whenever somebody, generally a green wienie, brings up “externalities” my first thought is that its shorthand for “Who can we blame/sue/demonize?”
And, why is the Jet Propulsion Lab paying for this flapdoodle?
I don’t know Murtagh from Adam, yet his personal web site is illuminating in it’s way. There’s some moral superiority on display, like the blinking “Microsoft-free zone” – that’s positively precious – and symptoms of Bush Derangement Syndrome. But that’s no surprise! He’s a baby boomer college professor!