Bioethicist Wants to Tax Parenthood
Saving the planet is all the rage these days. Now, an Australian bioethicist wants to charge people a carbon tax for having children. The money would be used to plant trees as an offset to the global warming that the new children would allegedly cause. From the story:
Professor Walters, clinical associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia and the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, called for condoms and "greenhouse-friendly" services such as sterilisation procedures to earn carbon credits.And he implied the Federal Government should ditch the $4133 baby bonus and consider population controls like those in China and India.
Let's see: China and India have terrible problem with sex selection abortions and China also has an infanticide problem. Moreover, in other contexts we are told by many bioethicists that reproducing is a fundamental right by whatever means desired by whomever might wish to become parents.
Global warming has become a catchall for policies people would be pursuing anyway based on ideology. Or to put it another way: What a crock.
Labels: Population Control
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 4:17 PM
7 Comments
7 Comments:
HA! Let's ask this guy if he favors developing same-sex conception, I bet he does. I do think the carbon footprint required for same-sex conception and genetic engineering and genetic research in general is a very valid argument against allowing it, though there is no shortage of other arguments also.
John -
"HA! Let's ask this guy if he favors developing same-sex conception, I bet he does."
Well, why not? It's more PC than us breeders having kids the natural way, and anything we breeders do is wrong wrong wrong, because we're killing the planet, dontcha know?
Personally, I don't think the "carbon footprint" thing is a good argument against same-sex conception. As far as I can tell from my anthro and archeology classes back as an undergrad, the question of global warming is at best up in the air, and most likely is a natural phenomenon. All of *my* anthro profs talked about warm weather spikes (aka global warming) as being beneficial periods where more plants were growing and there was better food supply available for humans and animals, and I went to U of Houston, which is hardly a conservative university.
So I don't think it should be used as an argument against *any* kind of conception - personally, I think the other arguments you mention are way more convincing.
It seems to me last I heard, statistics suggested we were reaching our peak as a planet-wide population and we were expecting a decline in numbers shortly. Anybody know anything about that? I can't cite my source here so I'm up in the air.
Would you prefer a tax deduction for those of us without children? That would be fine with me.
Right church, wrong pew. There are sound reasons in terms of overpopulation, resource depletion, habitat and wildlife destruction, and pollution to limit the number of children couples can have worldwide. Global warming, on the other hand, is a questionable rationale.
The doctor does raise a good point: if other countries are taking steps to limit population, it is grossly hypocritical for Australia to pay couples for babies, or (for that matter) for the US to allow unlimited tax exemptions for children. Either the globe has too many people or it doesn't. I think the former is true. Too much evidence suggests there are too many people, and some scientists believe we are in excess of the sustainable limit by as much as a factor of 10. That is, instead of 6.7 billion people, preserving the planet would mean fewer than 1 billion.
The end of our way of life is on the horizon, and it has little to do with global warming. Look instead into the peak oil debate and think about where that might lead, since our agriculture and so much else are oil-dependent. The pending collapse of all that does not bode well for paying couples to spawn or for subsidizing parenthood indirectly as the US does.
If the doomsayers are even partially right, many of the babies born today to couples who will get a handsome payout from the government will starve to death as adults when the oil runs out and agriculture and civilization collapse. I hope I'm not around for the worst of it. We have the luxury of discussing this issue now, and I hope we can act on it constructively. After all, bioethics will not even be on the radar once the oil wells run dry.
Perhaps what we need is a good old fashioned worldwide war to help stem over population. Thermo nuclear ought to do the trick. I can think of a few heads of state that are probably thinking along those lines right now.....although for different reasons.
Mort -
Feeling a little dark today, I see...
Again, from what I've seen in general reading (meaning I can't quote my sources, which is making me batty), right now the majority of our problems involving oil stem from political/military confrontations, rather than the resources running dry, meaning we have a bit of time before we *have* to start implementing our back-up plans.
Which of course would mean industrial grade hemp in place of coal, natural gas, and oil, nuclear energy controlled by the government rather the way France's government controls their nuclear reactors, turning to diseal engins running on veg oil (as they were originally designed to), and cutting down on mass consumption in general. All of these are usable ideas that are being shelved because the oil companies want to make money and oil is better for their pockets than any of those alternative fuels.
As for the population itself, right now the US has a surplus of food and resources because of how we manage ourselves, and the rest of the world needs to get caught up. The problem with China, honestly, is that it's got lots of land mass, but not much of that mass is durable farmland. And since there are many more subsistance farmers there than in the US (*are* there any subsistance farmers in the US anymore? I think they're like 99% commercial these days), individual families need lots of cheap labor, and the easiest way to handle that is to have lots of kids to work very little land and most of it poor. That's why their numbers are straining their resources. So I think it's less of a matter of the resources themselves giving out under pressure and more that each individual country needs to realign itself so that the most use is gotten out of its land to benefit the most people, which, as much as people probably hate to hear it, means doing away with subsistance farming and getting these people commercially farming in a capitalistic setup, because so far it seems to be working here, in Australia, England, most of Europe...
Given the excess we have here in the US, there's a pretty good indication that things *could* be managed very well and that we could support the population we have now, if we could look beyond politics and really work at getting things set up, but so far it doesn't look like any of the people in charge are willing to stop playing "soldier boy" or "I toldja so" boy long enough to actually work on the problem. Bummer.
And I'm still pretty sure that I read that the population is leveling off and will start hitting a decrease soonish. I'm less worried about our numbers and more worried about how we're handling the resources we have. We could easily take care of our numbers if we paid attention to details.
The population increase is levelling off.
Some areas are already seeing a decrease, particularly Scandinavia, Russia, and Japan. The reasons for those are as much cultural as it economic.
But the nationalistic cultures tend to see population as a necessary component of their power and hence, a decline of that nation's population would be bad to them. As such, both Japan and Russia are trying to get people have more children. The United States would do the same if we were anywhere near a population decrease.
However, the net world population won't decrease for quite some time, and even not until the total population hits 9-10 billion or so.
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