Reproductive choices and global warming
By Norman Leahy | Monday, July 11th, 2011 | PolicyVia Ronald Bailey at Reason comes word of a paper from Oregon State University on “Reproduction and the carbon legacy of individuals.” It’s a rather…chilling…little study. Snip:
Clearly, the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle. For example, a woman in the United States who adopted the six non-reproductive changes in Table 3 would save about 486 tons of CO2 emissions during her lifetime, but, if she were to have two children, this would eventually add nearly 40 times that amount of CO2 (18,882 t) to the earth’s atmosphere.
In other words, you can drive an electric car, replace your incandescent bulbs with CFLs, recycle your newspapers and even buy an energy star refrigerator and it still won’t come close to doing as much carbon good as having one less child.
By what means you choose to avoid creating that child are left unsaid. But the implication is that having none is best, birthing one is tolerable, producing two is too much and daring to breed three or more would rank you alongside BP in the pantheon of climate criminals.
(Cross-posted to Score Radio Network)
Tags:
Contribute for Conservatism!
Share this post
About the author
Norm Leahy has written about Virginia and national politics online since 2002, beginning with One Man's Trash (OMT), and continuing through Bacon's Rebellion (both the blog and the e-zine), Sic Semper Tyrannis, NBC12's Decision Virginia, Richmond.com and Tertium Quids. He is the chief blogger at "The Score" and a producer of "The Score" radio show as well as being a Washington Examiner contributor.
We're 75% there! Thank you to everyone who has so far contributed! Just $2000 to go!
Comments
5 Responses to "Reproductive choices and global warming"
With logic like that, wouldn’t nearly 54 million abortions since 1973 imply that we should be freezing our asses off?
Ward,
Even with all of those abortions, the population of the United States, and the world in general, continues to expand. So your sarcastic point does not measure up.
Most Republicans personally use some type of birth control in the personal relationships. If they did not, they would have about as many children filing into the church pew with them as my own devoutly pro-life parents did (they had 11 kids along with 2 miscarriages towards the end after my mother’s womb wore out). To most pro-life extremists, most forms of birth control are just abortion at an earlier stage because it may or may not take affect after conception. They also oppose the distribution of condoms even though if properly used, condoms will prevent conception from occurring.
I’m going to double post to tie in to a Monty Python skit since Brian Kirwin made such appropriate with a previous article.
Some pro-life extremists (according to Monty Python) think:
“Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.”
Ooops, triple post. I credited Brian K for the introduction of Monty Python to the conversation and it should have been Shaun Kenney. My apologies to anyone offended if any offense was taken.
Little David, sometimes a snark is just a snark. And sometimes it’s an absurd comment tossed out to point out another absurd premise.
Leave your response