health + fitness news: 26.11.09
POSTED 26.11.2009 @ 13:29
The key to cutting greenhouse gas emissions is birth control according to a UN commissioned report that suggests a reduced population could be more effective in easing the effects of emissions on the environment than the construction of wind turbines or nuclear power stations.
The UN Population Fund report indicates that by taking measure to avoid the birth of one billion new babies by 2050, the effects would be equivalent to the construction of two million one-megawatt wind turbines.
"No human is genuinely carbon neutral," the report states. "Therefore, everyone is part of the problem so everyone must be part of the solution in some way."
The report has earned the ire of some social commentators, with an article in the Wall Street Journal dismissing the claims as a "somewhat totalitarian formulation" and saying that its rationale ignores the possibility that one of those "prevented" lives might have been the way to cure cancer or HIV.
"One could equally make the argument that car makers should dispense with seat-belts—the better to rid the world of drivers of carbon-emitting automobiles—or that children should be encouraged to smoke from a young age, the better to shorten the years in which they too might emit untold quantities of greenhouse gas," the Wall Street Journal article states.
"Smoke, Die and Save the Planet—now
there's a credo for the folks in the anti-population lobby."