Save Greta

By Brendan O'Neill
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/09/24/save-greta/
24 September 2019


(Associated Press)

Any adult who cheered Greta Thunberg’s speech to the UN yesterday should be ashamed of themselves. Her emotional rant was a deeply disturbing spectacle. It revealed a young woman, a girl, in essence, who is in the grip of terror, of a morbid, debilitating belief that life as we know it is coming to an end. You could not have asked for firmer proof that the green ideology is seriously screwing up the next generation by pumping them with fear and panic and a deranged belief that the end of the world is nigh. It isn’t the planet that needs saving – it’s Greta. She needs to be saved from the death cult of eco-alarmism.

It was a truly sad sight. Greta, 16, spoke through tears. And her tears were understandable given she believes life on Earth is being suffocated and murdered by greedy, marauding mankind. She berated the gathered heads of state. ‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood… People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?’ With each nightmarish word, with each unhinged dystopian prediction of doom, her voice wobbled and her emotions span out of control. It was a public meltdown. And of course the politicians applauded it – perversely, they love nothing more than being told how awful they are by a petrified, disorientated girl.

Who did this to Greta? Who turned a bright and curious 16-year-old schoolgirl into a prophet of horror, into a young woman who admits to feeling terror and who believes the Earth is on fire? Adults did. The green-infused educational, political and cultural elites did. The people who have been feeding kids a narrative of eco-fear for years did this. Their secular Armageddonism, their wilful exaggeration of every problem mankind faces, their marshalling of the politics of fear to try to force people to change their allegedly wicked, eco-harmful behaviour – all of this has convinced many young people that the future is dark, mankind is doomed, and there is no point even going to school, far less planning one’s life, because we will all be dead soon. They did this to Greta, and to others, and it is unforgivable.

The extent to which adults have indoctrinated kids with eco-nihilistic fear was made clear in the words of the UN general-secretary Antonio Guterres. Opening the UN Climate Action Summit yesterday, at which Greta made her frazzled, tragic speech, he said: ‘Nature is angry.’ What is this superstition? It is positively pre-modern. This anthropomorphising of nature is central to the eco-alarmist outlook. It presents everything from forest fires to floods as punishment for humankind’s sins, as nature’s payback to the pox that is humanity and our ‘fairytales of eternal economic growth’, as Greta describes it. In Biblical times, freak weather and plagues of locusts were viewed as God’s punishment of human beings’ sinful behaviour; now we hear talk of ‘weather of mass destruction’ and ‘angry’ natural events that are apparently Gaia’s punishment of us for committing the sin of economic growth. The words change, but the backwardness and hysteria are eerily similar.

Greta Thunberg is admirable in many ways. She is driven and articulate. But it is patently clear now that she is being exploited. She is being pushed to the forefront of the most fearful and superstitious movement of our times. She has been turned into the chief spokesperson for doom, the mouthpiece of eco-misanthropy, a soothsayer of the horrors humankind will allegedly bring upon itself. The aim seems to be to make environmentalism an unquestionable, untouchable ideology. Witness how anyone who raises even a peep of criticism of eco-nonsense will now be asked: ‘How dare you criticise Greta and the other brave climate-striking children?’ These kids are being used as moral shields by adults to protect the increasingly bizarre politics of environmentalism from interrogation and criticism. It is dizzying in its cynicism.

And it is destructive, too. Destructive of public debate, destructive of critical discussion, and destructive of the kids who are being dragged into this terrifying, miserabilist worldview to play the role of a stage army to adult society’s own loss of faith in mankind and in economic growth. Enough. Set Greta free. Stop instructing her in the cult of fear and let her go back to school and to a normal youthful life. If you really must have a child speaking at the UN, how about a teenager from Africa or India who believes economic growth is not a fairytale but absolutely essential to their liberation from poverty? We’ve all heard more than enough from middle-class Westerners who think economic growth is oh-so-horrible. Let’s hear from someone in the teeming billions around the world who profoundly disagree with this downbeat, anti-human, Western-centric crap.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast,The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy

Environmental Playacting

By Heather Mac Donald
https://www.city-journal.org/todays-youth-climate-change
September 10, 2019




Youth will save the planet, according to the elite narrative about global warming. It was young voters who were “asking the tough questions” and holding “Democrats’ feet to the fire” at last week’s Democratic climate-change pontificon, reported the New York Times. A high school student challenged Julian Castro about his previous support for fracking and demanded to know why “should we trust you . . . to transition our economy to renewables?” Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar was grilled by a Columbia University student about her possible fealty to the beef and dairy industries. A Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University berated Joe Biden for allowing a natural gas company executive to host a fundraiser for him; fossil-fuel companies are committing “crimes against humanity,” announced this shoo-in for a prestigious professorship.

The claim about youth’s transformative commitment to radical environmental change is—based on informal observation—bunk. The cardinal rule when it comes to environmental virtue-signaling is that people give up what they’re willing to give up. Young people are no different. If being environmentally sound required sacrificing anything that a self-described environmental warrior actually valued, the conversation would quickly change to a different topic. One’s own habits are necessary; it’s everyone else’s that need to change.

This always-unreached threshold for environmental sacrifice is particularly notable on the part of celebrity Greens, with their fortress-like SUVs, multiple residences, and massive carbon footprints—whether it’s the cavalcade of yachts and private jets that brought such luminaries as Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Zuckerberg, and Katy Perry to Google’s three-day climate-change summit in Sicily this July; environmental crusaders Prince Harry and Meghan Markle jetting off to Elton John’s French estate; or Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter’s “quick day trip” to Los Angeles from New York just ahead of the CNN climate-change debate. A police caravan drives New York City mayor Bill de Blasio 11 miles from his mayoral mansion in Manhattan to his favorite gym in Brooklyn. “Everyone in their own life has to change their own habits to start protecting the earth,” he has intoned, but taking the subway is not one of those changes appropriate for him.

Most young people have not yet reached such a flamboyant level of energy use, but if they could, they undoubtedly would, with as little sense of anachronism as that of Al Gore in his energy-guzzling mansion. These are the consumers who keep football fields of computer servers buzzing round the clock to support their social media habits. If being green meant turning off one’s phone for 22 hours a day or foregoing the latest smartphone upgrade, the reasons why such sacrifices are not required would spout from every Gen Z-er and millennial’s lips. Students from the University of California, Irvine, constantly run their air-conditioners in the apartment complex where I spend summers, regardless of how cool the temperature outside is. They drive with their windows sealed and the car AC on, no matter how fresh the day (this is the new driving norm for almost everyone now). The meteoric rise of food-delivery apps, producing torrents of plastic and paper waste and a constant circulation of cars and electric bikes, has been fueled by young people’s demand for convenience and instant gratification. Cooking is apparently unthinkable. At best, one buys precut and washed food in the inevitable plastic containers. A daily Starbucks habit is deemed consistent with railing against environmentally destructive corporate greed.

New York’s tap water is among the purest in the world. Yet a young neighbor of mine in New York, like progressives throughout the city, receives towering deliveries of bottled water, entailing huge energy outlays to package and transport, not to mention generating flotillas of discarded plastic. The swim team members in my gym turn on their showers in the locker room, then walk away or do nothing other than chat as water gushes down the drain. Uber drivers in college towns report that students regularly call a car to get to class, rather than walk or ride a bike.

If the younger generations have any nonpolitical interest in nature, they keep it well hidden. Instagram holds more fascination than forest mosses and lichens; like most air travelers today, the young fly with their seat windows down to reduce the glare on their screens, indifferent to the startling revelations below about geology and topology that John Ruskin and Leonardo da Vinci would have killed to observe.

In short, the young rely on galaxies of goodies beyond count, whose production requires resources, nature-altering infrastructure, and dependable energy systems. The latest environmental crusades—whether banning fracking or plastic straws—are as gossamer bubbles atop this rushing torrent of manufactured consumables.

The children’s crusade for gun control is another alleged example of the purity of spirit of the young. But anti-gun youth crusaders are prepared to give up guns because, in almost all cases, they have none. Similarly, student protesters—whom we are supposed to admire for heroically skipping classes to agitate around their latest grievance—place little value on those classes and suffer no consequences for missing them.

An awareness of one’s own consumption and an attempt to conserve and to eliminate waste are worthy practices. But so is a zeal-tempering humility that should deflate any moral righteousness around such marginal efforts and that recognizes the fantastically un-natural prosperity—the product of Western capitalist enterprise and the rule of law—that underwrites environmental playacting.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the bestselling books The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture and The War on Cops.

Swedish Prof Urges 'Eating Human Flesh — to Save the Climate'

By Tyler O'Neill
https://pjmedia.com/trending/swedish-prof-urges-eating-human-flesh-to-save-the-climate/
September 5, 2019



Magnus Soderlund

Oftentimes, the climate alarmists are their own worst enemy. It sounds reasonable enough that carbon emissions might have an impact on the climate, but it's a rather nasty thing to prove, especially when alarmist predictions fail, over and over again. It's far from the "scientific consensus." But the alarmists don't tone down their rhetoric — they ratchet it up to 11. They want to take away your plastic straws, your cars, your burgers. Then there's this behavioral scientist in Sweden who wants us to eat human flesh to deal with the effects of climate change.

No, this isn't The Onion or The Babylon Bee. This is a Swedish professor appearing on Swedish television advocating for cannibalism, because climate change is just that dire. It can't be lunacy if it's done in the name of climate change, can it?

Earlier this week, Magnus Söderlund, professor of marketing and strategy at the Stockholm School of Economics, spoke at the Gastro Summit, a discussion on the future of food in the case of a climatepocalypse, The Epoch Times reported.

Söderlund spoke on the topic, "Can you Imagine Eating Human Flesh?" He argued for breaking down the ancient taboos against desecrating the human corpse and, well, cannibalism. The clip is available on State Swedish Television channel TV4 at this link. The end of the video's description roughly translates to "the possibility of eating human flesh - to save the climate." How cannibalism would have any impact on the climate is anyone's guess, and it seems the professor is more focused on dealing with the aftereffects of climate change, anyway.

According to The Epoch Times, Söderlund dismissed taboos against cannibalism as "conservative." He suggested that people's resistance to eating human flesh "could be overcome, little by little, beginning with persuading people to just taste it." In the video, he warned "that since food sources will be scarce in the future, people must be introduced to eating things they have thus far considered disgusting—among them, human flesh."

While the professor also discussed breaking other taboos on eating pets and insects, his talk focused on cannibalism. Swedish articles on the debate use the term "mannisko-kötts branschen," which translates to "the human flesh industry."

According to his bio, Söderlund's research focuses on "consumer behavior," "reactions to marketing stimuli," "psychological reactions," and "our understanding of what it means to be a consumer (and a marketer) in a society increasingly obsessed with consumption."

Taking this psychological approach, the professor said that people can be "tricked" into "making the right decisions."

Söderlund appeared to equate resistance to cannibalism with capitalist selfishness. "Are we humans too selfish to live sustainably?" he asked.

Even the audience for a Climatepocalypse food summit seemed unwilling to break the "taboo" against eating human flesh. Then the professor asked the audience how many would be open to the idea, not many hands went up and some people groaned. The professor later told the media that 8 percent of conference participants said they would be open to trying cannibalism.

When asked if he would try eating human flesh, Söderlund said, "I feel somewhat hesitant but to not appeal overly conservative... I'd have to say... I'd be open to at least tasting it."

Even if cannibalism were not grotesque, it would still be unhealthy. The Fore people in Papua New Guinea practiced ritualistic cannibalism. The women in the tribe would eat the human flesh of their dead relatives — so that worms and maggots did not eat it. The women — and some children — started dying of kuru, a disease meaning "shivering" or "trembling."

Victims first had trouble walking, a sign they were about to lose control over their limbs. Then they would lose control over their emotions, and people dubbed the disease the "laughing death." Within a year, the victims couldn't get up off the floor, feed themselves, or control bodily functions.

Scientists won a Nobel Prize for linking the disease to the tribe's cannibalism. As it turns out, eating human flesh makes people susceptible to "prions," or "proteinaceous infectious particles," twisted proteins that would twist normal proteins in nerve cells. It seems someone in the tribe had contracted Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a degenerative neurological disorder. Cannibalism passed on that disease to generations. Roughly one in a million Americans contract this disease,according to the CDC. It is rare at least in part because of that "conservative" taboo against eating human flesh.

In other words, not only is this Swedish professor pushing something downright macabre, he's also advocating for a behavior that makes humans susceptible to a terrifying disease.

But hey, anything for climate change, right?

Follow Tyler O'Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.

Summer Heat Wave? It's Global Warming... Or Is It?

By Roger L. Simon
https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/summer-heat-wave-its-global-warming-or-is-it/
July 21, 2019


(Fox News)

With a heat wave currently turning half the country into a steam bath and the next round of Democratic Party presidential debates coming up in just over a week, it's likely climate change (né global warming) will be at or near the top of the agenda.

For the Democrats, climate armageddon is right around the corner, the only question really open for debate being whether that corner is twelve years away or twenty. Global warming is a religion to them and, as with so many religions, you obey its strictures or else. Just ask Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

That this isn't the most scientific approach to climate or anything else should go without saying. Unfortunately, it doesn't. Any discussion of the subject at the debate will undoubtedly consist of how much money we should throw at the problem and how soon.  Biden will be measured and try not to throw out the baby with the proverbial bathwater, while Bernie and the ladies will attack him for being a climate weakling willing to incinerate humanity. Everyone else could well join in. Soon poor Joe will be nodding his head in agreement, begging  AOC to forgive him and pledging to retrofit every picture window and storm door from San Diego to Sandusky himself. (Hey, he says he can beat Trump in push-ups.)

Meanwhile, none of the CNN stalwarts conducting the debate will dare ask this simple question because it blows a hole in their narrative worse than any the Iranians will ever put on a tanker. "Has the duration and extent of heat waves gone up or down in the last century?"

Answer: Not just down but way down. According to Chris Martz of Weather Facts (and, yes, he has them, replete with graphs; check it out), the average duration of heat waves is 41 percent shorter than it was in the 1930s. They lasted nine days then to six and a half now. Not only that, average high temperatures in the 1930s, when industrialization was minuscule compared to today, were considerably above (roughly two degrees) what they are now. The thirties were a depressed time — and a hot one on top of that.

Another question neither Andersen Cooper nor Jake Tapper will be posing is:  "When was Antarctica warmer — now or a thousand years ago?" Answer: a thousand years ago. Obviously, you realize where I'm going here.

Everyone knows that politicians are basically liars or envelope-pushers, but when it comes to science they are idiots as well, at least the vast majority of them. That we have to listen to them opine about climate is like having our brains drilled.

This is not to say that any of this proves the truth of global warming one way or another.  I try to remain agnostic on the subject — keep an open mind —  but the conformist drivel promulgated by the left tends to make me shut it. (The views of the Dane Bjorn Lomborg who does a good cost/benefit analysis of these things, are worth a look.)

But the generalized stupidity of the way the issue is treated points toward something possibly more disturbing — the debates themselves. Do they have any meaning other than the obvious entertainment value (for some)? Well, we learn that most of the Democrats are copycats and have pretty much the same (enforced) views on everything with only the slightest nuances. But didn't we already know that? It's all a game show, basically.  Maybe Ryszard Legutko — the Polish author of The Demon in Democracy — is right. Communism and liberal democracy have some eerie similarities.

As for heatwaves, this has always been my favorite way of getting through them.

Roger L. Simon - co-founder and CEO Emeritus of PJMedia - is an author and screenwriter.  His new novel - THE GOAT - will be available for preordering on Amazon next month.  He fervently hopes you will. 

Science's Untold Scandal: The Lockstep March of Professional Societies to Promote the Climate Change Scare

GLACIERS ARE OUTLIVING THE ENVIRONMENTALIST WHO PREDICTED THEIR DOOM

Won’t someone save the environmentalists?

Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273987/glaciers-are-outliving-environmentalist-who-daniel-greenfield

June 12, 2019

"This August I visited Glacier National Park in Montana," Gianna Kelly, the founder of Climb for Conservation, wrote in the Huffington Post. "I am still stunned to have learned the following fact:  by 2020, no glaciers will exist in Glacier National Park."

Kelly, who had worked for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, wrote that back in the first year of the Obama administration. It might stun her more to learn that Obama is out of the White House and that the glaciers of Glacier National Park are still there and waiting to be visited.

Throughout the Obama era, visitors to Glacier National Park were frequently harangued with false claims that the glaciers would all be gone in a decade. These warnings decorated dioramas and trash cans even as the hysterical propaganda become more ridiculous with every passing year.

The snow lay heavy on Logan Pass, when I arrived in July 2017. Visitors stomped through thick snow to reach the Hidden Lake Overlook. The alpine meadows of the Hanging Gardens didn’t live up to their name. Instead of the wildflowers that most visitors expected, there were nearly endless fields of white. Mountain goats, unaware that they were threatened by the supposed rising temperatures that were warming Glacier’s glaciers into extinction, eyed us suspiciously as we tried not to slip on the ice.

Sperry Glacier, a frequent target for environmentalist doommongers, was still there in the distance.

Next year, there was a 30-year snow record at Glacier. Snow removal crews in late April were struggling with drifts of between 10 to 20 feet. East Glacier Park Village measured 284 inches of snow.

Glacier National Park recorded “one of the coldest winters on record” this year. And across Montana, record wind chill temperatures hit 68 below zero in Bozeman and 59 below zero in Helena. In Great Falls, the temperature stayed below freezing for 32 days until the beginning of March.

In time for the 2019 summer season at Glacier National Park, the embarrassing signs claiming that the glaciers won’t be there next year have begun coming down. But the doomsday predictions won’t leave.

The melting glaciers of Glacier have been the subject of countless media stories and at least one book, The Melting World: A Journey Across America’s Vanishing Glaciers, from St. Martin’s Press, which excitingly promised to chronicle the “the first extinction of a mountain ecosystem in what is expected to be a series of such global calamities as humanity faces the prospect of a world without alpine ice.”

Melting World followed Daniel Fagre, who heads the Climate Change in Mountain Ecosystems Project for the United States Geological Survey, and is the figure most associated with the 2020 number.

Fagre had told the book’s author back in 2008 that all the glaciers would be gone in 10 to 12 years.

The USGS global warming expert has been quoted in media outlets every year predicting the death of the glaciers. He is largely responsible for the comparison photos claiming that the glaciers are vanishing, which he traces back to a visit by former Vice President Al Gore during the Clinton administration.

Fagre has a BA in Environmental Science, an MS in Animal Ecology and a PhD in Animal Ecology. In 1990, the Global Change Research Act was passed. The disastrous law created a massive infrastructure of chicken little “experts” tasked with finding evidence that the sky was falling.

In 1991, Fagre was hired to start to "climate change research program" and wrote a proposal to use the glaciers of Glacier to monitor the impact of global warming.

Somewhere along the way, despite no geology degree, he was deemed a glacier expert.

"One of the first things that we did was we went up and looked at Grinnell Glacier," he recalled.

Grinnell Glacier is the environmentalist's special nemesis.

In 2010, he told CNN that Grinnell Glacier was "this little dirty glacier that seems to be obviously falling apart, that has become very tiny and decrepit".

"This one is on its last legs," he insisted.

But Grinnell Glacier refuses to die. Instead it appears to have been growing.

The photos warning that the glaciers are shrinking are the work of Fagre and Lisa McKeon, who has a BA in Zoology. Neither of the two glacier experts, so often quoted in the media, have geology degrees.

But Fagre is the doomsayer most likely to predict the end of all the glaciers in Glacier. That’s why he and the media were outraged that the “area’s top climate scientist” wasn’t able to “share his expertise on global warming’s role in the retreating ice sheets” with Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg.

Fagre, who, according to one profile, doesn’t like “deskwork”, loves sharing his “expertise”. And that means predicting that the glaciers will be gone in a decade or two or who knows when.

And the government employee is open about his motives. “My role as a scientist is to make sure that everybody understands the pace at which they’re disappearing, and the reasons for that, so that, again, better decisions could be made societally.”

That’s not the role of a scientist. It’s the agenda of an advocate. The signs and photos warning of a glacier apocalypse at Glacier National Park are political advocacy.

"We get a lot of information visually," Fagre said. "And we tend to trust that even more than what we hear.”

That’s sensible enough because listening to Fagre speak can get a little bit confusing. Over the years, his doomsday date for the great glacier apocalypse has continued to fluctuate.

In 1999, he claimed that “all of Glacier's glaciers will be gone in 30 years”.

In a 2004, National Geographic article, he predicted that “within 30 years most if not all of the park's namesake glaciers will disappear”.

By either 2029 or 2034, some or all of the glaciers are set to disappear. Or something.

In 2009, Fagre downgraded a previous claim that all the glaciers would be gone by 2030, down to 2020. That 2020 date was featured in numerous media pieces warning that the glaciers would be gone in a decade. They also popped up in the park signage that is now being taken down in time for 2020.

In an official Glacier video, Fagre claimed in 2010 that, "they’ll melt by about 2020".

In a 2010 NBC News piece, the 2020 claim was cited, but Fagre hedged that some of the largest glaciers might make it to 2030.

The glaciers of Glacier National Park are always disappearing. But they never quite do.

Six years later, Fagre claimed that most of the glaciers would be “small insignificant lumps of ice on the landscape", but these lumps might survive another 10 or 15 years.

Three years after a 2011 chat with Fagre, in which the 2020 figure was cited, the New York Times did yet another piece claiming against that the glaciers are still vanishing.

"What will they call this place once the glaciers are gone?" the 2014 article began. This time it claimed that in 30 years, "there may be none". That postponed the date of glacier doomsday to 2044.

Fagre was quoted as saying, “I think we’re on the cusp of bigger changes.” Five years later, the biggest change is that the 2020 signs are being replaced.

In a 2017 USA Today piece, Fagre warned that the glaciers would be gone in our lifetime.

"Their fate is sealed," he insisted.

Sealed, indeed.

“What is important," Fagre emphasized, "is that it will happen in our lifetime.”

According to his conversation with a PBS reporter, "estimates on when the glaciers will disappear completely vary widely, from 2030 to 2080, depending on winter weather."

2030 to 2080 is quite a range.

“We are going to go toward a virtually glacierless state in the next few decades. Fagre had told Audubon in 2010. “We don’t care whether it is 2033 or 2029 or 2035. It’s just what’s happening.”

Scientists generally care about dates and predictions. The prophets of inevitable doom are cranks.

In a Guardian article in 2017, he claimed that all the glaciers in the country would vanish in the next few decades. “It’s inevitable,” Fagre insisted.

"They will certainly be gone before the end of the century," Fagre told a CBS affiliate in 2017.

"It's not just going to happen in my lifetime,” he had insisted in 2002 "It's going to happen during my career."

Back then, Fagre had been 49-years-old. He’s now approaching retirement age.

The glaciers of Glacier seem likely to outlive the environmentalist who had spent the bulk of his career predicting their doom. And, if the Department of the Interior cleans house, they will outlive his career.

Sports Writer Jeff Pearlman Compares Having More Than Two Kids To Tossing Garbage Into The Ocean

By Georgi Boorman
https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/18/sports-writer-jeff-pearlman-compares-two-kids-tossing-garbage-ocean/
April 18, 2019

Photo credit: Erik Isakson/Getty Images

Sports author and podcaster Jeff Pearlman casually floated the idea of population control on Twitter on Monday: “Just saw a Tweet from a guy I know, announcing how excited he and his wife are to be having child No. 6. Does there come a point when, in the name of earth’s survival and limited resources, we’re allowed to say, ‘Hmm. I dunno, man …'”

No, let’s not share in the joy of acquaintances who are blessing the world with another child. Let’s leverage our indubitable wisdom on climatology and public policy to proclaim “earth’s survival and limited resources” are at stake and question whether they are doing the responsible thing.

Oh, but he didn’t stop there. When a Twitter user named Lisa clapped back with, “As a mom of 6 kids, I’m gonna say no,” our erudite intellectual thoughtfully responded, “Serious Q, Lisa–why? Earth truly can’t sustain this. Not hypothetical, factual.” He then went on to say the estimable Jeff Pearlman-approved number of children to have is, “I dunno. 2?”

Lisa objected, leaning on demographers’ projections that the world population will peak before the end of the 21st century. “I think it’s a slippery slope to start telling people how many kids they can or can’t have. My body, my choice.”

But Chairman Pearlman of the People’s Republic of Know-It-Alls would not be swayed. “It bothers me when people tell me not to throw my garbage in the ocean. My garbage, my choice.”

Population Control Leads to Horrible Policies

The fecundophobia of some members of the American elite has blossomed into full-blown hatred. Around this time last year, comedian Nikki Glaser tweeted “Don Jr. and his wife have FIVE kids. No one should be having five kids. Why are people still allowed to have 5 kids?”

In general, many people in the mainstream feel comfortable dehumanizing and devaluing babies and children, which is why tweets like Pearlman’s (which oddly equates people having as many kids as they want with people throwing garbage in the ocean whenever they want) and Glaser’s must be roundly refuted.

If calling out dangerous, immoral opinions on Twitter were ever cheap sport for pundits with time on their hands, it isn’t anymore. The fact that children born alive after abortions can literally, legally be treated as garbage in the state of New York now should not be lost on you. The fact that 232 Democrats in the House of Representatives have refused to even vote on ensuring all children born alive are treated as children, not garbage, should not be lost on you, either.

If there are a few voices at the back croaking weakly in protest, we can’t hear them over the fascist chants for government to regulate anything and everything in the name of the climate “crisis,” up to and including our own bodies (ironic, for the “my body my choice” crowd).

I wonder if aspiring Population Czar Pearlman realizes how many people have been violated and killed based on exactly the policy he’s referring to in the name of “sustainability.” Would you like to know how many people in India were forcibly sterilized out of fear of a population “bomb” that never existed? Around 8 million men and women.

Would you like to know how many people are missing from the Chinese population due to their one-child policy (now a two-child policy)? An estimated 300 million. More than 20 million Chinese people were sterilized in 1983 alone. Families pregnant with an unauthorized child have been threatened with exorbitant fines they couldn’t possibly afford, thus forcing them to seek abortions or literally pay the price.

In 1990, when a small town protested after the Chinese government violently ripped 250 children from the wombs of their mothers, officials sent an army to occupy the territory. The villagers’ armed resistance triggered what is known as the Barren Massacre—the indiscriminate slaughter of hundreds by the People’s Liberation Army (another bitter pill of irony). We know that forced abortions and sterilizations are still occurring on 1 million mostly Uyghur captives held in internment camps in China, according to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Autonomy Onslaught, Here We Come

The radical environmentalists who ceaselessly lobby government for a turn at the levers of power have never been interested in preserving your autonomy. Every natural human right, including the right to procreation and the right to life itself, must bow down to Nature as god.

There has never been such a thing as effective mass population control without violating the rights of the individual, and there never will be. Solutions range from heavy taxation to biological warfare. Celebrated playwright George Bernard Shaw pleaded for a “humane gas” that would kill “instantly and painlessly” to cleanse the population of those who “cannot pull [their] own weight.” But even something as relatively anodyne as per-child taxation is a strike at the knees of all who would not submit to the desanctification of individual human life.

It’s no wonder we’re having to refute ignorant Twitterati who compare children to garbage when people as supposedly enlightened as bioethicists have claimed that “the life of a newborn baby is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.” I wonder if Pearlman and Peter Singer ever slouch in overstuffed armchairs, puffing cigar smoke and egotism into each other’s faces as they wax poetic about the golden days of eugenics and the blatant attempts to keep the poor and the “unfit” from breeding. You know, that heyday of the early 20th century when 60,000 Americans were sterilized? Sports, social hygiene—interchangeable disciplines, really.

That’s where we’re really heading, aren’t we? Why would we indiscriminately limit children from every family when we could doso much good for the planet if we uprooted the “weeds” from the garden of society and kept them from breeding. Wait a minute, that sounds familiar.

Ah yes, we’ve heard that from population-control fanatic Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. In the born-alive debate, the left is already leaning almost exclusively on the false notion that all late-term abortions not directly related to maternal health are of fetuses “incompatible with life.” Unfit, you might say.“Lebensunwertes Leben.” It’s almost like some of them haven’t left that awful genetic supremacist ideology behind or something.

The World Isn’t Ending, and Neither Should Families

All this death and oppression building like a violent storm on the horizon is supposedly justified by science, but it’s mostly echo chamber dogma put forth by people whose predictions pretty much always fail to come true. As David Harsanyi has pointed out, sea levels did not rise 20 feet in the 14 years since “An Inconvenient Truth” (nor did they even rise one foot), a billion people did not die of starvation due to overpopulation, and farming hasn’t collapsed due to increased temperatures. Instead, we are more prosperous than ever. Extreme poverty has been cut in half in the last two decades.

The real kicker is, American fertility is already below replacement rate and, in fact, sits at a 30-year low. If this trend continues, we won’t be able to sustain this nation’s massive welfare state because we won’t have enough workers to generate payouts to the old.

If we’re going to keep our sacrosanct entitlement system intact, then whose lives are authorized for neglect now? Whose lives will be devalued for the “greater good”? All those vulnerable senior citizens tucked away in long-term care facilities, who are already getting the message they’re better off dead.

You see, whether the fertility rate goes up or down, whether the overall temperature ticks up or down, the problem isn’t the flawed science so much as the perverted morality that promotes the abuse and murder of individuals in the name of some greater collective goal, for which the science seems all too often just a means to that end.

You don’t get to a point of suggesting population control and comparing babies to garbage just by believing the earth has a fever. You get there by denying that humans are made in the image of God and that their rights derive from Him, not the government.

That’s why refuting bad methodology and cautioning against tenuous conclusions, as important as they are, is not enough to stop the onslaught against the sanctity of human life. There will always be another excuse, another crisis. A crisis doesn’t determine our morality, our morality determines how we deal with a crisis. Maybe Pearlman should take a seat on the bench until he gets his head around this basic rule of civilized society.

Georgi is a Senior Contributor at The Federalist, host of The 180 Cast, and coauthor of "Clocking Out Early: The Ultimate Guide to Early Retirement." Follow her on Twitter.