Carbon Credits for One Child

This is so China -- not the carbon offsets part, the one child per couple thing.

From CNSNews:

Andrew Revkin, who reports on environmental issues for The New York Times, floated an idea last week for combating global warming: Give carbon credits to couples that limit themselves to having one child.

Revkin later told CNSNews.com that he was not endorsing the idea, just trying to provoke some thinking on the topic.

Revkin participated via Web camera in an Oct. 14 panel discussion on “Covering Climate: What’s Population Got to Do With It” that was held at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. The other participants on the panel were Dennis Dimick, executive editor of National Geographic, and Emily Douglas, web editor for The Nation magazine.

Video.



Transcript

ANDREW REVKIN: Well, some of the people have recently proposed: Well, should there be carbon credits for a family planning program in Africa let's say? Should that be monetized as a part of something that, you know, if you, if you can measurably somehow divert fertility rate, say toward an accelerating decline in a place with a high fertility rate, shouldn't there be a carbon value to that?

And I have even proposed recently, I can't remember if it's in the blog, but just think about this: Should--probably the single most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the lights or driving a Prius, it's having fewer kids, having fewer children.

So should there be, eventually you get, should you get credit--If we're going to become carbon-centric--for having a one-child family when you could have had two or three. And obviously it's just a thought experiment, but it raises some interesting questions about all this.

In a follow-up e-mail with CNSNews, Revkin distanced himself from being in favor of the "one-child solution." He said he wasn't endorsing it.

However, CNSNews notes a September 19, 2009 blog post by Revkin, "Are Condoms the Ultimate Green-Technology?" It reveals he seems to be an advocate for limiting population growth.

“More children equal more carbon dioxide emissions,” blogged Revkin. “And recent research has resulted in renewed coverage of the notion that one of the cheapest ways to curb emissions in coming decades would be to provide access to birth control for tens of millions of women around the world who say they desire it.

“I recently raised the question of whether this means we’ll soon see a market in baby-avoidance carbon credits similar to efforts to sell CO2 credits for avoiding deforestation,” he later added. “This is purely a thought experiment, not a proposal.”

Furthermore, he blogged: “But the issue is one that is rarely discussed in climate treaty talks or in debates over United States climate legislation. If anything, the population-climate question is more pressing in the United States than in developing countries, given the high per-capita carbon dioxide emissions here and the rate of population growth. If giving women a way to limit family size is such a cheap win for emissions, why isn’t it in the mix?”

Revkin thinks it makes sense to bribe women to limit how many children they have with "baby-avoidance carbon credits."

Rather than seeing this as a "reward" for having one child, I see it as a penalty for having more than one child.

I wonder if Revkin would want to issue "baby-avoidance carbon credits" for abortions.

That certainly would be an incentive to scam the system, intentionally becoming pregnant to abort for carbon credits.

It's sick, and it's a fact that "baby-avoidance carbon credits" is an idea coming from the Left.

Is this really the sort of change Americans wanted when they voted for Obama and the Democrats?

Did they vote to relinquish their freedom and empower the government?

I can't believe that Americans really want to give up their independence and allow the government to determine the course of their lives.