JONAH GOLDBERG ON THE UGLY ENVIRONMENTALIST:
The environment editor for the left-wing British newspaper the Guardian, Damian Carrington, recently wrote a piece fretting about how having kids doesn’t help fight climate change. Jill Filipovic, a feminist writer, endorsed the article. “Having children is one of the worst things you can do for the planet,” she wrote on Twitter. “Have one less and conserve resources.”
I found this interestingly dumb. Filipovic is precisely one of those writers you’d expect to go ballistic if some conservative Christian opined about the reproductive choices women should make. But if it’s in the name of the environment? Let’s wag those fingers, everybody!
I believe, along with the late economist Julian Simon, that humans are the ultimate resource. We solve problems, and I think we’ll solve climate change too.
But if you really want to yoke your reproductive choices to the issue of climate change (a bizarre desire if you ask me), maybe you should have as many kids as possible and educate them in science and engineering so they can come up with a solution.
It’s fascinating watching the Malthusian enviro-left return to the original stance of “Progressivism,” and shout “Eugenics now, eugenics tomorrow, eugenics forever!” to paraphrase George Wallace 1963 inaugural address as the Democrat Governor of Alabama — but then, increasingly, the left believes in Wallace’s original message as well.
Related: Somewhere, Henry Luce, the son of Christian missionaries, weeps at the feeble current incarnation of Time magazine. The remains of the magazine he founded seems awfully upset that pressure from the right (read: the Wrong People) has put sufficient pressure on a British judge to allow a US specialist to examine Charlie Gard.
Yes, you read the last half of that sentence correctly. As Ed Morrissey notes, “Remember well that had this court and the Great Ormond Street Hospital gotten its way, this would have been an autopsy rather than an examination.”
But Sarah Palin was the dummy for suggesting that sooner or later, socialized medicine invariably leads to death panels.