Maybe the Collectivists Will (Un)Breed Themselves Out of Existence

The UK-based Telegraph reports that some outfit called the Optimal Population Trust is suggesting that people should have fewer babies to fight supposed global warming (or climate change, or whatever they're calling it now). This is a reflection of the people-are-bad mentality that seems disturbingly common among enviro-statists:

The report, Fewer Emitter, Lower Emissions, Less Cost, concludes that family planning should be seen as one of the primary methods of emissions reduction. The UN estimates that 40 per cent of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended. ...Roger Martin, chairman of the Optimum Population Trust at the LSE, said: “It’s always been obviously that total emissions depend on the number of emitters as well as their individual emissions.

Reading this article, though, reminded me of another article from a British paper. As this story from the Daily Mail explains, some radical environmentalists are deliberately choosing to sterlilize themselves to avoid having kids:

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy. But the very thought makes her shudder with horror. Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she was helping to save the planet. ...Incredibly, so determined was she that the terrible "mistake" of pregnancy should never happen again, that she begged the doctor who performed the abortion to sterilise her at the same time. He refused, but Toni - who works for an environmental charity - "relentlessly hunted down a doctor who would perform the irreversible surgery. ..."Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet," says Toni, 35. "Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population." ...Toni is far from alone. When Sarah Irving, 31, was a teenager she sat down and wrote a wish-list for the future. ...Most young girls dream of marriage and babies. But Sarah dreamed of helping the environment - and as she agonised over the perils of climate change, the loss of animal species and destruction of wilderness, she came to the extraordinary decision never to have a child. "I realised then that a baby would pollute the planet - and that never having a child was the most environmentally friendly thing I could do." ...Mark adds: "Sarah and I live as green a life a possible. We don't have a car, cycle everywhere instead, and we never fly. "We recycle, use low-energy light bulbs and eat only organic, locally produced food. "In short, we do everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint. But all this would be undone if we had a child.

Think about what this means. If the nut-job environmentalists persist in not having kids, that almost surely means the world's population will gradually become more sensible about these issue since mommy and daddy enviro-statist won't be raising little interventionists to plague future generations. Sounds like a win-win situation for everyone.