That'll improve our gene pool, perhaps.

That'll improve our gene pool, perhaps.

That'll improve our gene pool, perhaps.

The future belongs to those who show up for it.

"due to the severity of the ecological crisis and the current inaction of governing forces in the face of this existential threat."

What losers.

First, how are they certain it's an ecological crisis and a severe one? They aren't.

Second, why do they beg to be enslaved more than they already are by a gang of molesters calling themselves "government"? Government is the worst despoiler of the natural world; why allow it to dictate to those who aren't the problem? Crazy.

An American woman not having children won't be a drop in an ocean when those actually adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere (in India and China, for example) aren't going to follow her example. It's like the person who dropped an apple core on the ground is blaming herself while the one with a giant tire fire keeps adding tired to the heap.

https://blog.kentforliberty.com/search?q=AGCC

But a 2017 study found that having even one less child is a more effective way of cutting down a person's carbon footprint than recycling, driving an electric car, being vegetarian, or using renewable energy.

Contrary to popular belief, vegetarianism or veganism is not the most effective eating plan to reduce your carbon footprint. Grasslands unsuitable for growing crops, for example are ideal for raising cattle, for one thing. For another, there's land that would be suitable for growing food for the animals, like hay and grains, that aren't suitable for growing the crops that we would need.

And there is the obvious fact that human beings are not vegetarians. Every herbivore in the animal kingdom is capable of digesting cellulose, whether by foregut fermentation (requiring a four-chambered stomach and regurgitation) or having the enzyme cellulase (either innately -- producing it on their own, which no vertebrate can do, including us -- or having gut flora capable of producing it, neither of which humans can do/have). Then there are our primate relatives, who can do hindgut fermentation, thanks to their sizeable cecums and large intestines (ours comparatively tiny), the necessary gut flora to produce cellulase and the lovely habit of eating their food twice (coprophagy).

So, if you think we should be vegans, either grow a four-chambered stomach or eat shit.

ADDENDUM: It's possible, I suppose, to recolonize our digestive systems to have the gut flora necessary to produce cellulase, but, as implied above, there's more to it than just adding flora to our guts. The digestion of cellulase takes a long time. And our cecum and large intestines just aren't big enough for the job. You would have to redesign human anatomy and redesign what we're attracted to so we can learn to find the protruding guts common to great apes to be attractive.

Great apes, other than humans, that is. Yes, humans are considered great apes, or hominidae.

I strongly support their decision to not procreate. They are just the people we want making a choice like that.

Government is the worst despoiler of the natural world

And the worst of the government models for the environment is...socialism. Take a gander at eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Empire, or even modern China. The environment will not be allowed to stop the latest 5 year plan. For example, I give you the Aral Sea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

I strongly support their decision to not procreate.

While that's a good start, I will be bold enough to recommend that they take it to the next level and commit suicide. No offspring, no more icky carbon footprint, and your body will become worm food.

No, no cremations! we must retain carbon in the various sinks!!

"I strongly support their decision to not procreate. They are just the people we want making a choice like that."

I strongly believe that, even though they say it's by their choice, it really is ones who never would be reproducing anyway, since repellent behavior tends to make potential suitors turn and flee!

An American woman not having children won't be a drop in an ocean when those actually adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere (in India and China, for example) aren't going to follow her example.
______________________________________

How do you know?

From what I've heard for many years, India and China are leading the way when it comes to getting access to new contraceptives, which suggests, at least, that the Indians and Chinese are more eager than other people to use them. Even though the one-child policy in China has been modified, couples there can only have TWO children, as of 2015.

But...surprise, surprise, not all Chinese want two, after 35 years of observing how much quieter and easier life can be with one child. See this, from the BBC, in December. (Note the birth rate chart, which shows the figures for three countries - China, India, and the U.S. - hint, ALL the birth rates have plunged since 1960, and India's birth rate has never gone anywhere but down since then. At the current rate, an Indian woman may have fewer than two children in just a few years.)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-46558562

Excerpts:

...Many young people in China who grew up during the three decades of strict family planning and break-neck economic development have a different mindset from their parents.

They are used to being the centre of attention and enjoying much better material wealth and personal freedom.

They are also marrying late (if at all), having children late (if at all), and focusing more on their own careers and happiness, a trend not confined to China.

When they contemplate starting a family, one big concern is whether they can afford it.

Surveys show that on average, raising a child in a city can cost more than half of a Chinese family's income. Childcare places are always oversubscribed, so many have to rely on grandparents for help. And then there's the mortgage and other burdens on the family budget.

In other words, to have one child is a struggle; to have another needs even more resources and support.

None of the young people I talked to recently in China wanted a second child...

(snip)

""Here's a provocative thought: Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them," Rieder told NPR."

Suits me just fine. Fewer red-diaper babies will make the world a better place. Meanwhile, the first home-schooled kids of the 2000s are reaching reproduction age.

And from May of 2018:

http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002324/the-resolve-and-regret-of-chinese-women-who-reject-motherhood

By Fan Yiying:

...Couples who choose not to have children are often referred to as DINKs — meaning “double income, no kids.” In China, their unconventional lifestyle frequently garners disapproval, the same way unmarried women of a certain age are derided as “leftover.”

The Chinese government, which relaxed its family planning policies in 2015 and has encouraged citizens to have more children, does not keep official statistics on how many Chinese couples choose to remain childless. But in its annual Family Development Report, the national health authority noted that the number of DINK families was “increasing rapidly” and that they were “emerging in large numbers” in 2014 and 2015, respectively.

Huang Shuyue, a certified marriage counselor based in the southern province of Guangdong, says that in the past, only couples with fertility problems were childless. But in recent years, she says, a growing number of millennials have chosen the DINK life for various reasons — from the desire to focus on their careers to wanting to avoid the cost and stress of raising a child...

(snip)
_____________________________________

Me: But one 53-year-old woman said she regrets not having children, though she doesn't seem exactly anguished over it, likely because she has at least five nieces and nephews.

And, from another woman (now 40):
_______________________________________

...Last year, Xiao almost changed her mind. After her mother broke her leg, Xiao had to lift her onto an X-ray table at the hospital. “In that moment, I asked myself, ‘Would I feel hopeless and alone if such a thing happened to me, and I had no child to lift me?’” But then she realized it would only be a burden for the child. “This is the reason why Chinese insist on having children, but I don’t think it’s fair,” she says...

I thought American girls already opted out of having children, because feminism is about being obedient and submissive to The (correct) Man (provided he is a corporation or the government; anything but a husband)?

I thought American girls already opted out of having children
________________________________________

Obviously they haven't, as any news source will tell you. (Not to mention the BBC chart above.) Or just go for a walk in the park on the weekend and count how many babies you see.

Which is not to say the U.S. birth rate isn't falling.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-big-number38-million-babies-were-born-in-the-us-last-year-thats-a-drop/2018/05/25/ce96af5a-5f6f-11e8-a4a4-c070ef53f315_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4d3d25785d33

But maybe that's just because more couples are actually learning to think - and go to the drugstore - before acting. Good for them. Children are supposed to be deeply wanted, not just lightly wanted - right?

Btw, Paul Ehrlich was interviewed on the radio in late 2014 about his book "Humanity on a Tightrope: Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future," co-authored by Robert E. Ornstein. During the interview, he freely admitted that some of his 1960s predictions turned out to be quite wrong - but also that scientists' predictions are seldom accurate - that is, seldom 100% right.

And maybe all those predictions from 50 years ago and earlier were wrong only because 1) small families and no families turned out to be far more popular than expected, and 2) people got alarmed enough to USE birth control more than they might have otherwise?

Sort of the opposite of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe there's a name for that? After all, maybe the old predictions would have been absolutely RIGHT - had they not been made public.

Forgot to say, re "Nobody Cares But (Would-Be) Grandma":

Not true, and I don't just mean arrogant, rude friends and neighbors. (I'm luckier than some, but plenty of people on Bratfree will tell you that THEIR friends, relatives and neighbors simply will not "MYOB." Those rude people just don't believe they're being rude. And plenty of people who are not used to standing up for their right to adult privacy will cave in.)

Albert Mohler, for one (historical theologian and the ninth president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky) has condemned the childfree as people who are engaging in "moral rebellion." Should I believe he's the only church leader to do that?

See more:

https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=pZGbXN-ZAuas5wLHgpf4Dg&q=%22Deliberate+childlessness%22+&btnK=Google+Search&oq=%22Deliberate+childlessness%22+&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i30.1242.3202..3789...0.0..0.101.231.2j1......0....2j1..gws-wiz.....0..0i22i30.gPzbeubuvPE

Not to mention those who, like Rick Santorum, strive to make it harder and harder for people to get good birth control.

"And maybe all those predictions from 50 years ago and earlier were wrong only because 1) small families and no families turned out to be far more popular than expected, and 2) people got alarmed enough to USE birth control more than they might have otherwise?"

1) No
2) No

Ehrlich was just wrong. Completely and total. He wasn't 90% right or even 50% right. He was wrong. And no it wasn't a self fulfilling prophecy. Even if his prophecies had never been made public they never would have happened. Plenty of contemporaries pointed out how wrong Ehrlich was. They were right he was wrong. Simple as that.

Before making such a critical life decision as not having children because climate, one would think that a person would want to review all of the relevant data and analyses...within the limits of their scientific and mathematical education, of course, but one could still learn a lot by really digging into it.

I wonder how many of these women have actually done that?

My guess would be, none.

Fashions in reproduction don't work this way. People have very nearly precisely as many kids as they want.

Relax…

The sky has been falling for humans for centuries -- most recently with Paul Ehrlich's failed predictions of mass starvation.

Those of us older than 30 remember several predictions of imminent doomsday. Predictions of global doom are as old a humanity:

• In 1789, Thomas Malthus predicted that population growth was going to starve the population as the food supply could not keep up.
• In 1968, Paul and Anne Erlich echoed Malthus, predicting that overpopulation would cause mass starvation.
• In the '70s, global temperatures were on a 30-year cooling trend, so an ice age was predicted. By 1980, that prediction was reversed and alarm was being raised over global warming.
• In 1985, the newly discovered hole in the ozone layer was going to destroy us all unless we immediately and completely stopped using aerosol spray cans.
• In 1988, scientists, James Hansen and Michael Oppenheimer, told Congress that if the buildup of carbon dioxide and methane continued at the current rate, the Earth would be between three and nine degrees Fahrenheit warmer by the years 2025-2050, and that sea levels would rise between one and four feet in the same time frame. Progress so far on that doom is scant. Seas have risen 3.15" and the temperature is only 0.5ºF warmer. Now, it's not 2025 year, so that prediction of doom can still come about but, given current progress, it's not likely to.
• In 2006, Al Gore predicted 20 foot rise in the ocean level in "the near future" due to ice melting in Greenland and Antarctica. Twelve years later and Greenland's ice cap is actually growing again.
• In 2009, Prince Charles told the world that we had a mere 96 months before it was too late to save the planet. Those 96 months were up last year.

Global doomsday prognosticators target the young since they're not old enough to remember the failed predictions of the past. Kipling put it best:

“In August was the Jackal born;
The Rains fell in September;
‘Now such a fearful flood as this,’
Says he, ‘I can’t remember!’”

So this is either a counterpoint/rejection of this argument or an X-files episode.

I think Cher was in the original.

Nine. Count 'em.

Wrote Crid:

Fashions in reproduction don't work this way. People have very nearly precisely as many kids as they want.

Exactly. With the advent of inexpensive and widely available birth control in many societies, people do or don't have kids for largely the same reason, and it starts with "I want ... ".

"Children are seen to be the ultimate goal in life, something that everyone wants, and so promising never to have them seems extreme to a lot of people."

Vomit. Then you're not paying attention, or you're a lemming.

The indigent would never agree to stop having children. More kids means more welfare benefits.

Even if his prophecies had never been made public they never would have happened.
_____________________________________

Source, please? (Something that specifically addresses that scenario, of course.)

People have very nearly precisely as many kids as they want.
_______________________________________

If you're born into the Quiverfull society, chances are you're not allowed to KNOW what you really want. Or decide, if it goes against the grain.

And, as I hinted at 8:11 AM, people whose parents brainwash them into believing they don't really have a right to privacy from their parents even after they leave home (or that asserting that right is a sin) probably don't know what they really want either, since they feel so guilty about it.

Trouble is, once you've made a lifelong decision, it's human nature to brainwash YOURSELF into believing that this is what you wanted all along. But it doesn't always work - it's just the mask you wear in public.

Not to mention that even people in their 40s can sometimes adopt if they change their minds about being CF. Especially if they're willing to adopt a foster child.

(I couldn't believe a certain letter to a newspaper. The writer claimed that there's NO such thing as an unwanted child, because so "many" people are trying to adopt. So why are there kids - at least half of them white - begging in the same paper, every week, to be adopted? They can't help their ages. Or what they've been through.)

"In the '70s, global temperatures were on a 30-year cooling trend, so an ice age was predicted. By 1980, that prediction was reversed and alarm was being raised over global warming."

Yep. And the Left recommended the exact same totalitarian measures to address both problems.

Ehrlich was just wrong. Completely and total. He wasn't 90% right or even 50% right. He was wrong. And no it wasn't a self fulfilling prophecy. Even if his prophecies had never been made public they never would have happened. Plenty of contemporaries pointed out how wrong Ehrlich was. They were right he was wrong. Simple as that. ~ Ben at March 27, 2019 8:21 AM

Both the Erlichs and Malthus (and Marx) ignored improvements in productivity, basing their dire predictions on an assumption that existing technology and efficiency would be static while population growth would be dynamic.

Improvements in food production and distribution mean a year-round growing cycle (multiple harvests in the same field within one year), more food with less labor, the ability to purchase Argentine-grown food items in Chicago in January, and grocery store shelves brimming with inexpensive food year-round. We're no longer at the mercy of Mother Nature for our food.

Nine. Count 'em. ~ Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at March 27, 2019 9:35 AM

So, nine women pregnant? Did they get the baby in a month? Or does it not work that way?

Actually Conan they assumed the growth would be static as well. Or at least would only increase. And also assumed the current rate of productivity improvements couldn't be maintained. They were wrong on both accounts. They also assumed goods could never be replaced with anything else. Which is obviously false. When specific products become more expensive people swap to other cheaper ones all the time. And had done so long before even Malthus came around.

To his credit I think it was Erlichs that accurately predicted the end of cheap sweet crude oil. Got it within a decade or so. He was just wrong that this was an issue of concern. As the price of such oil went up we switched to other less desirable oil supplies and even to other sources of energy where appropriate. I doubt anyone who wasn't selling such oil even noticed it going out of favor. Apparently the world ended and no one noticed.

Lenona, I'm not going to do that homework for you. It is pretty obvious. If you want a source for another person making that claim you can find it on your own.

" Did they get the baby in a month?"

They each get 1/9th of a baby and assemble it later.

That's why they work in a hospital.

"People have very nearly precisely as many kids as they want."

Actually, looking at the youngest kids of larger families, I'd say most people have n+1 kids, where n is the number they have the energy to raise properly.

I just couldn't be happier to hear that socialists have decided to stop breeding.

> Actually, ...

No.

> Actually Conan...

WTF izzamadder with these people.

I feel vindicated by the research showing a lacto-veg diet is the most sustainable.
https://indianapublicmedia.org/eartheats/study-vegan-diet-sustainable-previously-thought/

Pass the mozzarella!

I love the woman who talks about how young she is... let us see how she feels about babies in five years.

feel vindicated by the research showing a lacto-veg diet is the most sustainable.
https://indianapublicmedia.org/eartheats/study-vegan-diet-sustainable-previously-thought/

Pass the mozzarella!

NicoleK at March 27, 2019 10:06 PM

Sustainable for whom? The purpose of any diet is to sustain you. You do not exist to sustain the diet.

Sustainable for not depleting global resources

"Global resources" are not something to worry about. Mankind has essentially never run out of anything, ever. And when we have, the challenge has been the transition to even better replacements. That's certainly what's going to happen with things like plastics in your great grandchildren's lifetime.

Postel and many others have written eloquently about this. In the middle 19th, academics were seriously concerned that the life of the mind was in jeopardy, because when whale oil was no longer available, no one would be able to read at night.

Better Solutions were found to the gratification of everyone, including the whales.

When people are allowed to know costs and prices, and innovators are permitted to experiment at making customers happy, the future brightens.

Progress is not about political strength. The capacity of free people to make each other happy is pretty much limitless.

Sustainable for not depleting global resources

NicoleK at March 28, 2019 6:54 AM

If you need a religion, there are better, less self destructive and less self loathing choices out there.

Amazing how many of you embrace the fallacy "appeal to prior practice".

But it's vitally important to think that everything is and always will be hunky-dory.

How many people do you want to see?

Do you recognize that only two general practices have allowed this? They are the use of fossil fuels, used to grow and distribute food, and vaccination, without which population density becomes a killer.

Even if you loftily declare 100% of the Earth's crust to be oil a mile thick, it's limited, and you will run out.

Now, go back to sleep. Everything is Just Fine.

If you need a religion, there are better, less self destructive and less self loathing choices out there.
_______________________________

How is it not a "religion" to believe that oil will never run out, that technology can solve every problem - or that there will be enough money for, say, colonizing another planet due to lack of space on this this one?

> Amazing how many of you

Or as Ben put it the other day:

> Wow.

Amazing Wows demonstration an almost supernaturally distinct realm of insight and comprehension.

> it's limited, and you
> will run out.

This is both literally and practically untrue. Mankind will never run out of oil, and you betray your high school education (and career self-interest) by claiming otherwise.

The most generous possible take on your fearmongering follows. Note also that it's explicitly condemnatory to your presumptions:

Thus is the world I grew up in, the world of scarcity and constraint, stood on its head. "The end of the oil age," says Julian West, a senior director at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, "is not going to come because we run out of barrels." West is a good person to ask about the errors of the 1970s and 1980s. "I believe I was the first person to call the peak of UK North Sea production," he told me in a telephone interview from his London office. "This was in 1981, and I called it for 1982." And how, I wondered, did he do? "It hasn't peaked yet."

It may be as wrong to project today's optimism into the future as it was to project yesterday's gloom. "Forecasting with a pencil and a straightedge has had a very checkered track record," West told me ruefully. But the most common view, and the one that I find most plausible, is that the demand for oil will peter out well before any serious crimp is felt in the supply. Something cheaper and cleaner, perhaps the hydrogen-based fuel cell, will come along, and the oil age will end with large amounts of oil left unwanted in the ground.

It is natural to think of oil the way a miser thinks of gold -- as a limited physical resource whose price must rise or at least hold steady. But that is no longer a good way to think of oil, or of any other resource in the New Old Economy. Most people understand intuitively that the essential resource in Silicon Valley is not magnetic particles on floppy disks, or hard drives in servers, or lines of code or bits of data; it is human ingenuity. The oil business cannot be information-based to the extent that the software industry is, but increasingly it is dominated by the same principle. Knowledge, not petroleum, is becoming the critical resource in the oil business; and though the supply of oil is fixed, the supply of knowledge is boundless. In every sense except the one that is most literal and least important, the planet's resource base is growing larger, not smaller. Every day the planet becomes less an object and more an idea.

(Emphasis: Uncle Cridmo)

If you so desperate need scarcity in your life, consider the most reliably means of its artificial production.

Sory for the speling, distracted by better quibbling elsewhere

Also, I meant Postrel, not Postel.

Back when I was superstitious (a church-going, Bible-believing, Christian) I had a couple as Sunday School teachers who cried-- actually sobbed-- over all the children they didn't have because they had used birth control.

I knew the two kids they DID have, and believe them not reproducing more was a gigantic plus for the world.

Kent...very amusing. But...are you sure it wasn't an act of some weird kind? (Unless they'd been brainwashed when young into believing that family planning is a sin.)

I mean, even before all the Internet pseudo-PSAs began popping up in the last 20-30 years about how maternal-oriented women shouldn't wait until they're 35 to START having all the kids they want, it's not as though women really needed the warnings. That is, uneducated women didn't delay having children anyway, and educated women, of course, were better aware of the hazards of waiting - assuming they wanted even ONE child, in the first place.

Btw, when I was a preteen (in a non-religious family) and happened to read about how rhythm was "the only BC method accepted by the Catholic Church," I assumed that meant that it was ILLEGAL for Catholics to use artificial BC. It never occurred to me that adults who didn't want children would ever take chances with birth control just because their CHURCH told them they had to!

In the same vein, I read the myth of Aeneas and Dido at the same age - but it was Edith Hamilton's version, so she covered up the fact that they were sleeping together - until he abandons her. I was shocked, a few years later, to find out the real story. I thought "wait - they didn't have birth control back then, so why would she throw herself at him and risk getting pregnant when they weren't even married?"

It didn't occur to me that Dido MIGHT have been over 40 - but I don't know one way or the other.

"...are you sure it wasn't an act of some weird kind?"

I'm sure. This couple also swore dinosaurs never existed-- all dinosaur fossils were just "pig bones". They were in DEEP.

I've seen similar people Lenona. And while I am a person of faith I agree with Kent that it is probably best they don't reproduce. Nutty people exist everywhere.