Echoes in Eternity

Awww, no one showed up for the Rev. Gore's Live Earth concerts. Guess there still is hope that people have seen through the charade. But you do have to love the spin that the concert organizers put on the low attendance numbers: it was too cold, so people stayed in. It was too nice, so viewers didn't stay inside to watch the concert on TV. Either way, climate change was the reason. Convenient how all roads lead to global warming. Anyway, the warm-mongers have finally gotten around to the logical conclusion to all this hysteria: we need less people. So they are suggesting that even in places like Europe, where the birth rates are already at crisis low levels, kids should become even less common. Mark Steyn has a great little column this week in the New York Sun addressing this idea.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, is it because Al Gore and a bunch of elderly rockers organized an all-star stadium gala on its behalf? The colossal flopperoo of Live Earth is a heartening reminder that there are some things too ridiculous even for global pop culture, and one of them is the Reverend Almer Gortry speaking truth to power ballads.
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[T]here was something oddly touching about seeing rock gazillionaires who'd flown in by private jet tell Joe Schmoe all the stuff he doesn't need. Your own car? A washer and dryer? Ha! Why can't you take the bus and beat your underwear on the rocks down by the river with the native women all morning long?
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So how far are the ecochondriacs prepared to take things? In London last week, the Optimum Population Trust called for Britons to have "one child less" because the United Kingdom's "high birth rate is a major factor in the current level of climate change, which can only be combated if families voluntarily limit the number of children they have."

Climate change is now widely regarded as the biggest problem facing the planet," says Professor John Guillebaud. "We're nearing the point of no return and people are feeling increasingly desperate and helpless. The answer lies in our own hands … We have to recognize that the biggest cause of climate change is climate changers — in other words, human beings, in the UK as well as abroad." As the professor sees it, having fewer children is "the simplest, quickest and most significant thing any of us could do to leave a sustainable and habitable planet for our children and grandchildren." The best thing we can do for our children is not to have them.
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This is the logical reductio of climate-change fever: throw the baby out in order to save the bathwater. For a start, look at the "high birth rate" Professor Guillebaud is complaining about... [i]n Europe as a whole, the fertility rate is a little over 1.3, which is what demographers call "lowest-low" fertility, from which no society in human history has ever recovered. The Spanish, the Italians, the Germans, the Greeks, the Bulgars and Ukrainians will be extinct long before the polar bears or the Antarctic krill or the Latin-American three-toed tree sloth or any of the other species these professors wants to protect.
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Well, I guess Professor Guillebaud's grandchildren (assuming he has any) will eventually discover whether he was right about that. Few westerners are yet as boldly explicit in their anti-humanism, but there is a more general insouciance among these ancient European peoples as they commence, in effect, to vanish from the earth in an incremental auto-genocide: the Scots and Germans would rather weep for obscure insects on distant continents than for themselves. They agitate for a Live Earth but are indifferent to their own demise.

A few months back, I was at a meeting in Australia on nanotechnology and one of those great boyish scientific gee-whiz types was raving about all the exciting new things that were being developed. Invited to cite an example, he named the self-repairing condom: Hey, how about that? Don't worry if it tears in mid-use, the hardworking nanomunchkins will zip it up again in nanoseconds and you'll be none the wiser. I'm as agog at the marvels of technology as the next chap, but you could hardly ask for a more poignant example of the west's boundless scientific innovation on the brink of ruinous demographic decline. Maybe the world that comes after western civilization will be more "sustainable" but I doubt it will be more "habitable."