NPR’s Climate Propaganda: Arrogance Masquerading as Self-Sacrifice

[Valin]

National Review:

The idea that people should stop bearing children because of the threat of climate change is preposterous.

Jeremy Carl

August 26, 2016

 

David Harsanyi has already written a fine critique about the recent NPR story “Should We Be Having Kids in the Age of Climate Change?”, but the entire NPR article is such a bit of weapons-grade stupidity that as someone who works professionally on energy and climate policy, I need to offer an even more forceful rebuttal.

 

It’s hard to know what’s more shocking and depressing—that there are large numbers of people out there who take nonsense like this seriously or that our government-funded radio network has reporters credulous enough to report on it without a trace of mockery.

 

Nobody knows what will happen to our future climate, and you can find estimates from serious scholars ranging from the dire to the optimistic (I lean fairly strongly toward the latter view). But betting that climate will cause catastrophic disruption to human populations, at least in countries like America – changes so disruptive that they would make child-bearing a bad idea – is simply, based on history, a terrible bet. NPR’s piece is a pure form of climate propaganda in which arrogance, both on the part of the reporter and her subjects, masquerades as self-sacrifice.

 

The article informs us that “scientists and world leaders agree” that a change of over two degrees Celsius ”would trigger cataclysmic consequences” (scientists are agreed on no such thing, and not having crystal balls, it wouldn’t matter if they did agree—they simply can’t know).

 

One of the stars of the NPR article, Travis Rieder, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins with one child, claims to know about ethics, but he clearly knows nothing about history, which, at least in the developed world, has been rife with failed predictions of environmental doom and a continued under-estimation of human resiliency (a finding extensively documented 35 years ago by economist Julian Simon and built on by countless scholars since).

 

(Snip)