By Steve Jalsevac
December 14, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In addition to strong criticisms from Laura Ingraham on the Fox Network and Canadian MP Maurice Vellacott, there is increasing outrage to the blunt, sincerely meant comments by National Post editor-at-large Diane Francis advocating worldwide adoption of the Chinese one-child policy as a solution to climate change.
Francis's column is only the latest in a growing number of calls for de-population as a principal solution to climate change. The Chinese delegation to Copenhagen has been urging international adoption of a population policy similar to their forced one-child program.
A report by Britain's Optimum Trust suggests that the 10 metric tons of carbon emitted by a single return flight from London to Sydney could be “offset” by “enabling the avoidance of one unwanted birth in a country such as Kenya.” In a Dec. 10 column in the London Telegraph, writer Charlie Brooks states, The real “elephant at the summit”, however, is population growth. In spite of it being the core cause of climate change” he says, “everyone is running a mile from having a serious, frank discussion on how it can be halted.”
The UN Population Fund is leading the push for drastic de-population measures as what it claims is a necessary tactic to combat climate change. However, long before climate change or global warming became a major issue, the UN has been strongly advocating world de-population even to the point of today ignoring the fact that most nations are already at well below replacement birth levels. Many experts warn that nations will soon and inevitably experience traumatic social and economic upheavals because of the huge demographic imbalance between the aged and the young.
Listed below are additional responses to the Francis article and arguments given to counter her points:
The Canadian Financial Post: ‘The Whole World Needs to Adopt China’s One-Child Policy’ – Newsbusters
Ironically, she failed to mention that China's fertility rate of 1.7 children per woman is actually higher than that of Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, and many other European countries. In fact, many of Europe's current problems assimilating the massive influx of non-Europeans are the result of a declining population, which has caused a shortage in the labor force and strained the ability of the young to support the growing number of elderly.
Even the birthrate of the author's own country, Canada, isn't high enough to sustain its population, and Japan's has begun to so deeply affect its economy that the country's thinking of paying its citizens to have more children – $3,400 per year per child.
Global Warming Hysteria: The Potential For Tyranny 2 - Wesley J. Smith
Can you believe it? China – an unmitigated tyranny–has become, among the hysterics like the NYT’s Thomas Friedman and this writer, the country with policies worth emulating! Not one word decrying the terrible human rights violations of imposed abortion, female infanticide, and China’s explicitly eugenics policies.
And yet, we are told the global warming agenda is so progressive, so humane. Anyone who doesn’t see the potential that global warming could become the pretext for destroying human freedom and imposing death culture policies just isn’t paying attention.
The War Against Children Spreads to Canada – Hot Air.com
The Canadian newspaper the National Post has hit upon a brilliant solution to all the world’s problems; not only that, they have discovered that if their solution is not implemented immediately, the Earth will be destroyed in short order.
But the solution turns out to be simple… ban children! But a darker motive lurks at the intersection of cultic environmentalism and madness; it’s not just that the rich should be killed and eaten, that’s old hat; humanity itself is a cancer upon the Earth… and it must be expunged.
Population control no way to save Mother Earth - By Jon Ferry, The Province (Vancouver, British Columbia)
Well, I find her argument unsustainable. Canadian birthrates have been falling for years. And women in Vancouver itself already average only about one child each. In other words, they're doing voluntarily what China's population-control program has been doing since 1979 by coercion.
Not having children may, in fact, be one of the most selfish and stupid things you can do, especially in our vast country with its very low population density. Besides, I think there's a deeply sinister aspect to the eco-religious frenzy sweeping Vancouver and other large western cities. And it's sad how, in a couple of generations, we've gone from a Nazi-era fascination with eugenics and the selective breeding of humans to a guilt-ridden preoccupation with population control to appease Mother Earth.
Diane Francis and the global one child policy: hypocrite of the month award nominee - The Examiner by Tim Worstall
Diane Francis has two children herself meaning that she's a nominee for the hypocrite of the month award.
”One-Child” Planet – An Asinine Argument - The Cypress Times
When proposing that “governments should control family sizes,” Francis clearly has not done her homework. If she had read the Congressional testimony, she would have learned that China’s One-Child Policy causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on earth. China “controls family sizes” through enforced through forced abortion, forced sterilization and infanticide. This is not a “fundamentalist” issue. It is a women’s rights issue. It does not matter whether you are pro-choice or pro-life on this issue. No one supports forced abortion, because it is not a choice.
So you really want to save the planet, do you?by Colby Cosh In Macleans
Diane Francis’s piece could correctly be described as half-crazy, of course. Even granting that we are willing to endow the state with monstrous population-control powers, and Francis is obviously willing, her praise for China’s population-growth measures as “simple” suggests a willful blindness to its demographic effects and to the inegalitarian way the policy has actually been applied.
Diane Francis is singing an old song that environmentalists unlearned for strategic reasons. It made them look like she looks right now: authoritarian and nihilist and out of touch with the hopes and ambitions of ordinary people.
Diane Francis is Killing the Planet - The American Spectator
How would Ms. Francis intend to implement an international one-child policy? It might work in leftist European nations already committed to erasing their populations through rampant birth control and abortion, but Muslim nations would send the U.N. child police home in a body bag, probably headless.
The Re-Birth of Population Control; Human Life Seen as a Carbon Problem - Zenit News
The Copenhagen climate summit has brought with it an outpouring of opinions on environmental issues. Among these is a disturbing return to the Malthusian position of seeing population control as the solution to the world's problems.
A planetary law imposing China's one-child policy on all nations is what is needed, according to an opinion article by Diane Francis, published Dec. 8 in the Canadian newspaper, the National Post.