Human Sacrifice for Gaia

Regular BreakPoint listeners know about the inhumane lengths some environmentalists are prepared to go to “save the planet.”

Some have proposed taxing the parents of newborns several thousand dollars to discourage child-bearing, and thereby reducing CO2 emissions. Others have spoken of “culling” the human herd.

What these proposals have in common, besides their cold-bloodedness, is that mainstream environmentalists keep insisting that they are “fringe” views. Well, recent statements from sources that couldn’t be more “respectable” put the lie to those claims. And they should remind Christians why the sanctity of human life must be our highest priority.

During the recent U.N. global warming summit in Copenhagen, China came under fire for not doing enough to reduce its CO2 emissions. However, China had at least one defender: Canada’s Financial Post.

According to Canada’s equivalent to the Wall Street Journal, China is “the world’s leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation.” Hold it a minute! How can the world’s leading emitter of CO2, and home to 16 of the world’s most polluted cities, be a “world leader”?

Simple: its one-child policy. According to the Financial Post, the “inconvenient truth overhanging” the deliberations in Copenhagen is that “humans are overpopulating the world.” What’s needed is for the entire world to embrace China’s one-child policy.

This “simple” and “dramatic” fix would reduce global population by 50 percent by 2075. According to the paper, the failure to even consider such a measure at Copenhagen is proof that world leaders aren’t serious about global warming. I’m not making this up.

Advocating a global one-child policy doesn’t make the Financial Post as bad as the Chinese government-it makes it worse. The Chinese policy was an inhumane, brutal, and totalitarian effort to address the historic problems posed by China’s huge population.

In contrast, the Financial Post and others like it are motivated by a worldview that sees humans as a kind of virus infecting mother earth. For Gaia’s sake, they want the human population brought under control-even at the cost of human freedom and life itself.

In the aftermath of the Manhattan Declaration, some people questioned our focus on life issues. They wondered why we didn’t include other concerns, like the environment.

This is why. The sanctity of human life is under continuous assault. This assault isn’t limited to abortion and euthanasia-contempt for human life itself has become respectable. For the sake of the planet, we are being asked to drastically reduce our numbers.

But radical environmentalists don’t mean people like themselves-after all, their home countries, with the exception of the United States, are losing population. They mean the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet. It’s no coincidence that a recent ad in a British newspaper about the link between CO2 emissions and population control featured 12 African babies.

This is the “inconvenient truth overhanging” the debate about environmental issues.

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