Across the Western world, demographers are warning about the collapsing birthrate. From Canada to the USA to Europe, not a single Western country is currently replacing their own populations—a reality that has many nations topping up their depleted work forces by importing immigrants from non-Western nations. The tension caused by that reality was described in morbid detail by Mark Steyn in his explosive bestseller American Alone: The End of the World As We Know It.
But climate change activists don’t seem to have noticed this demographic implosion—or if they have, they are welcoming it. The Toronto Star, for example, reported in 2015 that more people had died than been born in three Canadian provinces. And it was reported widely—although not widely enough—earlier this year that Canadian seniors now outnumber children for the first time in our history. Without utilizing immigration as an engine to keep the country functioning, Canada is quite literally a dying country.
But Canada’s state broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, ignored all of this and published a list of tips on how to combat climate change the other day under the cheery title, “What are the best ways to shrink your carbon footprint?” And as I’m sure you can guess, the non-existent problem of Canadians having too many children was one issue that needed addressing. According to researchers at the University of British Columbia, the CBC noted, one of the top four things that could help you reduce your carbon emissions and not kill the planet is simple:
Having one fewer child (which could reduce emissions by 58.7 tonnes of carbon per year, due to the absence of emissions that an extra person would generate over a lifetime).
I’ve noted before that one of the reasons I’m so suspicious of climate change activists is not because they are passionate about the environment. True conservatives are also conservationists, and the traditionalist arm of the conservative movement is even more so. The reason I am so suspicious of climate change activists is that they are so overtly anti-human. Infamous abortion activist Gloria Steinem has stated rather bluntly that abortion is necessary to fight climate change. Kill more people, and you’ll have less emissions. That’s some bloody easy math.
Besides the fundamental insanity of a government-funded media outlet advising a country with an imploding birthrate and aging population to have less children, the anti-human activists also seem to have missed serious warnings from impeccably progressive voices like Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk warned earlier this year that, “The world’s population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care.” Nations need to sustain a birthrate of 2.1 children per woman to replace their population, but as Business Insider noted, most Western nations are nowhere close:
If countries don’t have enough babies, they won’t produce a strong enough labor force to match the economic output of the older generations. And in the most extreme cases, low fertility rates create a vicious cycle of low spending and low reproduction. People who can’t afford to have kids don’t bolster the economy, which leads people to have even fewer children.
Many of the world’s wealthiest countries may not be far away from economic decline due to low fertility. The US, Denmark, China, and Singapore all have low fertility rates: 1.87, 1.73, 1.6, and 0.81, respectively. Japan, one of the most extreme cases of population implosion, has a fertility rate of 1.41. Its population has been declining for the past few years.
If the advice of climate change activists is any indication, they would welcome this news as a positive change. But for the actual lives of millions of people, it will be quite the opposite.
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For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.
