I want you to panic

As we all know by now, climate activists score quite highly on their ability to out-loon everyone else. Mercatornet passes on a few examples, beginning with Greta Thunberg.

“There is no more any prophet,” is the bitter lament of the Psalmist in the Babylonian Exile. We are more fortunate. Sixteen-year-old Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg has been out-Jeremiah-ing Jeremiah as she criss-crosses Europe lecturing about the imminent catastrophe of climate change.

Here’s how she excoriated “the people and prophets and priests” at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos. Expressionless and in her Swedish-accented monotone, she declared: “Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.”

We move on to what seems to be the core Malthusian worry behind the entire climate game - there are too many people. Those of us who are not climate activists should assume that the covert message is - there are too many people who are not climate activists. Apparently one answer is that we should stop having children. Until the climate begins to cool presumably.

The journal Essays in Philosophy has just devoted an entire issue to the question: “Is Procreation Immoral?” According to the editor and the four contributors, the answer is Yes. Basically their argument is that the safest response to climate change is not to have fewer children, but to have none at all.

Anca Gheaus, of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, brings a legal perspective to the debate. She observes that having children is clearly guaranteed by human rights documents. So the problem is this: how can people exercise their United Nations-guaranteed right without making the planet an uninhabitable wasteland?

She squares the circle with a proposal of delirious brilliance. Instead of decreasing the numerator in the child-to-parent ratio, increase the denominator! Polyamorous household with many partners and one child will reduce the birth rate. “Multiparenting—that is, three, four, or possibly more adults co-raising the same child or children—is a desirable solution,” she writes. “Moreover, in cases where each individual or couple parenting one child would not result in sufficiently steep downsizing, multiparenting may be morally required.”

I wonder what Ms Gheaus means by the phrase "morally required". Maybe she means something akin to compulsion. After all, people are morally required to be honest but that doesn't get us very far.