A WEST Australian medical expert wants families to pay a $5000-plus "baby levy" at birth and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 a child.
Writing in today's Medical Journal of Australia, Associate Professor Barry Walters said every couple with more than two children should be taxed to pay for enough trees to offset the carbon emissions generated over each child's lifetime.
Professor Walters, clinical associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia and the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, called for condoms and "greenhouse-friendly" services such as sterilisation procedures to earn carbon credits.
And he implied the Federal Government should ditch the $4133 baby bonus and consider population controls like those in China and India.
Professor Walters said the average annual carbon dioxide emission by an Australian individual was about 17 metric tons, including energy use.
"Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society," he wrote.
"Far from showering financial booty on new mothers and rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour, a 'baby levy' in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the 'polluter pays' principle."
Australian Family Association spokeswoman Angela Conway said it was ridiculous to blame babies for global warming.
"I think self-important professors with silly ideas should have to pay carbon tax for all the hot air they create," she said. "There's masses of evidence to say that child-rich families have much lower resource consumption per head than other styles of households.
But the plan won praise from high-profile doctor Garry Egger. "One must wonder why population control is spoken of today only in whispers," he wrote in an MJA response article.
sonicbomb Forum Admin
Joined: Aug 06, 2006
Posts: 1638
Location: UK
Posted:
Wed Dec 12, 2007 5:22 pm
That is truly comical, watch this space for more coming this way soon.
Fringe eco-academics like James Lovelock who were regarded as cranks a decade ago now get airtime on national TV - he of the Gaia theory who advocates slashing global population to 500 million. The logical end point of green politics is self-immolation. These weirdos are all end-timers and apocalypse freaks who in an more religious era would have been rampant bible bashers, telling everyone how to live their life and persecuting those who ignored them. They are the Green Misanthropists, eg see
What are we to make of green activists who oppose electricity and want most
of humanity to remain poor?
What are we to make of green activists who would rather see Zambia face
starvation than let people eat genetically-modified crops?
What are we to make of green activists who promote "voluntary human
extinction"?
Finally, what are we to make of a philosopher who once held libertarian,
pro-capitalist views, later held anti-capitalist and anti-globalization
views, and has finally denounced humanity as a plague upon the Earth, openly
longing for our destruction as the only solution to environmental problems?
Calling them all evil might be oversimplifying. A friend of mine, Critical
Review editor Jeffrey Friedman, insists that there are no evil people. He
points out that political activists love to paint their opponents as evil
but that usually their opponents just sincerely disagree about how to make
the world a better place. No one, the argument goes, does what he does
because he woke up in the morning thinking, "How can I make the world, on
balance, a worse place?"
I think Friedman is wrong to say no one thinks this way, since there are at
least a few bullies, sadistic murderers, violent Satanists, and gang members
eager to prove how bad they are. These people are evil in the classic sense
of the word. But the case of well-meaning political zealots is a more
interesting one. If someone genuinely believes that blowing up an airplane
will, in the long run, make the world a better place, might we say that
person - despite making a terrible, disastrous error in judgment (and
deserving whatever retaliation he gets) - is not evil?
Perhaps, but we are within our rights to inquire further about what "a
better world" means in such a person's mind and whether he has been morally
responsible in thinking that vision through. If his goal is a world of
peace, happiness, and prosperity for all, we might be willing to concede he
is not evil in the classic, villainous sense of the term - though we'll
still happily shoot him (and so would Friedman, I should note - ultimately
we both care more about consequences than intentions). If, on the other
hand, the zealot's vision of "a better world" is one in which, to paraphrase
Osama bin Laden, "the world runs red with the blood of infidels," it is fair
to ask whether this in any meaningful way constitutes "good intentions" -
though the zealot's desire to secure salvation and eternal joy for all the
non-infidels means that even butchery may be an attempt (albeit a failed
one) to do good.
However, it would be naive to think that classically evil motives never
intermingle with people's stated good intentions. The zealot may have become
a zealot in the first place in part because he loves to kill. Someone might
embrace the anti-moral philosophy of Nietzsche in large part because he's
eager to rationalize shoplifting and vandalism, hobbies he loved long before
reading Beyond Good and Evil. Similarly, a Marxist acquaintance of mine and
other left-wing activists recently had a rumble with neo-Nazis in
Washington, D.C. (think of it as a re-enactment of Weimar political
violence) - and while my friend went mostly out of a sincere desire to
oppose fascism, surely he went in part because he enjoys a good fistfight.
So "good intentions" can be a veneer over nasty, misanthropic, sadistic
motives.
And that brings us back to the various green activists I mentioned at the
beginning.
When an activist such as Gar Smith, webzine editor for the Earth Island
Institute (the group that worked to save the "Free Willy" whale), says
"There is a lot of quality to be had in poverty" and complains that
electricity is "destroying" primitive cultures by bringing them media and
machines and raising their standard of living, should we regard him as
well-meaning? According to a report by CNSNews.com, Smith says, "I don't
think a lot of electricity is a good thing. It is the fuel that powers a lot
of multi-national imagery."
When the president of Zambia says his nation would "rather starve" than
accept genetically-modified crops - and imminent famine creates the
possibility that Zambia may one day face that very choice - should we view
the anti-biotech activists who created this situation as compassionate
people? Should we listen with sympathy to the hecklers who interrupted Colin
Powell at the Johannesburg Earth Summit when he defended Zimbabwean property
rights and American biotech? U.S. AID Administrator Andrew Natsios,
according to the Washington Times, is one man who is no longer willing to
give the anti-biotech activists the benefit of the doubt. He now openly
criticizes them as obstacles to famine relief. Leftists may soon be forced
to decide which they hate more, famine or technology, and the answer will
speak volumes about whether their vaunted compassion is really misanthropy
in disguise. (One precedent that makes optimism difficult is
environmentalists' support for the ban on DDT, a ban that has cost millions
of lives.)
When the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement calls for all humans to stop
breeding so that humanity vanishes from the Earth - for the sake of Gaia -
they at least do so with some humor, but is it unreasonable to think that
there may be some good, old-fashioned misanthropy (with which any
intelligent person can sympathize) underlying their ostensible concern for
trees and ecosystems? In the grand scheme of things, if even a species as
impressive as humanity doesn't matter, what ultimately makes trees and
ecosystems so important?
Is it possible that many of these green activists are simply growing weary
of decades of disguising a deep hatred of their fellow humans as a deep
concern for nature?
Philosopher John Gray was once more-or-less libertarian but is now the
civilization-despising author of Straw Dogs, in which he argues that
humanity is inherently destructive and predatory and that we should hope the
"plague" of humans will eventually vanish from the Earth, enabling it to
recover from its metaphorical illness. Helene Guldberg, in her Spiked-Online
review of the book, notes that Gray laments the introduction of agriculture
some 10,000 years ago as an attack on nature, while Guldberg counters that
we should "celebrate the birth of agriculture...for marking the start of
human civilization." In adopting his anti-agro view, Gray, previously a
hardcore conservative (at least for a few years after his more libertarian
phase) has reached a reactionary reductio ad absurdum: He has come to hate
modern society so much that he joins the environmentalist radicals of Earth
First! in longing to go "back to the Pleistocine!" (There are times when one
suspects that all the world's fanatical causes are basically
interchangeable, as when the Palestinian spokesman at the Earth Summit used
all of his time to condemn Israel instead of touting environmentalism.)
We live in strange times when a conservative is echoing radical
environmentalists, while Guldberg, part of the Marxist crowd associated with
Spiked-Online and the Institute of Ideas, sticks up for Western
civilization, industry, and science (actually, Marx himself, who admired
progress and condemned the "idiocy" of rural life, probably would have
approved, but nowadays Guldberg and company's sentiments make them unusual
on the left). The Australian philosopher Chandran Kukathas suggested a
decade ago, when Gray first began toying with extreme conservative and
environmentalist views, that Gray should be labeled "blue-green" (in keeping
with the European practice of calling leftists red, conservatives blue, and
environmentalists green). Brian Micklethwait argues on Samizdata.net that
Gray is just a grouchy pessimist and always has been.
And people should be allowed to be grouchy pessimists, even grouchy
misanthropes who wish humanity would vanish. But if those are the sorts of
motives that underlie their manifestos against biotech corn and their
protests against multinational agriculture companies, we probably shouldn't
delude ourselves into thinking they have the public good in mind when they
make policy recommendations. It may be time to stop philosophizing with the
greens and start psychoanalyzing them in much the same way that we do other
hate groups.
FF
Graviton Mike (10.4 mt)
Joined: Sep 03, 2006
Posts: 1315
Location: USA
Posted:
Thu Dec 13, 2007 2:54 am
Good post there, Fission.
Blake Tewa (5 mt)
Joined: Jun 25, 2007
Posts: 680
Location: Florida
Posted:
Thu Dec 13, 2007 12:58 pm
These people see humans as pollution. Pollution.
Graviton Mike (10.4 mt)
Joined: Sep 03, 2006
Posts: 1315
Location: USA
Posted:
Fri Dec 14, 2007 2:34 am
Zose Eurosocialeests ...
Now those crooked bureaucrats in the little, round glasses want to impose Eurosocialist EU constitution with only one country's voting to approve it in public vote. ... More autocrats trying to tell everyone else what to do while they silence internal opponents with several hundreds of thousands of euros per year salaries.
These bureaucrats only work a few weeks a year with any dedication.
This "reform" is NOT democratic, nor an improvement.
This is exactly why socialism represents a stinking little elite ordering everyone else what to do without their constituents' approval.
Vote these jerks out of office in the next election for betraying European citizens of their voices in this monumental decision developing.
The EU is driven by France and Germany. At the moment both countries have Conservative governments (Sakozy and Merkel). You say that in order to vote out these "socialists" who drove the treaty, citizens will need to vote the opposition parties in. The opposition parties are the Socialists.....
Feel ze EU consensus socialism!
FF
Graviton Mike (10.4 mt)
Joined: Sep 03, 2006
Posts: 1315
Location: USA
Posted:
Fri Dec 14, 2007 7:58 pm
fastfission wrote:
The EU is driven by France and Germany. At the moment both countries have Conservative governments (Sakozy and Merkel). You say that in order to vote out these "socialists" who drove the treaty, citizens will need to vote the opposition parties in. The opposition parties are the Socialists.....
Feel ze EU consensus socialism!
FF
Conservative is not an issue in Eurosocialism. Socialism invades all the major players there.
People need to demand grassroots government controlled by voters, not by autocrats decorating their selves in authority and self-superiority avoiding constituent voices. If it takes a voting strike to demand voter control, then so be it.
I agree that it is a huge problem of all the major players there, but it also a huge fault in the political culture that supports socialism. France, Finland, and other major socialists love their huge vacations, and as Sarkozy said, France suffers from 20 minutes of kissing colleagues at the start of each so-called workday.
I am also dismayed at the French and German dominance of this system, since France introduced socialism to Europe in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Bismarck followed shortly afterward in this downspin that originally rose from the HUGE class differences of earlier royals-ruled, feudal Europe.
The French and Germans may as well have everyone else -- the Quislings against common voters -- sign the EU constitution in an old railroad car, making symbolic reference to the vehicle they both employed for signing treacherous documents. I could just see the Merkel, the Bundesbank (German Central Bank) director, and Sarkozy doing a stomping victory jig together outside.
It bothers me even more that Britain has fallen into the socialist trap, since Britain is fundamental in history for inspiring legal gains in democracy, as well as the importance of individual human rights. Socialism only attacks democracy with a new elite largely based on political in-playing rather than competent merit, and inspires the group mentality that weakens the importance of individuals.
Consider that the EU was modeled after the PhD thesis of Helmut Kohl, who was widely known for corruption in access to secret accounts as well as the Flick bribery scandal.
Similarly, Putin protected Yeltsin from prosecution in stealing many billions of Russian government funds. Putin very likely had to be in on this major haul of at least 15 billion dollars, which explains why Putin is not thieving as much now after those many billions were stolen from IMF (International Monetary Funds) and widely disseminated among the influential elements of Russian government.
It's easy to see that whole socialist systems are self-managing systems of corruption. This is why you don't see government protection of corruption informants in European law, like you do for whistleblowers in USA. European law does not generally provide immunity from prosecution of those who could inform against system corruption. Asians generally only take actions against those who fall out of favor with the leadership system, unless the whole system was touched by the same scandal, like with Yeltsin. In fact, just about every legal agency in Moscow was in on the Yeltsin corruption.
As much as I do not like FAS, the article was posted at the FAS site, from an outside source:
Its quite conveniant also that those scientists don't get anywhere near as much airtime as self serving pigs like Al Gore, promoting his propaganda. I would like to hear a balanced opinion on global warming when i watch the news, then i can make my own judgement, not be brainwashed into feeling guilty every time i let off i am damaging the planet. I'm sick and tired of seeing pictures of polar ice falling into the ocean every time global warming gets mentioned!
Graviton Mike (10.4 mt)
Joined: Sep 03, 2006
Posts: 1315
Location: USA
Posted:
Tue Sep 09, 2008 7:05 pm
Here is an excellent example of true socialism completely corrupts government, especially those with putin-styled dictatorships:
Stalin made the drought far worse by forcibly shipping out the remaining food, leaving almost none for Ukraine. The surplus was so high that much of it was put on the world market for quick cash resources in the 5 Year Plan.
So quickly so many forget.
Stalin actually borrowed this idea from Lenin's earlier go at this forced starvation in Ukraine as well.
Also notice how the Putiniks shut down the Georgian pipeline, their only competitor, with bombing in the recent fighting. This shut down the line all the way from Azerbaijan to Turkey.
People are so deluded not to see the dangers of too much central control of an economy that attracts vicious theft of state property and ultranationalist lackeys that often concoct murderous plots for domination.
bueschu Cherokee (3.8 mt)
Joined: Mar 17, 2008
Posts: 402
Posted:
Fri Sep 12, 2008 4:07 pm
I laugh because you seem to use the word "socialist" as a synonym for everything that went wrong in recent human history. Our definitions of "socialism" differ strongly: I use the word to describe a policy that is based on the concept of a solidary society and aims to lessen the cleavege between different social groups. You use it to describe ultra-nationalism, authoritarian rule and a strongly centralized economy in general (which in terms of Russia might also be called state-capitalism).
Blake Tewa (5 mt)
Joined: Jun 25, 2007
Posts: 680
Location: Florida
Posted:
Fri Sep 12, 2008 11:07 pm
It doesn't matter what your own personal definition of socialism is. Look at the results.
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AND FINALLY: GREEN MISANTHROPISTS PROMOTE VOLUNTARY HUMAN EXTINCTION
