They really hate people

The sub-text of the whole environmental movement is that people are irredeemably bad. After all we cause all the problems in the world.

If you were puzzled by occasional references to "population policy" in the reports on the Copenhagen conference this article might fill in some gaps. The article refers to Malthusianism which is a belief that we are doomed because we will shortly run out of food or other resources- it's been around since Roman times and ignores exponential technology advances which allow each generation to produce more food/energy/minerals more efficiently than previous generations.

From spiked.com

‘We need a planetary one-child policy’
Malthusianism is so widespread that greens can now openly sing the praises of China’s population authoritarianism.
Brendan O’Neill


It is testament to the relentless rise of neo-Malthusianism that people are now openly praising China’s one-child policy. At the Copenhagen summit on climate change, Zhao Baige, vice-minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China, said ‘population control is key to reaching a climate deal’, and none of the Western leaders or radical green activists – who have complained about everything from politicians’ use of limousines to the presence of Coca Cola – batted an eyelid (1).

In the run-up to the summit, leading Western greens gave thanks for China’s stringent population policies. ‘Had there been no “one child family” policy in China there would now have been 400million additional Chinese citizens’, said Jonathon Porritt, former chair of the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission (2). An eco-feminist writing in the UK Guardian said, with an almost audible sigh of relief, that there are ‘300 to 400million fewer people on the planet’ as a result of China’s one-child policy (3). (A feminist praising authoritarian control over women’s reproductive lives? You couldn’t make it up.)

A Canadian newspaper columnist drew out the logic of these paeans to China’s population policing. She argued that ‘the real inconvenient truth overhanging the Copenhagen conference [is] that humans are overpopulating the planet’, and said ‘a planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate, which is currently one million births every four days’. She said we should thank China for its ‘one-child-only edict’ (4).

The public complimenting of China’s one-child policy shows how utterly mainstream Malthusianism has become. Western Malthusians have long had a soft spot for China’s barbaric one-child policy, seeing it as a useful tool for keeping down the number of yellow people on the planet; they even helped to fund and mould China’s population-control programmes and provided ‘acceptable discourse’ to make the one-child policy look like a reproductive health initiative rather than an alarmingly illiberal method of control over women’s choices and bodies (5). Yet at the same time they recognised that they could not openly praise China’s methods for fear of exposing their own authoritarian instincts. That they now feel free to do so shows how worryingly ascendant is the misanthropic creed of Malthusianism.

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