Michael A. Walsh
Al Gore, America's loopiest ex-vice president, is at it again. Not content with pocketing a fortune by scaring his fellow citizens with the imaginary boogeyman of "man-made climate change," the prophet of doom now wants everybody to save the planet by -- wait for it -- halting population growth.
You heard that right: To save mother Gaia, it's imperative that we kill ourselves as a species. Let a thousand flowers bloom, but be sure to have only one or two kids, lest you make "climate change" worse.
Ladies, this means you: "One of the things we could do about it is to change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principal ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women," Gore said in New York last week. "When that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices and more balanced choices."
This from a guy who has the carbon footprint of Bigfoot: four kids, a jet-fueled lifestyle, a huge Nashville mansion that's four times the size of the average new American home and uses up 20 times as much electricity.
Hypocrisy, anybody?
Since he lost the whisker-close presidential election of 2000, Gore has turned into a combination of Jeremiah and Croesus, predicting doom while pocketing cash from such harebrained schemes as carbon credits and offsets, under which companies can pay for the right to emit carbon dioxide -- the gas we release every time we exhale.
But the marks have started to get wise: Congress has abandoned "climate-change" legislation, while the Chicago Climate Exchange, in which Gore was a major investor, finally ended its crackpot carbon-trading scheme last year.
So Gore's moved on -- straight back to the early 19th century of Thomas Malthus, who warned direly of the dangers of overpopulation and mass starvation, never foreseeing the dramatic improvements in agriculture that today allow a tiny percentage of the US population to feed the nation.
Liberals generally detest the notion of having the government in the bedroom -- except, apparently, when it's for "a good cause." Thus Gore embraces the notion that we can "stabilize" the population, as if people were animals to be bred according to fiat.
But there's no such thing as a "stable" population: A society that's not busy growing -- unleashing its vast creative energies in the process -- is busy dying.
Given the demands on the welfare state, a society that skews elderly will be unable to afford programs such as Medicare and Social Security, which effectively operate on a pay-as-you-go basis. Fewer kids means drastic cuts in benefits -- as Americans are about to find out.
Indeed, the developed world's problem is the opposite of overpopulation. Twenty countries, all European but for Japan, now have negative population growth. It's not just Russia and the countries of the old East Bloc, but also Germany, Austria, Italy and Greece -- where they're rioting in the streets over the demise of the welfare state. As for Japan, its population is expected to be fully 21 percent lower than its current 127.5 million by 2050.
At more than 300 million souls, the United States is holding steady, with American women having about 2.1 children apiece -- replacement level. Effectively, we've already "stabilized" -- and were it not for immigrants, we'd be declining, too.
So who is Gore talking to? The Third World, that's who. Add Great White Father to his Nobel Peace Prize and his Academy Award honors as he tries to save the planet.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/al_gore_next_crusade_in_your_bed_ZxBde3uCieomMrk37DThdL#ixzz1R4F61pT4
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