“The daft proposal for a baby levy would kill the very hope which sustains and drives our society.”

What a load of BS!!

Thankyou Michael Cook for bringing this article to OLO. It is a very important subject indeed. But gee, what a pity you came out against the concept.

Of COURSE we need to need to link population growth directly to greenhouse gas emissions, and to overall sustainability.

Of COURSE we need to very directly address methods of stabilising, if not steadily reducing population.

Of COURSE we need incentives to significantly and quickly reduce the birthrate, in most countries across the world.

We can look at China’s experience with their one-child policy and work towards mitigating some of the negative aspects. But for goodness sake, we must not let it put us off striving for the implementation of at least world-wide two-child policy.

“Julian Simon’s optimism about harmonising the environment and population growth has again and again been proved right.”
In order come up with such a statement has the author been constrained to a cave for almost a generation – excommunicated from the real world? If anyone has been proved right it certainly has not been Simon.
Those of us getting sunburned with reality are acutely aware that population has grown while environment has diminished: harm rather than harmony, because population health is dependent upon environmental health. Lousy water, lousy human health and all that stuff.

“The ultimate resource is people”, “children create hope, not problems”. A filtered view of the real world as any decent parent knows.
Children bring both hopes and fears; problems and joy; and challenges certainly, to nurture them in a caring atmosphere towards their full potential. The costs in time, money, and resources, to adequately nurture from birth to adult independence vastly exceed those required by the elderly component. This latter weighs heavily only in the last few years of life.

If all women were eventually to average 2.1 births each, at appropriate total human numbers, populations would stabilize – a fundamental necessity to sustain a society living in harmony with the environment - which fundamentally underpins society.
What antediluvian thought dictates that Homo sapiens keep increasing its numbers? Australia’s present numbers are living beyond the means of their environment. The same could be said for almost all other nations. Of those, the most dire might be East Timor, with an average of 8.1 live births per woman. As a result 36% of its population is 0-14 years of age, twice that proportion for Australia. What hope for East Timor while its children reach adolescence poorly educated, prospects for social enrichment and gainful employment woeful? With over-stressed parents, they are prey to mentoring by elder peers steeped in hate against other competitive groups.

Let every child be a wanted child, hopefully with parents aware of the human flood which has already arrived. Other parents - let them leap aboard their Ark and head for Mount Ararat.

If there is going to be such a tax to reflect footprint, then lets at least discuss making it a means-tested tax. Only families with a joint income of more than say $150,000 annually. These incomes and above are more likely to spend on unnecessary consumer goods, travel etc, and each person has a higher footprint.

Perhaps though instead of a baby-tax, we look instead to additional consumption taxes. This consumption tax would need to be directly put into environmental offset activities and not dumped into general revenue. It could be set at particular amounts of particular classes of goods, and adjusted for suppliers that complied with set environmental standards. Eg once determined, an environmentally friendly factory in northern europe would get a credit based on its production techniques, and a smoke-bellowing factory in china would not. It would go someway towards encouraging environmentally friendly consumption, as the price-benefit of buying cheap goods from developing countries would disappear.

Actually, Julian Simon got it very wrong. Being an economist
who understood nothing about biology, he tried to put a $ value
on biodiversity. What he forgot of course, is that without
biodiversity, you won't have a humanity, so your $ won't mean
much.

Whatever we do, if its not sustainable, its bound to fall over
eventually. Its fairly pointless worrying about climate change,
unless we address the issue of another 80 million a year being
added to our planet each year, mostly in the third world.

What these two fellows have done is hopefully brought the
population question back into the discussion arena.

Its high time that the Catholic Church got real about population.

If it was up to me, the pope would be charged with environmental
degradation :) I guess they just want to make sure that their
chuch outbreeds the muslims, so those poor women in the third
world have to keep popping out babies, or they won't get their
promised Catholic ticket to heaven.

Today the world's entire population can stand each in a square metre, in greater Melbourne. Yes that's right folks, all 6.5 billion people in Melbourne, each on a square metre.

So the world is not even remotely over populated, and can support a population many many times greater than it is.

It was interesting to hear these baby-taxers on the air the other day: one academic in WA, and mysteriously, another academic in Canberra at the ANU. Amazing how these guys can network so that they both appear on the air-waves on the same day, in the same news item.
That is, there is definitely a highly-networked, highly-financed organisation pushing this global warming agenda. Conspicuously, it has become almost frenzied in the last few weeks, JUST WHEN THE IRAQ WAR AND TERRORISM HAD STARTED TO BECOME OLD HAT AND BORING.

It would be interesting to be able to trace the source and connections (and phone calls and emails) emanating from these control freaks. I think if we delved deeply enough, we would find an integrated network dedicated to socialism. The recent global push by anyone and everyone, is probably unprecedented in world history with regard to coverage and comprehensiveness. Such collusion and control of the media takes an incredible amount of money and organisation. For we are being bombarded with the bogus scenario every day, on every media outlet, in every country, including this forum.
It is as though someone very high up has commanded to start pulling strings. Even political parties, with all their media experience, cannot manage campaigns as effectively and universally as this. There is definitely a conspiracy occurring at the highest level, and I am quite certain that many of the global-warming contributors on this forum are low-ranking co-conspirators.

Put another way, if it were indeed a conspiracy, how would it look any different? And the answer of course is: "it wouldn't".
Therefore by virtue of the philosophical axiom which states that two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other, we derive that the current global warming scare campaign is a conspiracy.

Surely it would be much more politically feasible to impose a carbon tax on immigrants (who are going to generate warming gases) rather than on babies. In addition, a carbon tax rebate could be given to emigrants, for the same reason.