In tune with the “City’s Climate Change Action Plan,” the Vancouver city council long ago passed legislation that forces taxi companies to use only hybrid vehicles. It was announced today that this same program is being implemented in New York by mayor Bloomberg. Harry Binswanger has the following to say regarding government interference in the taxi industry, and relates it to the bastardization of principles so prevalent today:

Those who eschew principles are bereft of…guidance. A case in point is
the relatively innocuous concrete of government licensing of taxis. It seems
almost arguably a defense of individual rights: since a person getting into a
taxi is somewhat at the driver’s mercy, shouldn’t the government supervise
them, by licensing cabs, just to protect the passengers from, e.g.,
kidnapping?Well, no. That is preventive law–treating all cabbies as potential criminals
in the absence of any specific evidence against specific individuals. So it
is a violation of the principles of individual rights.

And now look at what has happened. The first step is that since the
government has taken over the responsibility of ensuring the passenger’s
safety, shouldn’t it, by the same token, insure that the taxicab itself is
safe? That leads to government dictation of what kind of vehicles can be
used as taxis. (In New York City, they had to do a *two-year* study before
they would allow a slightly larger, van-like vehicle to be used.)

Today, I learned of the next step in the progression. Mayor Bloomberg has
ordered all cabs to be “green.” Over a five-year period, hybrid cars will be
phased in. After five years, there will be only hybrid cabs in NYC. Thus,
the original, innocuous idea of licensing taxis to protect the public morphs
into an official, governmental support for the myth of global warming.
What starts as “How do we know a cab driver *won’t* kidnap his
passenger?” ends up as another step toward shutting down industrial
civilization.

 

Enivironmentalism in its most anti-life form. This series of articles ran in the Globe & Mail, Canada’s leading national newspaper, for Earth Day. Here is one in full…

Globe & Mail
Saturday, April 21 2007

Don’t have children, save the world
Parenting may be natural. It could also kill the planet.
by Leah McLaren

Jerry Steinberg lives with his wife on a leafy family-friendly street in Vancouver. All very nice – except on garbage day, when the 62-year-old says he’s disgusted by what he sees. “These families with children put out four or five cans of garbage and no recycling bin,” he complains.

As for parents who are environmentally conscious? The “founding non-father” of No Kidding – an international organization for people who choose to be childless – says he believes that once you’re a breeder, the damage is done. “I think environmentalists with children are hypocrites,” he says. “It’s like saying, ‘I don’t smoke but bring me another cigarette.”

An extreme view, perhaps – but one that is being taken up by a growing number of eco-warriors in their fertile years. As concerns over the dwindling size of the polar ice cap and the world’s fish supply continue to mount, these enivironmentalists are putting their carbon-offset credits where their mouths are and stocking up on birth control.

“Every living being on this planet consumes resources and creates pollution, whether it’s a worm, rabbit or a human being. And no one consumes and pollutes as well as humans do,” Mr. Steinberg says. “Rabbits don’t drive cars. Worms don’t throw garbage in the landfill. The fewer humans, the more we’re doing to save the planet.”

Sounds a bit crazy, doesn’t it? But it’s one of the reasons Mr. Steinberg and his wife have remained “child-free,” as they call it. And making the decision to deny one’s own biological urge in order to make the world a better place for other people’s children is a life choice that is gaining ground among serious environmental doom-and-gloomers.

In a society that holds up childbirth and parenting as the moral gold standard, the idea that procreation might be an irresponsible environmental choice is not a popular one – even among environmentalists.

Indeed, the issue of global population control and reproductive rights remains a taboo talking point in debates about sustainability. While most people are quite happy to talk about organic hemp baby clothing and the joys of compost, few are willing to contemplate the idea that our children are killing the planet.

But maybe they are. Just look at the numbers.

According to recent statistics compiled by the Global Footprint Network in Oakland, Calif., the average Canadian’s environmental footprint – which measures the resources needed to sustain the average human based on their consumption – is roughly equal to that of 15 people in Bangladesh. That’s 75 Bangladeshis for a typical Canadian family of five.

If you cart your kids around in a gasaholic minivan or SUV, you can effectively up that number by three Bangladeshis. Those over-packaged, non-local foods the little ones love to scarf down at every meal? Add a few more Bangladeshi footprints around the fire. Hockey lessons? Family vacations? Air travel? The cottage, the cabin and the ski chalet?

They don’t say it takes a village for nothing.

The average Canadian probably wouldn’t think twice about the environmental impact of having a couple of kids. But would you think twice about raising a Third World village? Because environmentally speaking, if you have children, you probably already are.

Even the World Health Organization’s most moderate population predictions point out that, at the current population and consumption growth rates, in 50 years we will need twice the Earth’s resources to survive as a species.

Mathis Wackernagel, executive director of the Global Footprint Network, says that, while many environmental groups shy away from the subject of population control, “to not look at the demographic challenges of the impending environmental problem is essentially a crime against humanity.”

In the 20th century, the global population grew to 6.1 billion from 1.6 billion, causing a 12-fold increase in carbon-dioxide emissions, according to a report from the UN Population Fund. As Albert Kaufman, founder of the Portland, Ore., chapter of Population Connection, recently told the online forum Sustainable Life: “Most people would rather focus on the symptoms – pollution, sprawl, species loss. But if we don’t bring the number of people down, these are just stop-gap measures.”

*************

Vincent Ciaccio and his wife, Laura – both 29 – grew up passively assuming that they would have children one day. However, after the couple met in college and embarked on a life together, they realized they did not want to become parents, a decision informed in large part by environmental concerns.

While the Ciaccos would not describe themselves as hard-core environmentalists, they are both ethical vegetarians who eat locally grown food, drive a compact car and regulate their energy consumption.

“There are lots of reasons to be vegetarian and a lot of those translate into reasons to be child-free – choices like not supporting clearcutting the rainforests to raise cattle,” says Mr. Ciaccio, who currently lives in Boston, where is wife is at law school. “Being child-free means we don’t run the risk of having children who won’t be vegetarian and undo all the good choices we’ve made.”

To that end, Mr. Ciaccio underwent a vasectomy at the age of 23. His wife is now considering getting a tubal ligation at the age of 29 – which they describe as “a belt and suspenders measure.”

And they are not the only ones. Mr. Ciaccio conducted a study of “child freedom” (or the choice to remain childless) for his master’s thesis in psychology at Iona College, N.Y., a couple of years ago. He found that 12 per cent of the child-free people he surveyed named overpopulation and concern for the environment as the biggest motivators for skipping parenthood.

Still, Mr. Ciaccio has endured a lot of guff for his choice to be sterilized at such a young age. He points out that his decision was just as informed and irreversible as the decision to have children – one that is rarely questioned. But he says, “There is the societal idea that normal people have kids and that if you don’t want kids, there must be something wrong with you.”

This is rich, Mr. Ciaccio says, since, in his view, parents who threaten the sustainability of the planet have their own choices to answer for. “It’s funny all those environmentalists with two or three children,” he says, “I have an issue with the dishonesty of it, this situation in which people claim to be environmentally conscious but the environment at risk in another way, but one that is socially acceptable.”

The same goes for Third World adoption, the current fad among celebrities trying to improve their humanitarian image. While it may change an individual child’s life for the better, there is an environmental trade-off. One cringes to think of the small metropolis of footprints Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have created with their well-publicized orphan-hoarding campaign.

Professor William Rees of the University of British Columbia is the co-inventor of footprint analysis and a pioneer in the study of population ecology. He has two adopted native Canadian children, and says he has seen many people in his field take a moral stance not to have children, because the world is overpopulated.

From an environmental perspective, Mr. Rees says, the decision not to procreate has obvious merit. “The current rate of resource consumption and waste creation exceeds the capacity of our living system’s ability to replace what we consume and assimilate what we produce,” he says. “Is adding more people to the planet going to help this situation? Probably not.”

[...the article is quite long, but goes on to say, incredibly...]

Ms. Ross, 49, says that, while she doesn’t believe in legislating biology (a la China’s one-child law), she does find it “indulgent” when people have more than two children.

…the triumph of consumer culture over human connection is what brought us to this juncture in the first place.

Other articles that ran that day include:
“Cut your spending, save the world”
“Saving Earth calls for a hero”

…alongside the following humanitarian articles:
“AIDS in Africa: A Special Report”
“Canadian volunteers lend a hand in East Africa”
“CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) making education count in Kenya”
“Take a Swing at Global Poverty!”

These articles have a theme in common: they condemn our North American ‘consumer lifestyles’ while extolling third-world poverty.