Interesting letter to the editor in today’s Charlotte Observer, in its entirety below:
Can someone explain to the protesting kids that governments never have been, nor ever will be, able to do much of anything to “save the planet”?
We have protested for 49 years, ever since the first Earth Day. The kids who joined us decades ago grew up to be wasteful polluters while screaming, “The government must do something.”
Humans are the ultimate reason for all kinds of pollution. Forty-nine years ago there were 4 billion humans on Earth and the planet screamed that’s way too many. Now there are 7. 7 billion polluting humans. Save the Earth. Don’t give birth.
I wish governments had the courage to “do something,” but people would riot in the streets if governments actually did the things needed to force people to act environmentally responsible.
Alan Dockery, Newton
The conclusion I reach is Mr. Dockery realistically knows government cannot enforce birth control, yet that last sentence speaks for itself–he wishes the government would enforce birth control. That’s the scary part of the radical environmental movement that few people seem to grasp–the demand that government control pretty much every aspect of our lives, right down to the very personal decision of whether or not to have children.
On that note, something has bothered me about young Greta Thunberg—what if her parents had taken the decision not to have children in the interest of ‘saving the planet?’