Keeping the Climate Safe from Too Many Brown Babies
By Mary Theroux • Tuesday May 29, 2012 1:48 PM PDT • 11 Comments
It was one thing for gullible college students in the late 1960s to present themselves for voluntary sterilization as a result of their buying into Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb myth. In keeping with the premise of the annual Darwin Awards, it might be just as well that those so prone to falling for groundless doomsday myths remove themselves from the gene pool.
But in a match made in hell, neo-Malthusians have teamed up with global warming proponents to extend China’s practices of forced abortions and sterilizations to India, funded by the incubator for global warming hysteria, Great Britain.
Since 2005, Britain has provided India nearly $260 million to fund forced sterilizations of poor Indian women:
With officials and doctors paid a bonus for every operation, poor and little-educated men and women in rural areas are routinely rounded up and sterilised without having a chance to object. Activists say some are told they are going to health camps for operations that will improve their general wellbeing and only discover the truth after going under the knife.
Special “sterilization camps” are set up to conduct assembly-line operations—as many as 80 in 3 hours—with little to no post-operative care or follow-up, with the result that many have died.
Rationale for the program was provided in a working paper published by the Britain’s Department for International Development, citing the need to fight climate change:
The document argued that reducing population numbers would cut greenhouse gases, although it warned that there were “complex human rights and ethical issues” involved in forced population control.
Clearly, unresolved human rights and ethical issues pose no problem to global warming crusaders bent on imposing their warped vision on the world. Nor do facts: Paul Ehrlich’s hypothesis was famously disproven (see this account of the famous Ehrlich-Simon wager), and developed countries have birth rates lower than replacement, yet “overpopulation” remains a widely held mainstream view, leading to cheery proposals ranging from forced sterilizations, to wars and pandemics as good for culling out large numbers of people. With 30 years of actual global temperatures having now widely diverged lower from those projected by global warming theorists, and the past ten years showing no rise in global temperatures, “global warming” has subsequently been rebranded, first as “climate change,” and more recently as “climate volatility.”
Yet public policy, urban planning, vast government subsidies for “green energy,” and on and on, continue to be made as if these theories were established fact.
Until and unless we are willing to let facts rather than emotion rule, such unacceptably high costs will continue to be imposed on those unable to defend themselves: peasants in China and India, and the poor everywhere today; the rest of us soon behind?
For newscast coverage, see also here.
Tags: Budget and Tax Policy, Civil Liberties, Culture, Energy, Environment, Family, Global Warming, Government subsidies, Morality, Nanny State, Natural Law, Poverty, Science, Women 
I had no idea that India and Great Britain had conspired to create such a horrifying and still active program. Thanks, Mary Theroux, for binging this sordid story out into the open.
Mark Charger | May 29, 2012 | Reply
Great post Mary!
It seems that the majority is always inclined to make decisions base on emotion as opposed to facts.
You can smack them with all the facts in the world. Some don’t want to believe it or simply deny the fact that they’ve been sleeping all this time.
amateur libertarian | May 29, 2012 | Reply
This was shocking news to me as well, Mary, and thank you for the eye-opener. Where are India’s reputed peace and life-affirming religious leaders as this Hitleresque population culling occurs? It has been said that the world’s young strong males are always cannon fodder for the greed and evil goals of the rich and powerful be they nations, organizations or individuals. Clearly the world’s poor, uneducated females are similiarily expedient.
Barbara Wanvig | May 29, 2012 | Reply
This is an opinion piece, not based on research, but on other opinion pieces from anthropogenic global warming climate denialists, often funded by the Koch brothers who also fund the Independent Institute.
Denialism that concludes that global warming has stopped in the last ten years requires a vigorous cherry picking of data and ignoring the consensus of 95% of climate scientists, regarding the issue.
Use of this “no warming” argument calls into question every other contention in the piece, since the author has clearly abandoned any requirement for factual bases to support conclusions.
Frank Smith | May 30, 2012 | Reply
Good said Professor Smith-Lysenko! Exactly what Party teaches us.
Alexandra K. | May 30, 2012 | Reply
Dear Frank:
Au contraire, these are facts: actual temperature readings of the past 30 years (the approximately the age of “global warming” hypothesis) have diverged far lower then those projected by global warming theorists’ projections—and temperatures have remained constant for the most recent ten years.
James Lovelock, for example, is an independent scientist and inventor of the electron capture detector. As the originator of Gaia theory, he is an über-”environmentalist,” yet even he has recently recanted:
As has been repeated ad nauseum, and one would have thought obvious, science is not a democracy—that is, what is True is not determined by “consensus,” but by facts.
However, even if science were consensus, the contention that the “consensus” supports the theory of global warming is pure bunk, and is itself based almost solely on the flawed research of one researcher who apparently can’t use Google properly. Many, many reputable scientists accept that reality has diverged from predictions and thus continue to seek the facts behind climate patterns. In “No Need to Panic About Global Warming,” 16 scientists (Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva), state:
And here their follow-up piece includes this graph of temperature projections vs. reality:
Further factual information: we do not in fact receive funding from the “Koch brothers,” apparently the strawmen of choice for those who do not care to engage in discourse. Regardless, it doesn’t matter from whom anyone receives funding; the sole criterion should be whether findings can be validated or not. As the scientists quoted above said:
With best wishes,
Mary
Mary Theroux | May 30, 2012 | Reply
Yet Mary, The basic contention that yours is primarily an opinion piece remains, as you also choose to use a straw man, i.e. British foreign policy is bad, thus all who are concerned with the impacts of pumping gases from burning fossils fuels are immoral barbarians.
Thus you have created a false equivalency to support your apparent argument, that humans can do what they want on this planet with no consequences.
Yes. there is a lot of data, and a lot more data, which is still being processed. There are a lot of researchers who disagree, or are uncertain about what all of that data means.
However, one thing it doesn’t mean is that just because someone wishes to pursue alternatives to using 19th century methods to provide energy doesn’t make them a barbarian.
Your initial article is shoddy and biased in a very heavy handed way.
(a different) Frank
Frank | May 30, 2012 | Reply
Dear (a different) Frank:
In reading and re-reading my piece, I see no assertion that “British foreign policy” is bad; that “all who are concerned with the impacts of pumping gases from burning fossils fuels are immoral barbarians;” that “humans can do what they want on this planet with no consequences;” or that anyone who “wishes to pursue alternatives to using 19th century methods to provide energy [makes] them a barbarian.”
That you draw those inferences could therefore be a function of its indeed being shoddily written, or a function of your own sensibilities.
In any event, the point of the piece was supposed to be that it is morally reprehensible for policy makers in rich, developed nations who have bought into the theory of global warming as caused by greenhouse gases produced by too many humans, to seek as redress the forced sterilization of poor woman in poor, underdeveloped nations. As one Indian commentator in the broadcast piece linked to above, Dr. Abhijit Das, Director Centre for Health and Social Justice, puts it, “It smells of actual racism that harkens back to the old colonial days. Since you can’t manage your own greenhouse emissions through excessive use of energy you come and say the poor are the reason for your greenhouse gases.”
We at the Independent Institute are very concerned with proper stewardship of the environment, and have numerous studies showing that centralized management of the environment is the cause of the most egregious environmental disasters and ongoing environmental problems which no amount of centralized policy solutions will avert. We similarly show that innovation has developed in the past, and holds the best promise for the future development of new, alternative forms of energy, that are both efficient and economical, for the greater number of people, than those forms being subsidized and favored by centralized authorities.
As the Simon-Ehrlich wager demonstrated, given a market economy, when prices are free to communicate relative scarcity, which assists in the exercise of rational decision-making, resources grow more available over time, not less. Population growth is thus not the enemy of a vibrant and verdant earth: people are brains contributing to the wealth of our earth, not merely “useless eaters” depleting its resources.
But, again, for those who believe that population growth is a danger, they are free to volunteer for their own sterilization. But it is absolutely morally wrong for them to impose sterilization and death on others.
With best wishes,
Mary
Mary Theroux | May 30, 2012 | Reply
Wow, this is deeply disturbing.
Speedmaster | May 31, 2012 | Reply
Ah yes, they are all National Socialists now.
Harold Helbock | Jun 2, 2012 | Reply