Pop Offsets is a way for guilty-feeling Westerners to pay for their use of carbon dioxide (CO2s) through the modern indulgence system known as carbon offsets. In this particular scheme, you calculate your carbon footprint and make a donation to an entity run by the Optimum Population Trust which funnels the money to “family planning” programs, and from what I can see those programs typically operate in the developing world (their website lists India, Kenya and Madagascar). As Chesterton said, those who talk about overpopulation always assume it is other people who are overpopulated. (Small Dead Animals has an excellent post on PopOffsets. She sums up the scheme thusly: “Every time I start my truck, a Kenyan loses his ‘nads.”)
Putting aside the dubious climate change science and the ridiculousness of carbon offsets, this seems incredibly offensive: eliminating future children, mostly from the developing world, so that people in the developed world can continue living in a way that they are hectoring others not to. It is selfish and perhaps worse; eugenic and racist come to mind. (Lucinda Marshall of the Feminist Peace Network has a long post at RH Reality Check which concludes that aggressive promotion of family planning in the developing world is also sexist.) And yet, as we write in our January editorial (the paper goes to press next week) aggressive depopulation is the logical conclusion of the fundamentally anti-human climate change agenda.
In their FAQs (#9) they claim that no PopOffsets project will directly fund abortion services, but this ignores (or fudges on) two facts. The groups they fund may use contraceptive pills and morning after pills that can be abortifacient. Furthermore, because money is fungible, groups that receive money from PopOffsets to increase their provision of non-abortion services have money freed up to provide abortion services. If the money allows an organization to bring a doctor or nurse into an area that will provide condoms, contraceptive pills, and abortion, even if there is some segregation of funds, the money has helped bring a health professional who does abortions to a region.
When you get to the bottom of this it adds up to one thing: environmentalists want fewer people. Whether or not they are killing them off through abortion and abortifacient drugs or preventing them through other family planning techniques or education, environmentalists have set us on a course that pits the planet against people.
