Responding to report, pro-life leader insists people are not pollution

Sep 10, 2009 / 19:13 pm

A pro-life leader has criticized a report’s claim that contraception is the cheapest way to combat climate change, saying it rests on the false idea that people equal pollution.

On Wednesday the London School of Economics think tank Optimum Population Trust (OPT) released a report titled “Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost.”

According to the Daily Telegraph, the report claimed that if basic “family planning needs” were met, the number of “unintended” pregnancies that would be prevented, would result in 34 billion fewer metric tons of carbon dioxide being emitted, nearly six times the annual carbon emissions of the United States.

“It’s always been obviously that total emissions depend on the number of emitters as well as their individual emissions – the carbon tonnage can’t shoot down as we want, while the population keeps shooting up,” said Roger Martin, OPT chairman.

Stephen W. Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute, criticized the report in an email to CNA.

“The idea that people equal pollution dates back to the very beginning of the population control movement in the Sixties,” he said.

“It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now. Free people equal prosperity, which in turn provides the resources that you need to conserve and protect the natural environment. So these anti-people fanatics have it exactly backwards.”

He said that human-generated global warming is “still an open question.” He also speculated that the OPT’s recommendations could result in forcible contraception to prevent what he called a “make-believe problem."