Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

"I love that you support the Green Deal," a woman told @AOC yesterday, but "it’s not going to solve the problem fast enough. We have to eat babies!"

You might want to dismiss the prank, but it was a brilliant & wholly-justified way to highlight the dangers of climate extremism.

@AOC In the video, a woman stands up at a town hall meeting hosted by @AOC and says, with an accent reminiscent of Borat, "We don’t have enough time! Too much pollution, so we have to get rid of the babies! That’s a big problem. We need to eat the babies!”

@AOC Afterwards, @AOC tweeted that the woman was "in crisis," but it was a prank, which was obvious to anyone familiar with Jonathan Swift's famous 1729 parody, "A Modest Proposal."

@AOC The most famous line in Swift's essay is, "A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout."

@AOC Swift satirically suggested that hungry Irish people should sell their children as food to the rich. He did so in order to mock what he viewed British heartlessness toward the poor generally and the Irish specifically.

@AOC One hundred years later, the 19th-century British economist, Thomas Malthus, made similar arguments to Swift's, but in all seriousness.

Malthus thought that there were too many poor people, particularly poor Irish people, and that the ethical thing to do was let them die.

@AOC Malthus wrote, “Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits, and court the return of the plague.”

@AOC Malthus was responding to a French writer named Marquis de Condorcet who, four years earlier, had published the “Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind.”

Condorcet argued that scientific and moral progress could be intertwined.

Greater knowledge and understand could lead to greater prosperity, freedom and compassion, but only if scientific progress were married to moral and political progress.

Condorcet's vision was humanistic. He thought humans could take control of their own destinies, without need for an external authority, whether god or Nature. His vision was universal: universal prosperity could be achieved, regardless of to race, nation, religion or sex.

Malthus argued that Condorcet’s vision of progress was unsustainable because it required falling out of balance with the constraints imposed by nature. Rising food production, he argued, would inevitably result in over-population and famine.

Malthus wrote, "The poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress…. The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race."

He wrote, "A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand & if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is"

Malthus was making a utilitarian argument. If we let the poor reproduce they would just end up creating more suffering in the future.

The British government and media used Malthus’ ideas to justify the policies that led to mass starvation in Ireland from 1845 to 1849.

After World War II, environmentalists drew on Malthus' ideas to oppose development aid & cheap energy.

Cheap energy would lead to overpopulation, deplete scarce resources, and destroy the environment, prominent scientists in the West feared.

Humankind “would not rest content until the earth is covered completely, and to a considerable depth, with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots,” a chemist, Harrison Brown, wrote in 1950 book The Challenge of Man’s Future

Brown was hugely influential. One of his protégés was John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor. Brown proposed the breeding & sterilization of humans to prevent “the long-range degeneration of the human stock” but Holdren described Brown as “surprisingly modest."

Holdren argued that Western scientists, under the benevolent olive branches of the United Nations, needed to control “the development, administration, conservation and distribution of all natural resources.”

Anti-humanist ideas came full bloom in Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1969 Sierra Club book, The Population Bomb, which depicted poor people in India as animals “screaming… begging… defecating and urinating.”

The United Nations embraced neo-Malthusianism in a 1987 report called “Our Common Future.”

Rather than move to fossil fuels, hydro-electric dams, and nuclear power plants, like rich nations had done, poor nations should instead use *wood fuel* more sustainably, the UN said.

“The wood-poor nations must organize their agricultural sectors to produce large amounts of wood and other plant fuels,” the UN-backed authors wrote.

The lead author of “Our Common Future” was Gro Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway, a nation which just a decade earlier had become fabulously wealthy thanks to its abundant oil and gas reserves.

Figures like Brundtland promoted the idea that poor nations didn’t need to consume much energy, which turned out to be howlingly wrong.

Malthusianism is almost always hypocritical.

In 2014, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), sought to cut off US funding to poor nations seek to build hydroelectric dams.

"If Senator Leahy is so adamantly against hydropower," wrote a development specialist, "let him show his commitment by first turning out the lights of Vermont."

Today, while the Norwegian government produces natural gas in Mozambique and Tanzania, it is participating in a European push to prevent those same countries from building natural gas power plants.

Intellectual justification for restricting financing for cheap and reliable energy sources often comes from environmental scientists and advocates, including mainstream ones.

Last year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report that rests heavily on the idea that poor nations can grow rich while using radically less energy.

“Pathways compatible with 1.5°C that feature low energy demand,” IPCC said, “show the most pronounced synergies and the lowest number of trade-offs.”

The IPCC repeated a widely-debunked claim that poor nations can “leap-frog” rich nations with solar panels, batteries, and energy efficiency.

In truth, energy consumption is as tightly coupled to per capita GDP today as it was when today’s rich nations were themselves poor.

jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.…

IPCC authors even promoted “bio-energy” — the use of wood, dung, and ethanol — fuels incapable of lifting people out of poverty that also happen to have hugely negative environmental impacts.

Happily, Malthusian environmentalists are wrong about the environment and have been since Malthus wrongly predicted that too many people would result in famines and resource scarcity.

Tech has outpaced increases in population & consumption, so that today humankind faces the prospects of reducing the total amount of our usage of natural resources, including land, as @amcafee shows in his brilliant new book:

amazon.com/More-Less-Surp…

@amcafee The power of Swift's original parody is that it motivates readers to consider the values of the person proposing such a scheme.

Such was the case of the "we have to eat babies" hoax.

"A Swedish professor said we can eat dead people, but that's not fast enough," the fake protester said. "So I think your next campaign slogan needs to be this: We've got to start eating babies. We don't have enough time."

In seeking to calm the woman proposing baby-eating, Rep. @AOC said, "One of the things that is very important to us is that we need to treat the climate crisis with the urgency that it does present. Luckily, we have more than a few months."

/END