Andrew Revkin – Thought Experiments on Birth and Death

At the Business and Environment Programme’s 15-year anniversary held in London on 29 June 2009, Madame Dr. Baige Zhao,Vice Minister: Population and National Family Planning Commission of People’s Republic of China, pointed out that China’s population policies have since 1970 lead to 400 million fewer births in that country. This has significantly reduced the stress on the environment and carbon emissions as the annual CO2 emissions of these 400 million Chinese would have been about 1520 million tons (based on China’s current 3,8 tons per capita per year CO2 emissions).

Against this backdrop, there was a very interesting recent blog by Andrew Revkin of the New York Times. In response to earlier comments by Revkin that programs offering family planning information and services to women seeking smaller families had a climate value by avoiding emissions of greenhouse gases, Rush Limbaugh commented:

This guy from The New York Times, if he really thinks that humanity is destroying the planet, humanity is destroying the climate, that human beings in their natural existence are going to cause the extinction of life on Earth — Andrew Revkin. Mr. Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself and help the planet by dying?

In 2010 the Cambridge Resilience Forum will present a session on population and sustainability.

Original article: Andrew Revkin. New York Times. 20 October 2009. Read the article here…