They told me if we elected Trump we’d be ushering in a Handmaid’s Tale-esque dystopian state where births are the government’s business. We’re not there yet but it’s not for a lack of trying. A group of 11,000 scientists have co-signed a paper calling for dramatic action to limit the danger of climate change. In addition to things like eating less meet and shifting to renewable energy, the paper suggests the human population needs to be stabilized and then reduced:

More than 11,000 experts from around the world are calling for a critical addition to the main strategy of dumping fossil fuels for renewable energy: there needs to be far fewer humans on the planet.

“We declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” the scientists wrote in a stark warning published Tuesday in the journal BioScience…

The scientists make specific calls for policymakers to quickly implement systemic change to energy, food, and economic policies. But they go one step further, into the politically fraught territory of population control.

Here’s a sample of what the paper says on population control:

To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live, in ways that improve the vital signs summarized by our graphs. Economic and population growth are among the most important drivers of increases in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion (Pachauri et al. 2014, Bongaarts and O’Neill 2018); therefore, we need bold and drastic transformations regarding economic and population policies…

Still increasing by roughly 80 million people per year, or more than 200,000 per day (figure 1a–b), the world population must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that ensures social integrity. There are proven and effective policies that strengthen human rights while lowering fertility rates and lessening the impacts of population growth on GHG emissions and biodiversity loss. These policies make family-planning services available to all people, remove barriers to their access and achieve full gender equity, including primary and secondary education as a global norm for all, especially girls and young women (Bongaarts and O’Neill 2018).

It’s not just the cows they want to get rid of, it’s the people. Granted what’s described here is a kind of passive population control, i.e. societies with better education and equality of the sexes tend to have lower birth rates.

What’s worrisome about this is that once lowering the population becomes the goal, it’s only a matter of time before government mandates are called for. China has done pioneering work limiting its population through the one-child policy. There are plenty of progressive technocrats who admire China’s work.

So how long before AOC is adding it to her Green New Deal? I think we can take it for granted that she already supports this. She raised the issue earlier this year wondering aloud if it was “okay to still have children?” Still, someone should ask her if she agrees with this paper and what she plans to do about it. Her response should be enlightening.

As the Overton Window moves left, it’s only a matter of time before every green politician is demanding we do more to limit the population the way we seek to limit fossil fuels. That will mean funding more abortions, presumably, but again I sort of doubt that will be the end of it.

For the left, there has long been a not-so-secret desire to demolish the nuclear family. The claim that science demands we regulate population is an invitation to the world’s busiest busy-bodies to start telling everyone it’s best not to have kids at all. Anyone who thinks that campaign will stop with polite hints hasn’t been paying attention to the new left.