No Cars, No Energy, No Mating: Has The Environmental Movement Turned Anti-Human?
By Kevin Killough foe Cowboy State Daily
A new report from the University of California-Davis takes an honest look at the widespread environmental impacts that will come with a transition to electric vehicles.
The report’s authors form a network called the Climate and Community Project (CCP), which says it “works to connect the demands of the climate justice movement to the policy development process.”
To address these issues, the report proposes a complete social reengineering of society to greatly reduce the need for cars.
The authors’ recommendations follow a line of thinking that some argue is becoming prevalent in environmental and climate change activism that views humans as a problem that needs to be solved.
‘Menace To The Earth?’
The CCP report notes EV batteries require lithium, cobalt, nickel and rare earth minerals.
So, the authors explain, the transition will require large-scale increases in mining resulting in heavy environmental impacts, mostly in poor countries where the mines are found, and increases in greenhouse gas emissions.
Rather than an exploration of the costs and benefits of an electrified transportation system that takes into account there is no perfect solution that provides for abundant automobile transportation free from any environmental impacts, the authors argue people should live in high-density urban environments where they will be free from “car dependency.”
The study’s lead author, Thea Riofrancos, didn’t respond to a Cowboy State Daily request for an interview.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal about the study, Allysia Finley notes the report’s proposals aren’t a fringe idea. A Natural Resource Defense Council report last year that examines the environmental impacts of lithium mining came to similar conclusions.
“Progressives’ ultimate goal is to reduce consumption — and living standards — because they believe humans are a menace to the Earth,” Finley said in her opinion piece.
Short Conservationists
Mara Altman wrote an essay published in The New York Times last month that discusses what she believes is a problem of human height.
In what is likely a facetious proposal, her piece titled “There Has Never Been A Better Time To Be Short” argues that the human race could lower its carbon footprint by encouraging the proliferation of short people.
People of lower stature, the author argues, use fewer resources, including eating less food and drinking less water.
“The short are inherent conservationists, which is more crucial than ever in this world of 8 billion people,” Altman wrote.
So, Altman proposes, people should be mating with small people.
Height Is Complicated
Dr. James Ahern, a biological anthropologist and vice provost of graduate education for the University of Wyoming, told Cowboy State Daily that what determines human height isn’t one thing, such as good nutrition or genetics.
There are more than 400 genes that contribute to how tall a person is, he said.
“Human height itself is kind of interesting,” Ahern explained, “because we think of it as kind of a single morphological feature — a single thing — that we can readily identify, because we look at someone and we see their height relative to ourselves. But human height is actually a combination of a whole bunch of things.”
In other words, a commitment to pairing up with short people might not produce a population of conservationists.
Ahern noted a 2019 study published in the scientific journal PLoS ONE, that reducing human resource consumption is better served by controlling obesity with policies that shift away from energy dense foods that promote it.
Earth’s Cancer
There are more examples of this kind of thinking in mainstream America in which humans are viewed as a cancer on the planet.
In November, The New York Times published a feature on Les Knight, founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction movement, which calls on people to stop reproducing.
Knight, whom the piece compares to the late popular PBS children’s show host Fred Rogers, argues that despite any achievements, humans are a net detriment to the planet.
Prominent climate scientist Michael Mann has said that the world’s carry capacity – a term to mean how many humans it can handle – is only 1 billion. In other words, he wants to see the population of the world population reduced by 7 billion people.
Celebrity primatologist Jane Goodall recently made similar statements.
Long History
Dr. Matt Wielicki, now an assistant professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama, told Cowboy State Daily it’s especially concerning when westerners are calling for reductions in population since whites are a numerical minority on the planet. So, the bulk of the population reductions would be Asians and Africans.
Wielicki said this line of thinking goes back to Thomas Robert Malthus, an 18th century economist who proposed that unrestricted population growth would lead to catastrophic failures in food supplies leading to widespread famines.
Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich argued the same thing in his 1968 book “The Population Bomb.” Rather than increased population growth producing famines and widespread poverty, as Malthus and Ehrich predicted, the opposite happened.
According to the World Bank, the share of the worldwide population that is undernourished fell from 13.2% in 2001 to less than 9% in 2020. Of the global population that is poor, undernourishment rates fell from 37% in 2001 to 29% in 2020.
Data from the World Bank also shows the number of people on the planet living on less than $2.15 per day, based on 2017 prices, fell from 2 billion to fewer than 650 million.
Who Supports Cities?
Knight stressed in The New York Times profile that he doesn’t support mass murder or suicide. Neither Mann nor Goodall has never spoken of any such actions either, but they’ve also never explained exactly how they propose populations be reduced.
In the 1970s, Ehrlich proposed taxes on diapers and children, covert sterilization of the public through drinking water and even spiking foreign food aid with anti-fertility drugs.
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