Your Tuesday Reading

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Mark Steyn:

The intersection of the environment and demography continues apace. In the old days, we worried about “overpopulation” in general, which, if only by implication, indicted the fecund mothers of Asia and Africa at least as much as the developed world, if not more. But eco-demography is a more exact science these days. Issuing a stirring call for the British to breed less and doing it from the exalted perch of The British Medical Journal, doctors John Guillebaud and Pip Hayes explain the arithmetic: Every new baby born in the United Kingdom will in his or her lifetime produce 160 times more greenhouse gas emissions than a baby born in Ethiopia.

We’ve known for years, of course, that a Brit is worse than …well, almost anyone apart from a Yank. But we’ve only known it in the very general sense that the Brit is the purveyor of imperialism, colonialism, racism, economic exploitation, and other planetary toxins. Now environmentalism enables us to nail down the formula once and for all: An Ethiopian baby is 160 times better for the planet than a British baby. So, if you’re an Anglo-Celt and you care about the earth, have fewer kids. Having fewer children is “the simplest and biggest contribution anyone can make to leaving a habitable planet for our grandchildren.”

Grandchildren?

Well, we’ll come back to that.

Go read the rest.

What's going to kill the West? Not nuclear war nor climate change, but simple self-loathing.