Save the Planet: Stop Having Babies

London (CNSNews.com) - Reducing the number of children couples have is the best way to fight climate change, according to a British environmental group.The UK's Optimum Population Trust (OPT) says in a report that population growth is one of the main causes of "global warming" but adds that both politicians and other green groups are loathe to talk about it.Using fewer resources and "greener" technologies helps combat climate change, it said, but the most effective strategy would be to limit the number of humans on the planet.The OPT said that during an 80-year lifespan, a Briton born today will produce 744 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas many scientists blame for changes in global temperatures.If birth control prevented this hypothetical baby from being born, the group said, then society would be saved from having to deal with his or her environmental cost.Trust co-chairwoman Valerie Stevens said that advocating population control was not going to make her group popular, but that it needed to be done."These are hugely important issues and the unfortunate fact is that both politicians and the environmental movement are in denial about them," she said in a statement. "It's high time we started discussing them like adults and confronting the real challenges of climate change."To achieve the required population reduction, the trust says people should be encouraged to have only one or two children -- not through any form of coercion but by making them aware of the effects of having larger families.The group also wants to limit immigration into the United Kingdom, to keep the population stable, and to provide all British citizens with access to reproductive services including birth control and abortion.Though the trust has been linked to the "voluntary human extinction movement" -- an even more radical philosophy that says all humans should stop reproducing to save the Earth - spokesman David Nicholson said Wednesday that it opposed that concept. He confirmed that some OPT members consider themselves members of the loosely organized extinction movement.Greenpeace spokesman James Holland Thursday declined to comment on the OPT stance and its implied criticism of other environmental groups, while Friends of the Earth spokeswoman Nicola Jackson said that her group had no policy on population growth.In a brief statement, the Green Party of Great Britain said an increased population was not much of a problem as long as it was accompanied by sustainable growth policies.James Casford, an expert in climate change at Durham University, said Thursday that while reducing population growth seemed to be an attractive option, it wasn't the panacea that the trust hoped it would be.So much damage has already been done to the Earth, he said, that the world population would have to be cut by half before anyone could see long-term results."Unless you're going to go out and shoot those people today, it's not going to have much of an effect," he said.However, Casford said the world would have to consider seriously the moral and practical consequences of having large families.How?In the past few decades, Casford said, many environmental groups have looked at the issue of population reduction but now most of them shy away from the sensitive subject.Population reduction was official policy of the British Green Party in the late 1980s, but the Greens eventually dropped it after a barrage of bad publicity, Casford recalled.He also noted that environmental groups were never clear about exactly how the size of families would be kept small."There's an ethical issue about how you reduce people's effort to have children," he said. "That's a question that's never been tackled by the Green movement."One government that has instituted a coercive policy aimed at cutting the population is that of communist China.Introduced in 1979, Beijing's "one-child policy" restricts urban couples to one child, and rural dwellers to two children if their first is a girl. Members of ethnic minorities may have two or three children, and various provinces also allow other exceptions - for example, allowing an additional child if the firstborn is disabled.In China, sons are expected to look after parents in old age, and the policy has led some couples to abort baby girls, even though the government officially has outlawed sex-selective abortions.The restrictions, coercive practices, and abortion of unwanted baby girls have been blamed for a growing gender imbalance in Chinese society.The Chinese government denies that it enforces the one-child policy through any means other than financial incentives and punitive fines, but officials in provinces around the country are accused of violations as they aim to meet birth control quotas set by Beijing.