UK Group Proposes Using Carbon Offsets to Stop Poor From Breeding

Carbon hysteria reaches its logical conclusion

James Corbett
The Corbett Report

9 December, 2009

The Optimum Population Trust (OPT), a UK-based "think tank" and registered charity, has launched a new initiative urging wealthy members of the developed world to participate in carbon offsets that fund programs for curbing the population of developing nations. The scheme is being promoted as a more cost-effective way to reduce CO2 emissions than investing in alternative energy sources and offers a way for elitist racists to feel ethical in their quest to exterminate the third world masses.

A BBC News article on the proposal dutifully reports the OPT's proposal and their justifications for proposing it. They note that the program is designed to fund "contraception" programs in poor nations, a term that helpfully obscures the fact that such programs—including those run by FPA, one of the agencies listed as a supporting organization of this new program—have used bribes to get poor men and women to volunteer for sterilization. The article does, however, allow space for a detractor of the proposal to point out that even if one does accept that limiting carbon emissions is necessary (which it is not), the focus on limiting emissions of people in Least Developed Countries (LDCs) is in itself nonsensical: "Carbon emissions from people in much of sub-Saharan Africa are so low that they can barely be counted."

What this error exposes, however, is not that the OPT has set its sights on the wrong target. In fact, they are simply introducing the idea as a politically expedient precedent which will eventually be expanded to include the developed world as well. Indeed, this is merely the latest such proposal from the group, which has previously said that the world's population must be cut by as much as half and the UK's population reduced to as little as 17 million in order to reach "sustainable levels." The group's patrons include world renowned environmental campaigners, academics and media figures like Jane Goodall, James Lovelock and Sir David Attenborough.

One patron of the Optimum Population Trust who stands out is Jonathon Porritt, a well-known baronet and a green campaigner who advises the likes of Prince Charles on environmental matters. He has long argued the link between "environmental sustainability" and enforced abortions. He once claimed to be "unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate." He is also on the board of BBC Wildlife magazine, perhaps explaining why BBC News tends to treat every pronouncement from the OPT as if it were a major policy announcement (see this and this and this for starters).

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Another prominent OPT patron is Paul Ehrlich, George W. Bush's chief science advisor and co-author (with his wife, Anne, and Obama's science advisor, John P. Holdren) of Ecoscience, a 1977 textbook that outlined in painstaking detail the various measures that the governments of the world could take to confront the "problem" of population, from forced abortions and one-child policies to mass sterilization of the populace through the contamination of the water supply. One representative passage reads:

"The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births."

With such patrons in its ranks, it is hardly surprising that the group would endose a plan to sterilize the poor in the name of reducing carbon emissions. Of course, the green rhetoric of "sustainability" and "carbon reduction" is only the latest garb for a very old ideology, eugenics, a 19th century junk science which concluded that the human race consisted of genetically "superior" and "inferior" breeds. Unsurprisingly, this long-since discredited hucksterism, invented by an inbred group of British gentlemen scientists concluded that inbred British gentlemen scientists were the master race and everyone else was expendable.

When the Jewish holocaust exposed the eugenics cult for the genocidal ideology that it is, the once-thriving eugenics societies had to go underground. Some did this by merely changing their name: the British Eugenics Society became the Galton Institute in 1989, for example. Others changed their focus. The American Eugenics Society morphed into the Population Council, a group formed by John D. Rockefeller III, and refocused its attention on the problem of overpopulation and sustainability. Under the cloak of "scientific" research into the discredited Matlhusian bunkum of overpopulation. In latter years, this merged quite nicely with the now discredited junk science of "manmade global warming" to provide a perfect front for the eugenicists.

If any further evidence were needed that the green rhetoric of carbon offsets were merely another front for the rabidly racist ideology of eugenics, perhaps the clearest indication can be found on the Galton Institute home page. Here, the group that once openly called itself a eugenics society brags that one of its main functions is to serve as a funding vehicle for Marie Stopes International, an organization whose founder was a rabid racist who advocated sterilization of non-whites and the poor.

And the eugenicist's agenda rolls on...