The crazier the left gets, the more it resembles some creepy medieval cult. Behind all the glossy NPR propagandizing, you could easily see this fellow in a hairshirt.
Standing before several dozen students in a college classroom, Travis Rieder tries to convince them not to have children. Or at least not too many.
For years, people have lamented how bad things might get "for our grandchildren," but Rieder tells the students that future isn't so far off anymore.
He asks how old they will be in 2036, and, if they are thinking of having kids, how old their kids will be.
"Dangerous climate change is going to be happening by then," he says. "Very, very soon."
Don't have kids because the world is going to end. How original.
Rieder wears a tweedy jacket and tennis shoes, and he limps because of a motorcycle accident. He's a philosopher with the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and his arguments against having children are moral.
They're moral. Cynics shouldn't speculate that there isn't a single woman on earth willing to have children with a philosopher in a tweedy jacket who spends his time explaining that the world will end.
Americans and other rich nations produce the most carbon emissions per capita, he says. Yet people in the world's poorest nations are most likely to suffer severe climate impacts, "and that seems unfair," he says.
So who is going to bail out these poorest nations if Americans don't have children?
"Here's a provocative thought: Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them," Rieder says.
Sound plan. Or we could just drown them at birth.