The pitter patter of tiny carbon footprints

Third, why pick on polyphiloprogenitive parents? Why not apply the Stalinist logic of mandating eco-friendly social conformity elsewhere? A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that divorce creates more households with fewer people, which use more energy and water and take up more space. How about a ban on divorce, eh? On pets? On Formula One? On non-essential air travel? On restaurants? If we all dutifully dined on spinach and brussels sprouts and pedalled to work, we could keep our carbon footprint small enough to enable double-digit families for anyone who wanted them.

The Aussie proposals may sound wacky, but in truth they are the logical conclusion to today’s trend for measuring humanity by its waste and “carbon footprint”. After all, if human life is seen as fundamentally polluting, then why shouldn’t the creation of new human life be viewed as irresponsible and problematic?

At the heart of this hostility towards new life is a lack of faith in the capacity of humanity to solve its problems. First food, then oil, then scarce metals, now carbon footprints. In another 20 years, it will be collisions with asteroids. This adolescent hankering for Doomsday by the University of Woolloomooloo senior common room, and its fellow travellers elsewhere, stems not from facts, but from a smouldering hostility towards their own species.

Walters treats the oracular David Attenborough as sacred writ: “Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, we should control the population to ensure the survival of the environment.” How about barracking for the home team, lads?

In any case, American economist Julian Simon’s optimism about harmonising the environment and population growth has again and again been proved right. “The ultimate resource is people - especially skilled, spirited and hopeful young people endowed with liberty - who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit and inevitably benefit the rest of us as well”, said Simon.

What Walters and Egger fail to take into account is that children create hope, not problems. Without the next generation - as Alfonso Cuaron’s stunning film Children of Men showed so vividly - there is no point in working for the future. Buildings decay, garbage piles up, injustice spreads like a cancer, and no one cares. But the birth of a child brings optimism and determination to make its world better than our own. The daft proposal for a baby levy would kill the very hope which sustains and drives our society.