Diane Francis’s Tuesday Financial Post column calling for a global one-child policy as the real answer to man-made global warming has become an instant classic in the art of antagonizing readers. The piece could correctly be described as half-crazy, of course. Even granting that we are willing to endow the state with monstrous population-control powers, and Francis is obviously willing, her praise for China’s population-growth measures as “simple” suggests a willful blindness to its demographic effects and to the inegalitarian way the policy has actually been applied.

In China, the one-child policy has been a class war that skewed the natural sex ratio, introduced chaos into the family-formation process, and condemned millions of men to lifetime service in a reserve army of the unmarried. It’s the biggest, cruellest biological experiment in history. The results aren’t really in yet. And even if it “works” by environmental criteria, a project that the Chinese can pull off will not necessarily be scalable upward to the entire species. I feel silly even having to point all this out.

What I like about the column is that it puts population growth front and centre in the emissions debate; it gets in our faces.

Labels: children, demographics, family size, population control

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