‘Stop having babies’ and save world from disaster
The Pill is vital in climate change battle, says scientist in city talk
ALEADING scientist says the best way to save the planet is to stop having so many babies – particularly in the western world.
Professor John Guillebaud, told a conference in Birmingham that the contraceptive pill could be the most important weapon in the battle for survival.
Otherwise, he warns, our children will be faced with a future of fires, flood, famine, fever and fighting.
As more than 1,100 Extinction Rebellion protesters were arrested, the academic said the problem was not just about fossil fuels.
He said that we must confront the taboo subject of population control in cities such as Birmingham.
“What is often overlooked is the greenhouse gases produced by each individual human,” he told the Birmingham Post.
“The person who requires the least energy of all is the person that isn’t there at all, the one who has never been born.
“It must help
if the world average family size comes down to two, with two kids replacing two parents.
“That needs to be the result of good voluntary family planning, delivered wisely and never forced on people. The Pill helps minimise climate change.”
Prof Guillebaud, who is Professor of Family Planning and Reproductive Health at UCL, says enough people are born every four days to populate a city the size of Birmingham.
Trained as a doctor and general surgeon, he says contraception is far more important for people in rich countries because their consumption is so much greater over their lifetime.
“When people think about family planning as an intervention, they think ‘Oh, those brown babies are overpopulated in the developing world’, usually in a kind of racist way.
“But we, in this country, need to think about the size of our own families. To have one less child in this country is the most environmentally strong thing you could possibly do.
“Not everybody is rich in Birmingham, but on average affluence is much higher than in Kampala, or Buye in Burundi where I was born.
“One fewer child in Birmingham leads to 30 times less damage to the planet than one fewer child in Burundi, because that child in the UK will grow up, they’ll want a car, and overall consume at least 30 times
more.” Prof Guillebaud, who has attended Extinction Rebellion demonstrations in Oxford and London, says teenager Greta Thunberg is right, and we have just eight years to avert global disaster.
“The ship is heading for the rocks, and the elite and the politicians of the world are not moving quickly enough,” he said. “If these things do happen, and climate change goes mad, then in the future everything dreadful to come begins with an F...
“There’s fires, floods, whether from sea-level rises or the ice caps melting. And there’s famine because of droughts, and fever.
“It will be warm enough in the UK for mosquitos to breed and carry malaria here. Finally there’s fighting. Violence, as everybody is fighting over the last remaining resources.”
He agrees with the late environmentalist Maurice Strong who warned ‘Either we bring down this world’s population voluntarily or nature will do this for us, but brutally’.
“Either it will be done benignly by family planning, or it will be done brutally by those five Fs,” said Prof Guillebaud.
“Why is it so taboo? It is good for individual couples, good for children and good for the world. To me it’s a no-brainer.”
Prof Guillebaud was speaking at a Planet Centred Forum event at the the Priory Rooms, in Bull Street.