Human Children = Your "Carbon Legacy"

Hey Church:

I totally respect your buying into climate change doctrine. I agree with you that reducing carbon fuel pollution is a good thing, as is switching over to renewable resources. I agree that waste is wasteful and stewardship of creation is a loving act.

But, my Climatist brothers and sisters in Christ, we are human beings created in the image of God. And we worship a God who made us with his own hands. He has an individual, infinite love for each and every person on this earth, including those yet to be born.

Many of you promoting a faith-based response to climate change have also been willing to accept the labeling of unborn babies as a "choice." Do you now want to be a party to those who are looking at our children, God's precious gifts, as a "carbon legacy" to be eliminated in lieu of a CO2 offset? 

I pray with all my strength that you'll come to your senses as to what's going on. And may God have mercy on us until then.

"The word of the Lord came to [Jeremiah], saying: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you."

-- Jeremiah 1:4-5

Excerpt:

Writing for the scientific journal Global Environmental Change, two academics at Oregon State University - Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax - identify this lifestyle change in a paper entitled "Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals." In this treatise they attempt to quantify, in their words, "the carbon legacy of an individual," and to examine "how it is affected by the individual's reproductive choices," based on the premise that "a person is responsible for the carbon emissions of his descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him." So what did they find?

The two researchers calculated that a woman in the United States would reduce her lifetime CO2 emissions by about 486 tons if she implemented the green-approved household and transportation activities mentioned previously. But they estimate that if she were to have just one child, that child, over its lifetime, would eventually release nearly 20 times more CO2 to the atmosphere than the reductions achieved by its mother via her more mundane green activities.

In light of these calculations, Murtaugh and Schlax conclude that "the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle," adding that "enormous [our italics] future benefits can be gained by immediate changes [our italics] in reproductive behavior," and, therefore, that "an individual's reproductive choices can have a dramatic effect on the total carbon emissions ultimately attributable to his or her genetic lineage."