The doom and gloom of this past year seems to be getting gloomier... and doomier. The end of millennium angst has come a few years late but with somewhat of a vengeance. This article from Marketwatch seems about par, and yet some of the underlying, really deep, problems seem to call for drastic authoritarian solutions - or at least that's what the authorities want people to believe.

We are very quickly heading back towards the politics of population growth, just as we were 100 years ago. Population control was the scientific paradigm much favoured by the eugenics movement a century ago. Today, eugenics is hiding under a green banner but it is still the son of the father. Before nodding sagely at the future scenarios depicted by the article, of horrendous climate change, of spiralling population with the accompanied food and resources shortages, let us try to remember that these were not a problem last year. How can things change so much in one year? More importantly, how can one agenda be replaced by another one so quickly? In Orwell's 1984 it is not just today's news that changes but all past news has to be changed to reflect the current orthodoxy. What is important politically is not which future scenarios carry scientific weight, but which ones are given political muscle.

If we put together the fear of population growth and the ecological control apparatus being slowly put in place in the name of carbon trading, we come to an inescapable logical conclusion - that by procreating you are adding a huge carbon footprint to the world.

Just think about it. Why are we giving tax money to people to have children? Surely parents should be paying the state so that their precious baby is "carbon neutral".

Just a thought... but let's see how long it takes to sneak into policy.

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