The view that demographic collapse is good for the environment is gaining ground once more, and, surprise surprise, it’s global-warming catastrophe theory that’s driving it*. There’s an excellent overview of it in the Wall Street Journal today by William McGurn:

The most recent example of anti-birth thinking comes from Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax of Oregon State University. In a study called “Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals,” they suggest that if you truly care about the environment, it’s not enough to trade your SUV for a Prius, use the right lightbulbs, or limit your lawn to organic fertilizers. To the contrary, you need to start thinking about something way more important: i.e., having one less child.
The “basic premise,” the study reports, is that “a person is responsible for emissions of his descendents.”
When Mr. Murtaugh runs the numbers, he finds some alarming results. Take an American woman who checks all the green boxes: She recycles, installs energy efficient windows, cuts back how much she drives, and so on. Yet simply by having two children, Prof. Murtaugh reports, she will add nearly 40 times the amount of carbon dioxide emissions she had saved with those lifestyle changes. No wonder the Los Angeles Times Web site reports on this study under the title “Tie Your Tubes and Save the Planet?”…
Mr. Murtaugh…stresses in an email that he suggests no policies, offering only “some complicated arithmetic showing the likely effects of an individual’s reproductive activities on future carbon emissions.”
Maybe. But accept his assumptions, and it means that when a friend has a baby, you have to think we’re all the worse for it. It means that instead of celebrating the development that brings things like refrigeration, cars and calories to people who don’t now have them, we fear the day that a child in Manila enjoys enough of the blessings of life to have the same carbon footprint as a kid from Minnesota.
And if we really think the answer is below-replacement level fertility, it should mean taking a closer look at places such as Japan and Europe, where we can see what happens to societies when people stop having children.

Read the whole thing, as someone once said.

* By the way, for those interested in the science behind global-warming catastrophe theory, there’s a very useful round-up of the latest problems with it by my colleague Marlo Lewis over at Master Resource.