 Are global warming alarmists encouraging children to commit suicide
because their carbon footprints supposedly are harming the planet?
It certainly appears so in a children's game concocted by the
state-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Science Department,
available online.
"Pigs" Should Die Young
The game is called Planet Slayer. Using it, children can calculate
their carbon footprint--how much impact their carbon emissions
allegedly have on global warming. The purpose for doing so, children
were told in a version of the game that was online in early June, is so
they can "find out what age you should die at so you don't use more
than your fair share of Earth's resources." The game now asks only,
"are you a carbon hog?"
After answering 11 lifestyle questions, children click on a skull and
crossbones. If a child is an "average" greenhouse "pig" or worse, the
cartoon pig explodes into pieces, and its blood drains from its body
and pools on the floor. Average "pigs," according to the site, should
die at 9.3 years old. The worst possible "pigs" should die at 1.3 years
old.
"It is an insensitive game," said Ronald Bailey, science correspondent
for the Reason Foundation. "It implies that it is better for the planet
that children die before they can grow up to harm the environment."
Sends "Cruel" Message
Skaidra Smith-Heisters, environmental policy analyst for the Reason
Foundation, says the game is a failure at educating children about the
environment.
"Planet Slayer's greenhouse gas calculator reflects a morbid
egalitarianism that is disturbing enough when it is applied
uncritically in adult audiences," said Smith-Heisters.
"The Planet Slayer Web site's message to children is cruel and
unhelpful," Smith-Heisters continued. "I hate to imagine what the
long-term lesson for a 10- or 11-year-old is if they're told they
should have died when they were nine. Making people feel powerless and
worthless is certainly not a productive social strategy.
"Rather than trying to scare children, who don't make either policy
decisions or even household economic decisions in the first place, we
should be teaching them basic science and principles of fair play,"
Smith-Heisters concluded.
Better Message Available
Bailey says this manner of teaching children about the environment is
ill-advised. Instead, he recommends people invest in teaching children
about how the environment can be improved through the millions of
individual consumer choices that make up a free market.
"Instead of encouraging kids to commit suicide as a way to protect the
environment, we should teach them that the natural environment in rich
countries is actually improving," Bailey said.
"For example, the air and water are getting cleaner, and forests are
expanding," said Bailey. "[We should] teach kids that free markets
increase productivity and spur technological progress so that people
can use less and thus spare more land and water for nature. The
prosperity that comes from economic growth reduces the size of people's
environmental footprints."
This isn't the first time global warming alarmists have used children
to spread fear about the future. A California sixth-grade teacher
recently force-fed his class a stack of articles predicting a variety
of catastrophes if human carbon dioxide emissions are not reduced
radically. The children wrote angry letters to The Heartland Institute,
fretting they would all be dead in 10 years.
Both the sixth-graders' teacher and the Planet Slayer game have been paid for by taxpayers.
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