Last Thursday, WSJ columnist Joseph Sternberg used his perch at the “political economics” blog, which “draws on personal insight and experience” to talk about the E.U., to talk about AOC, Bernie Sanders, Japan, and babies.
In a piece titled “A Hostile Climate For Children,” Sternberg writes that AOC just “couldn’t quite bring herself” to say no to the “faux constituent” “prankster” that asked about eating babies--a thesis that demonstrates Sternberg’s willingness to participate in an obvious hoax, even while acknowledging it as such.
He connected the hoax with a response Bernie Sanders gave at the recent climate town hall, when he said that making sure women have access to birth control is “a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe.” From there, Sternberg mentions Prince Harry’s announcement that he would only have two children for environmental reasons, before finally getting to his point: Japan’s low birth rates.
Japan’s waning population growth is, as Sternberg writes, a social issue that’s cause for concern. But what he doesn’t note is that it’s in no way actually related to or caused by environmental concerns.
Sternberg makes an obviously fallacious argument in connecting the two issues, which even he acknowledges, writing that one shouldn’t “assume causation when correlation will do.”
That doesn’t prevent Sternberg from addressing what he feels is “the bigger question climate activists never engage when they talk about population: Is their less carbon-intensive dream world a place we actually want to live in, if the price of achieving it is to have fewer children?”
But when climate activists talk about population, they’re not talking about princes like Harry having two kids. They’re talking about working in developing countries to secure reproductive rights for women so that they have control over their bodies and are free to choose how many children they have. It’s about freeing them from the expectation that a woman’s sole role is to bear and raise children, giving them the opportunity and autonomy to get a job outside the home. It’s about bringing them fully into the economic and social systems that have long reduced them to a basic biological function.
It’s not inherently people themselves that are the problem--it’s what and how we consume the goods that require environmental inputs. And while many are struggling with the anxiety and ethics of bringing children into a burning world, none are advocating for policies that would reproduce Japan’s unique situation. The “price” of that less-carbon-intensive world isn’t everyone having fewer children, it’s giving women the option to do more than have children with their lives.
Obviously Sternberg is blind, either intentionally or not, to this reality--perhaps unsurprising for a man. And the WSJ’s opinion page isn’t exactly rife with women’s perspective.
When it comes to climate change, columnist Kimberly Strassel occasionally writes about it, and women can co-author pieces, but unless a woman is, say, a lawyer for TransCanada, a consultant for the industry, or a scientist in denial, the Journal doesn’t appear to be interested in hearing from her.
It’s been almost 10 full years since they allowed a woman to write something positive about climate change without being accompanied by a man. In October of 2009, Kristen Gillibrand wrote about how cap-and-trade would be good for New York.
Since then, there have been about two dozen pro-climate pieces, all authored by men, and some 200 anti-climate-science pieces, overwhelmingly written by men.
We shouldn’t be surprised, then, when a WSJ column that’s supposedly drawn from “personal insight and experience” so fundamentally fails to consider women’s perspectives and experiences.
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