Eco-Freaks by John Berlau

Author:John Berlau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

3. Sports equipment for Little League and soccer.

During his presidential campaign, the environmentalist online magazine Grist asked Howard Dean what he drives. Dean answered sheepishly, “Well, I drive an SUV. Naughty, naughty. But I have two children who play hockey and soccer, and there was no way I could do without a seven- or eight-passenger car.” He promised his next car would be “an SUV, but it will be a hybrid.” 65

Dean’s justification for his “environmentally incorrect” indulgence is not exactly clear. He could mean that he has to take his kids’ teammates to and from games and practices. Or it could be that his children have to bring their equipment to the game. It’s hard to put hockey sticks in the trunk of any passenger car these days. Or he just could mean that the smell of sweat after a game goes over better in a larger vehicle. Any of these reasons should suffice, if Dean were not going to limit the choices by making SUVs part of the same auto fleet as cars in CAFE, which would mean drastic reductions in weight and size. But he expressed just such a desire in the Grist interview and elsewhere.

“SMALLER CARS, SMALLER FAMILIES,” ENVIROS DEMAND

If it’s hard for Howard Dean to haul two kids around without today’s size SUV, imagine what it would be like for larger families. Environmentalists often do not take big families into consideration for one simple reason: they hold them in contempt for contributing to “overpopulation” and want to discourage others from having what they consider to be too many children.

In response to the complaint about car seats on the liberal blog Alas, a poster called M wrote that it was possible to get two kids and one in a booster seat in the back seat of a certain car. But if a person had more kids, that was her own tough luck. “More children than that is ecologically unsound to start with anyway,” M writes. 66

This may be typical of what environmentalists and many liberals believe. CAFE was born in an atmosphere where the leading population control theorists openly advocated punitive measures for large families. As mentioned in chapter 2, population guru Paul Ehrlich recommended “luxury taxes” on cribs and diapers. In his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, Ehrlich called for making “the plush life,” as he called it, “difficult to attain for those with large families.” He even pushed boycotts of sponsors of TV shows that featured families with more than two children. 67 Another population control fanatic, economist Kenneth Boulding, said parents should have a government license to have a child. “The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state, said Boulding.” 68

And population control theory influenced legislation, from the DDT ban, as we have already seen, to reducing child tax credits in the 1970s along the lines that Ehrlich recommended. Ehrlich backed a bill by liberal Republican senator Bob Packwood to reduce the child tax deduction for each additional child and eliminate it entirely after the third.

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