“bill nye Saves the World” has turned out to be a gold mine of outrageous outrage. First viewers saw the Rachel Bloom performance about sex or something. Then, those Netflix customers who stuck things out were entertained by the animated ice cream orgy short. Now, according to the Federalist, a discussion of what to do about “extra kids” in the developed world took place that was positively creepy.
The episode in question began with a sober analysis about how women with education and access to resources tend to have fewer children. That is why a woman in Nigeria or India might have seven children, and someone in Germany or the United States might have two at most.
Therefore, population growth is being driven by the developing world, and the solution consists of more education and economic growth,
But here is where the creepiness, driven by Nye’s obsession with climate change. Since people in the developed world use much more resources than those in the developing countries, a kid being born in New York or Hamburg is more problematic than one born in Mumbai or Lagos. So, Nye muses, how to penalize parents in the developed world who has “extra kids?”
Here is where we go down the rabbit hole back to the early 1970s when Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” was still influential and the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” was scaring the stuffing out of public policy experts.
Back when Nixon was the president many people believed that the Earth was going to breed itself to death, too many people consuming a vanishing supply of resources. For a hint of what this dire future would have been like, take a look at “Soylent Green” the 1973 film starring Charlton Heston depicting a hell world of 2022, five years from now.
Of course, technological development, especially in food production, combined with a slower than expected growth in global population produced the world we live in, filled with problems to be sure, but hardly a dystopian world of cities teeming with starving people. But during the early 70s, many experts advocated forced sterilization and even abortion to clamp down on population growth.
China actually instituted the recently defunct one child policy that did not produce much of a reduction in population growth but did create a demographic train wreck with tens of millions more male babies being born than female ones. The specter of forced sterilization brings to mind the musings of eugenicists that wanted to use the method to suppress the population of “undesirables” which is to say, anyone who is not white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
So why is Bill Nye going retro and behaving as if “The Population Bomb” had not been thoroughly discredited? That is something best asked the man himself, which one hopes will happen in short order.
