The Greens are right

But for all the wrong reasons. Yes, we're destroying our environment, exhausting the earth's resources, running an ecological debt we cannot repay. We're running out of food, water, living space, energy and places to put all the garbage that we create. We're fouling the oceans and atmosphere with our excreta. There's probably nowhere on the planet without its drift of plastic bottles and Q-tips.

But the answer isn't to go back to some mythical agrarian past where excessively clean smiling peasants with good teeth live in (imaginary) harmony with the world (after all, such lifestyles are actually grindingly hard work, nasty, brutish and short). And even if it were the answer, it's only going to work for a short time.

You see, the real problem is simply that there are too many of us. Malthus was right. Even if he got the timings a little wrong. We breed and breed and breed and breed. Amusingly, this was summed up perfectly by a character in a film, Agent Smith in "The Matrix", to be exact;

"I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. "

And the solution? Stop breeding. Stick that thing into whoever and wherever you like, but stop squeezing out babies. Reproduction should be regarded like driving and driving, or smoking. Nasty and antisocial. The Government could make a good start by scrapping subsidies for babies. No more Family Allowance, or whatever it's called these days. That was introduced to boost the population after WW2. Big news! WW2 is over. And so should breeding subsidies be. Indeed, we should be adopting the opposite strategy; have more than two and your tax bill goes up.