This week, a Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah shared his bizarre theory on how to fight climate change: Have more babies ― but they should be American.
He reiterated his proposal on Friday in an op-ed for The Daily Signal, a conservative political news site.
In it, Lee defended his idea as more reasonable than the Green New Deal, a package of policies that would create jobs through developing the U.S. renewable energy sector.
“Since the beginning of our species, humans have constantly been innovating and changing the world around them,” he wrote. “In fact, it is our ability to function as a collective learning brain that sets us apart from every other animal on earth.”
Lee, who has expressed doubt in studies that indicate human activity drives global warming, introduced his plan on Tuesday on the Senate floor, claiming that having more “American babies” would save the planet from climate change.
In his presentation, he ridiculed the Green New Deal and displayed photos of President Ronald Reagan firing a machine gun while riding a velociraptor and Aquaman riding a seahorse.
“The solution to climate change won’t be found in political posturing or virtue signaling,” Lee said. “It won’t be found in the federal government at all. You know where the solution can be found? ... In churches, in wedding chapels, in maternity wards across the country and around the world.”
Arguing that climate change is an “engineering problem” that needs to be solved with the “human imagination,” he said that “more babies will mean forward-looking adults, the sort we need to tackle long-term large-scale problems.”
He said, “American babies, in particular, are likely going to be wealthier, better educated and more conservation-minded than children raised in still industrializing countries.”
In his op-ed on Friday, Lee expressed doubt that human-driven climate change poses a dire threat to the earth’s population. “Instead of looking to limit and even shrink humanity’s footprint on the world, we should be looking to improve and expand it,” he wrote. “And yes, this means more babies.”
According to a federal climate report released in November, the U.S. is expected to warm up by at least 3 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 without a significant cut in fossil fuel use, and the global average could rise by 9 degrees or more by then without carbon emission reductions.
David Easterling, the chief of the scientific services division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, said in November that research shows the average global temperature is much higher and is “rising more rapidly than anything modern civilization has experienced.”
“This warming trend can only be explained by human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” he said.