In the two centuries since Mathus's day, pessimistic prognosticators have been predicting the demise of civilization. Somehow we've managed to avoid starving to death over those two hundred years, even without being forced to limit our procreation, and still we have these arguments from the greeniacs that humanity is on its last legs.

Robert Frost said "A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel." Here we see the final stage of that truth: the author of this piece will not even take humanity's side against extinction. The sacrament of reducing carbon emissions has been elevated so high that nothing, not the biological impulse shared by all creatures, not people's innate yearning for a family, not even God's first commandment to mankind ("Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it") can stand in its way.

It's become commonplace to call the mania for carbon-reduction a religion, but at its extreme it is really more akin to a suicide cult. Most religions profess to love their adherents; not this one. Those who bend the knee to environmentalism are constantly told that everything they do harms that which is most sacred: the Earth. Here, in this book, even existence itself is deemed a sin.

People talk a lot about Catholic guilt, but at least Catholicism's original sin can be washed away. At least, when our sins are condemned, Catholics are told that there is a better way to live, a better example to follow. Greens have no such solace, no chance for forgiveness, no example to emulate. Carbon credits are green indulgences, but they only delay the punishment. No, the logical result of this most self-hating of cults is the embrace of that which repels all animals and all thinking men and women: death itself.

At least there's the chance of a green burial.