Sir Attenborough may be fine gentlemen but he should to be sensitive to how it appears from the other side of the pond.
I am not sure the rest of the world needs or desires another form or round of 19th and 20th century liberal paternalism and possibly even imperialism, to put it mildly. People do not forget history.
I do believe that family planning is necessary in developing countries for their own reasons and not CO2. And they are working on it. Economist recently had an article on
rapidly falling fertility rates in developing countries. It will fall more rapidly as prosperity increases.
As Goerge Monbiot suggests towards the end, the problem is not the number but the level of consumption. With a GDP of 1100$ per-capita GDP, a Kenyan kid is not going to consume a lot of energy or produce CO2. What he needs is education, governance, infrastructure and ofcourse green technology. Kenyan/indian/chinese mothers and fathers are rational enough to make decisions about children. They definitely need partners, but not carbon offsets based on their lives.
I dont expect this idea to go anywhere but it can increase distrust and create hurdles in the negotiations.
Rich nations to offset emissions with birth control
Radical plan to cut CO2 argues that paying for family planning is developing world is the best bet
Consumers in the developed world are to be offered a radical method of offsetting their carbon emissions in an ambitious attempt to tackle climate change - by paying for contraception measures in poorer countries to curb the rapidly growing global population.
The scheme - set up by an organisation backed by Sir David Attenborough, the former diplomat Sir Crispin Tickell and green figureheads such as Jonathon Porritt and James Lovelock - argues that family planning is the most effective way to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic global warming.
Optimum Population Trust (Opt) stresses that birth control will be provided only to those who have no access to it, and only unwanted births would be avoided. Opt estimates that 80 million pregnancies each year are unwanted.
The cost-benefit analysis commissioned by the trust claims that family planning is the cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions. Every £4 spent on contraception, it says, saves one tonne of CO2 being added to global warming, but a similar reduction in emissions would require an £8 investment in tree planting, £15 in wind power, £31 in solar energy and £56 in hybrid vehicle technology.
Calculations based on the trust's figures show the 10 tonnes emitted by a return flight from London to Sydney would be offset by enabling the avoidance of one unwanted birth in a country such as Kenya. Such action not only cuts emissions but reduces the number of people who will fall victim to climate change, it says.
"The scheme, called PopOffsets, understands the connection [between population increase and climate change]," says the trust director Roger Martin. "It offers a practical and sensible response. For the first time ever individuals, companies and organisations will have the opportunity to offset their carbon voluntarily by supporting projects to provide family planning services where there is currently unmet demand."
