Did you know that planting a tree won’t save the earth?

You’ve got to plant 483 trees just to offset your household’s carbon footprint. And that’s just for two people.

We know this because the Washington Post Home section on May 8 featured a cover story encouraging folks to plant trees while sternly warning them that this won’t help much because people are a cancer on the planet. 

Okay, they didn’t quite put it that way, but it would be hard to miss the message. A graphic with 483 little green trees illustrates this stat from the EPA:

A two-person household is responsible for releasing 41,500 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. To offset that, each household would have to plant 483 trees and let them grow for 10 years.

If a two-person household is that bad, what does that make families with children? Environmental criminals, at the least, and maybe earth wreckers.

Before giving us tips on tree planting, Post writer Adrian Higgins exudes the fumes of global warming hysteria:

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased by a third since the start of the industrial revolution, due mostly to the burning of coal and other fossil fuels, and that buildup has been linked to global warming.

Think about this for a minute. The industrial revolution revved up around 1850 or so, and with all the population growth and industrial production over the last 158 years, carbon dioxide has increased by only a third? He does not mention that this constitutes only a microscopic percentage of the entire atmosphere encircling the earth.

Could this mean that people are not really a threat to the planet after all? That we can get on with planting trees because… they’re pretty?

We ought to be focusing on a much scarier, and likelier, picture of the near future than the specter of too many people breathing, eating burgers and committing other random, senseless environmental atrocities.  The really frightening future is a human race that is quickly depopulating.

A new documentary, Demographic Winter, provides the grim facts behind the worldwide trend away from having children.

• 70 countries, including virtually all of Europe, are now below replacement birth-rate levels.
• Russia’s current population of 140 million will decline to 70 million by 2045 if current trends continue. The economic and political consequences would be staggering.
• The money boom triggered by the Baby Boom is about to run its course in the United States, as the Boomers make less, spend less and retire, drawing on the taxed earnings of a shrinking population of economic producers.
• In Germany, in 2006, in one province alone, 220 schools were padlocked for lack of pupils.
• Japan’s population reduction is so severe that the country is virtually shutting itself down, with labor shortages and plants closing.

Now, if you buy into the global warming theory, this may seem all to the good, since each human is a detriment. As the Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz notes in Demographic Winter: Continued...