The UK Guardian reports that a new study recommends that everyone have one fewer kid in order to combat climate change.

The new study, published in Environmental Research Letters, identified the most effective ways people can cut their carbon emissions, and right at the top of their list is to cut back on the size of your family.

Next most effective? Selling your car, avoiding long flights, and eating a vegetarian diet. Also, if Leonardo DiCaprio took one less flight on a private jet per week, or if George Clooney turned down the thermostat in his mansion in Lake Como, Italy, or if Joy Behar stopped emitting so much toxic hot air into the atmosphere, "climate change" -- i.e. "weather" -- would be resolved in 6 months. Actually those last three are not among the study's recommendations, but they should be.

The study's recommendations would be "many times more effective than common green activities, such as recycling, using low energy light bulbs or drying washing on a line," according to the Guardian.

But by far the biggest impact on the environment would be having one fewer child, which the researchers calculated would reduce 58 tonnes of CO2 for each year of a parent’s life. And besides, children are so less important than doing our part to save Mother Gaia.

“We recognise these are deeply personal choices," said Kimberly Nicholas, at Lund University in Sweden and one of the research team members. "But we can’t ignore the climate effect our lifestyle actually has. It is our job as scientists to honestly report the data. Like a doctor who sees the patient is in poor health and might not like the message ‘smoking is bad for you’, we are forced to confront the fact that current emission levels are really bad for the planet and human society.”

Nicholas says she doesn’t have children herself, "but it is a choice I am considering and discussing with my fiance. Because we care so much about climate change that will certainly be one factor we consider in the decision, but it won’t be the only one.”

Here's a serious question: if self-loathing environmentalists are so distraught about the impact they claim each of us individual humans is having on Mother Earth, why don't they simply kill themselves rather than recommend that other people stop having children? If those environmentalists think that humanity should subordinate itself to Earth, why are they themselves still here exacerbating our impact on the planet?

Nicholas said the low-impact actions such as recycling were still worth doing: “[b]ut they are more of a beginning than an end. They are certainly not sufficient to tackle the scale of the climate challenge that we face.”

Chris Goodall, an author on low carbon living and energy, said that the study "usefully reminds us what matters in the fight against global warming. But in some ways it will just reinforce the suspicion of the political right that the threat of climate change is simply a cover for reducing people’s freedom to live as they want."

No kidding? What could possibly be giving us on "the political right" that impression?