File this in your "non sequitur" file.

Climate change activists want to save the planet by cutting the birthrate.  According to their logic, more people are bad because it means more CO2 emissions. 

The way to achieve this goal is by changing the tax code – a "carbon tax on kids." 

Washington Times:

Travis Rieder, assistant director of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, told NPR that bringing down global fertility by half a child per woman “could be the thing that saves us.”

“Here’s a provocative thought: Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them,” said Mr. Rieder, who has one child.

He proposed procreation disincentives such as government tax breaks for poor people and tax penalties for rich people, a kind of “carbon tax on kids.”

Poor nations would be cut slack “because they’re still developing, and because their per capita emissions are a sliver of the developed world’s. Plus, it just doesn’t look good for rich, Western nations to tell people in poor ones not to have kids,” NPR said.

His paper, “Population Engineering and the Fight Against Climate Change,” written with two Georgetown University professors, is scheduled to be published in October.

Their work coincides with that of Conceivable Future, a New Hampshire-based nonprofit founded on the premise that “the climate crisis is a reproductive crisis.”

The activists insist that they are not advocating a coercive, government-imposed solution such as China’s much-decried one-child policy, but Climate Depot’s Marc Morano said that’s the logical extension.

“U.S. environmentalists are taking a page from China’s mandatory one-child policy even as China abandons the policy,” Mr. Morano said in a Friday statement.

He noted that climate-change groups have also touted the argument that people may have sex less often on a warmer planet, which would presumably lower the birthrate.

“The warmists have now graduated from regulating our light bulbs, coal plants and SUVs to regulating our family size,” Mr. Morano said. “Let’s keep ‘global warming’ out of the bedroom!”

We've been hearing this crap for more than 40 years: reduce the population, or we're doomed.  Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb reads as comedy today.  Published in 1968, Erlich predicted mass global starvation by 1980, including in the U.S.  Needless to say, Erlich's descendants are equally ignorant.

The problem with these Malthusians is that that they utterly fail to take into account technological change and innovation.  If global warming is the problem they say it is, humans won't stand around waiting to fry or drown.  We've already seen a big drop in emissions as a result of the fracking revolution bringing far more cleaner burning natural gas to the market.  If sea levels are going to rise, do these Luddites think we're going to remain frozen while water rises from our ankles to our necks?  You would think we'd find innovative and effective ways to keep the water at bay.  The Dutch have been doing it for 700 years.

Marc Morano is right.  This is a slippery slope with not far to travel from "discouraging" people having babies to government ordering the size of families.