We really need more brilliant minds like Bill Maher to be in charge of us stupid people and everything we do. Apparently these elite minds have realized that one fix for global warming would be if there were less people like us.

Elena Marszalek  of the The Worldwatch Institute reports on October 16 that environmental thinkers are giving serious consideration to birth control as one of the most important tools to reduce mankind’s carbon footprint.

Andrew Revkin in his New York Times blog September 15 opines that we shouldn’t be satisfied with cap and trade for industry but extend it to individuals:

More children equal more carbon dioxide emissions. And recent research has resulted in renewed coverage of the notion that one of the cheapest ways to curb emissions in coming decades would be to provide access to birth control for tens of millions of women around the world…

I recently raised the question of whether this means we’ll soon see a market in baby-avoidance carbon credits similar to efforts to sell CO2 credits for avoiding deforestation. This is purely a thought experiment, not a proposal. But the issue is one that is rarely discussed in climate treaty talks or in debates over United States climate legislation. If anything, the population-climate question is more pressing in the United States than in developing countries, given the high per-capita carbon dioxide emissions here and the rate of population growth. If giving women a way to limit family size is such a cheap win for emissions, why isn’t it in the mix?

We suspect that Bill Maher is typical of the intelligentsia who long for a dictatorship like China’s. China has had severe population controls for years. Jane Macartney in Beijing Times Online, MSNBC, the Huffington Post, and others report an unintended consequence of their population control policy. In just a few years China faces a shortage of 30 million brides. One in ten marriageable men may have no chance to marry.

Presumably in such a scenario it would be even more important for “smart men” like Bill Maher to father as many children with as many women as possible to further his gene pool and insure a smarter posterity.

Oh wait… didn’t they try that already? Was it the Ming or the Maher-ing Dynasty?