The “climate change solution nobody wants to talk about.” That’s the way it’s being headlined in the New Republic, and it’s not hard to see why. It turns out that the next front in for environmental extremists is to cut down on the number of people. The Left reckons our population is growing too fast for the environment. So it is seizing upon the 40% of pregnancies that are unintended. It wants to curb them through measures it calls “voluntary.”

At least they’ll be voluntary at first. The New Republic is talking about “pills, condoms, and IUDs” in efforts like one being hawked in Ethiopia as part of a reforestation project. But if population growth is really the source of, rather than the solution to, our environmental problems, why make it voluntary? Why not go to the measures the Chinese communists used and limit the number of children families can have, even if that leads to sex-selection abortions?

The New Republic — and the Huffington Post, where TNR’s dispatch first appeared — hasn’t ventured down that road yet. But so full of dangers is the course it’s onto which venturing that one doesn’t know where to start. It poses the question of whose fault all the population is. It concedes that most of the population growth (it’s not clear whether this growth is intended) is in Africa and Asia. Does it want to limit the population growth of, say, Africans?

Nope. It looks like the TNR would rather limit the number of Americans. At least that’s what one could surmise from its explanation that’s “industrialized countries’ energy consumption levels take a larger toll on the environment.” It quotes an Oregon study to the effect “a child in the U.S. emits more than 160 times the carbon emissions than that of a child from Bangladesh.” Plus, it says, reducing unwanted pregnancies is more efficient than other strategies.

The New Republic suggests that people “relax” on the issue because it “isn’t about abortion.” It complains that when “politicians and experts talk about voluntary family planning, they have been called ‘eugenicists’ and ‘Nazis.’” It drags in Secretary of State Clinton, quoting her as saying in 2009 that, as TNR paraphrased her, “we should be linking climate change to overpopulation.” She was “quickly skewered in the media,” TNR noted. What could possibly have set off the press?

One professor quoted in the piece, TNR reports, “used the ‘danger zone’ of a 2-degree Celsius increase in global temperature as a benchmark.” It quotes the professor, Kerry Bradshaw, as suggesting that he stated that “to cut emissions to keep the planet below this level, we would be forced to not only reduce new unwanted pregnancies—but also lessen the human population by 60 to 80 percent.” Says the professor: “That’s obviously unfathomable.” Yet fathoming it seems to be exactly what the climate controllers are doing.