As President Obama was getting ready to address the joint meeting of Congress, we were alerted by the Drudge Report to Richard Pindar’s dispatch in the London Daily Telegraph on a new report that argues that the “cheapest way to combat climate change” is — wait for it — contraception. The report turns out to have been done for a British environmental organization called Optimum Population Trust. The report, put together for the Trust by the London School of Economics, stated that “[f] rom the cost-benefit analysis, it has been found that family planning (considered purely as a method of reducing future CO₂ emissions) is more cost-effective than most low-carbon technologies.” And it recommends “that an optimum mix of carbon-reducing methods includes family planning as one of the primary methods.”

Maybe they’ll call it the Optimum Death Panel. The report contains an executive summary, which offers that the purpose of the project has to do with analyzing the costs and benefits of curbing carbon emissions through the reduction of population growth by methods that are non-coercive. But it strikes us that the authors of the study are stepping onto a slope of optimum slipperiness. For if one follows the argument to its logical conclusion, it’s going to end up arguing that the problem with the planet is too many people. When we went up on Optimum Population Trust’s Web site, it steered us to another site — myfootprint.org — that offered a quiz about one’s lifestyle and spending habits. One person of our acquaintance who took the quiz got a grade that suggested if everyone lived like he and his family did the number of Earths required would be 22.5. Another, who indicated she lived like an environmentally obsessed hermit, found that a globe full of people like her would still require .93 Earths.

The Optimum Report reminded us of what has been missing from Mr. Obama’s whole argument in respect of health care — a statement of first principles in respect of life. We don’t mean abortion, per se, though that would be part of the story. Rather, what we’re not hearing form Mr. Obama is a fundamental recognition that people are not a burden on the environment or the economy. We’re not hearing that his policy is about growth and how to create more people and help them live longer. There are, as the Optimum report suggests, those who actually do look at the problems of the world and conclude that we have too many people. Our sense is that a great deal of the unease Americans feel over Mr. Obama’s approach stems from the perception he’s in the latter camp. If he’s not and made that clear, he would have, we predict, an easier time formulating optimum policies to increase the number of Americans.