Want to decrease your carbon footprint? Have fewer children. While you're at it, some gross negligence, reckless driving, or (for eco-terrorist bonus points) maybe a premeditated murder or two could potentially erase your carbon footprint altogether!

Ugh. Are we really this stupid?

It's not a new study (it was published in February, I think). But it got picked up by the mainstream press last month and I've been thinking about it for a while. Your "carbon footprint," or the amount of greenhouse gases you "cause," is sort of the topic du an in armchair environmentalism. As memes go, it's provocative because it brings global-scale environmental events down to an empirical measurement of personal responsibility--complete with online calculators! So now in addition to calculating your body fat, home mortgage payments, and date of death, now you, too, can know just how much Mother Earth weeps as you bleed her dry!

Well. The study and its findings are simple: the creatures with the biggest carbon footprints on the planet are all humans, and humans come from somewhere (*SPOILER ALERT* it ain't the cabbage patch, Timmy *END SPOILER*). In fact, most humans, with the exception of certain lawyers and politicians, come from mothers, and often grow up to have even bigger carbon footprints than their forebears.

Ergo, your mother's carbon footprint is huge, because in addition to her own rampant consumption she is responsible for at least 18 years of your carbon emissions. At least, that is the position of this study.

More generously, the point of the study is that overpopulation is not just about global resources; negative population growth could also save us from global warming.

Good job, guys. You discovered that human-caused environmental changes (to whatever extent you accept them as real) could be mitigated if there were fewer humans. Who approved funding for this garbage? This isn't even one of those quirky studies that proves empirically something we all thought we knew but had never actually proven. This is a study demonstrating something that is true by definition!

And it gets worse. What does the study recommend? Why, have fewer children, of course! Seeing as we mature adults frown on genocide, germ warfare, and other forms of radical environmentalism, it is a comparatively peaceful choice to simply forgo childbearing, particularly when you get the added bonus of freeing yourself from the responsibilities that children bring.

Here's your new meme. "Earth: what are we saving it for?" Go forth and infect.

Anyway, I was going to ramble on for a bit about entropy, energy consumption, the not-so-impending implosion or explosion of our sun, existential crisis as brought on by the impermanence of all things, pragmatism in the face of disasters that will not occur within my lifetime... but I'll spare you the rant. The super-concise version goes something like this: most people think society is "getting worse" in terms of crime, morality, et cetera, and most people have thought that for all of human history. And yet, as the universe hurtles down the entropy stream, we are paddling up it... always at a net loss, in keeping with the laws of thermodynamics, but there is a sense that we keep our own species the tiniest bit better-off through scientific progress. Which is awesome, but in the final end, we as a species will probably suffer the same fate as all things in the universe, including our celestial cradle, no matter our efforts to "save" it. We end up with a choice: keep paddling upstream, or sit back and enjoy the show.

And by "paddling upstream," I probably mean "rolling stones uphill." As Camus notes, "One always finds ones burden again." I may never make the world a better place, but I am happy to try.

On second thought, reduce your carbon footprint, please. Save the Earth for my children, and (hopefully by extension) my ideology. By all means. By fiat, and probably by natural selection on some level, too, I value that outcome.