And yet, to an an eco-Technocrat, reducing population is the perfect and efficient solution to reducing carbon. ? TN Editor

Carbon dioxide doesn't kill climates; people do. And the world would be better off with fewer of them.

That's a glib summary of a serious and seriously provocative bookby Travis Rieder, a moral philosophy professor and bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University.

When economists write about climate change, they'll often bring up something called the Kaya identity—basically a multiplication problem (not an espionage novel) that helps economists estimate how much carbon dioxide may be heading into the atmosphere. The Kaya identity says the pace of climate pollution is more or less the product four things:

How carbon-heavy fuels are

How much energy the economy needs to produce GDP

GDP per capita

Population