Andrew Revkin comments on Rush Limbaugh’s ugly remark that Revkin should commit suicide because he brought up the subject of birth control: Thought Experiments on Birth and Death.

As I put it in the Wilson event: “Should you get credit — if we’re going to become carbon-centric — for having a one-child family when you could have had two or three. And obviously it’s just a thought experiment, but it raises some interesting questions about all this.”

The result, once the reverberating blogosphere ramped up the sound bites and eliminated the context, was Mr. Limbaugh’s challenge — or was it, in fact, a thought experiment?

Equating  “environmentalist wackos” with “jihad guys” who strap explosives onto other peoples’ kids and the like, he said:

This guy from The New York Times, if he really thinks that humanity is destroying the planet, humanity is destroying the climate, that human beings in their natural existence are going to cause the extinction of life on Earth — Andrew Revkin. Mr. Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself and help the planet by dying?

This might be funny, in a sad way, if it weren’t for the fact that my mailbox is already heaped with hate mail. And of course there’s the reality that  explosive population growth in certain places, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, could be blunted without a single draconian measure, many experts say, simply by providing access to family planning for millions of women who already want it, but can’t get it — whether or not someone gets a carbon credit in the process.

(Believe me, Andrew — I know about the kind of hate mail you get when you criticize St. Limbaugh.)