Limbaugh Calls for NYT Environmental Writer to Kill Himself

Posted by Tara Lohan at 9:05 AM on October 21, 2009.

Once again, Rush Limbaugh is stoking the fires of hate. Yesterday he told millions of his listeners: "Mr. Revkin, why don't you just go kill yourself, and help the planet by dying."

He's talking about Andrew Revkin who writes the Dot Earth blog for the New York Times and is a prominent environmental writer.

What got Rush's pants all twisted? Some commentary Revkin had given at a symposium discussing the environment and population growth. Revkin explains on his blog, "I had talked, in part, about recent studies concluding that programs offering family planning information and services to women seeking smaller families, in essence, had a climate value by avoiding emissions of greenhouse gases that would come with more kids."

Revkin took the ideas forward and mused about what he saw as a "thought experiment" -- meaning something hypothetical to get us thinking.

I've written quite a bit about whether markets in carbon credits earned by cutting, avoiding or absorbing such emissions -- whether from avoided deforestation, tree planting, or leaving oil in the ground -- are credible, sensible or doable. So I mused on whether the next logical step, in a world increasingly fixated with carbon markets, would be carbon credits for avoided kids. This is something particularly relevant in the United States, which -- nearly unique for rich countries -- has a fast-growing population and very high rates of emissions per person.

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."

Of course Limbaugh, unable to grasp the concept of "thought" took Revkin's comments, doused them in gasoline and set them on fire. Limbaugh equated Revkin to the 3-, 4-, and 6-year olds (that he believes) are recruited to the jihad and compared talking about climate change solutions to strapping yourself with explosives.

Here's Limbaugh's take:

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?

Enough is enough, get Rush off the air. This kind of hate speech should not be tolerated. He's a danger to society.

Tagged as: population, limbaugh, climate change, revkin

Tara Lohan is a senior editor at AlterNet.