With a hat tip to John Hodgman, who has pretty well cornered the market on ridiculous solutions to serious problems, I think I've got the answer to climate change: a cap-and-trade program for babies.

As related by the Washington Post, two recent studies have pointed out that the real culprit for global warming isn't cars or coal plants, it's us. There are too many humans on planet Earth, emitting too much carbon. The cheapest cure is contraception, according to a study released last week by the London School of Economics, which points out that each $7 spent on family planning over the next four decades would reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by more than a ton. Achieving the same result with low-carbon technologies would cost at least $32. What's more, a study from Oregon State University concluded that having children (especially American ones, because Americans use vast amounts of energy compared to people from other countries) is the most environmentally damaging decision you can make.

I can see the answer now: You place a cap of one child on every couple, but set up a market to trade child-bearing credits so low-income couples can sell them to those with the means to support big families. It's eugenic-tastic!

OK, maybe not. But the notion is only a little sillier than the solution being promoted by the London School and its study's sponsor, the British-based Optimum Population Trust. Their model for fighting climate change by promoting birth control in the Third World ignores the fact that such programs almost never work.

There are many reasons for the population explosion, but most of them come down to one factor: poverty. Women in poor countries have little education and almost no power over reproductive decisions, so they go from one pregnancy to the next. In places where infant mortality is high, women have a lot of children because some are expected to die. Agrarian societies need children to work the farm. Programs to promote condoms aren't going to change any of this; if you want to lower birth rates, as Jeffrey Sachs and other scholars have pointed out, you have to reduce poverty. That means investing in development for poor countries.

Of course, with development and industrialization come higher greenhouse gas emissions. There's a solution for that, too: Make sure these societies "grow green." To do that, the U.S. and other rich countries have to develop clean-energy technologies, and mass produce them until solar panels and windmills are cheaper for industrializing nations to install than coal-burning power plants.

As Hodgman would say, "Global warming, solved. You're Welcome."

-- Dan Turner

Photo by Bettmann/Corbis

The Opinion pages mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by looking at two very different aspects. Author Rebecca Solnit writes about the failure of the terrorists to terrorize in New York on that day, as ordinary people reacted with calm, generosity and bravery under the most fearful of circumstances:

A young man from Pakistan, Usman Farman, told of how he fell down and a Hasidic Jewish man stopped and saw the Arabic inscription on Farman's pendant. Then, "with a deep Brooklyn accent, he said, 'Brother, if you don't mind, there is a cloud of glass coming at us. Grab my hand, let's get the hell out of here.' He was the last person I would ever have thought to help me. If it weren't for him, I probably would have been engulfed in shattered glass and debris."

The editorial board looks at another effort that isn't going all that well: the war in Afghanistan.

But today, the situation in Afghanistan is grim. Taliban insurgents have been regaining ground while U.S. military and Afghan civilian casualties are on the rise and the support of the American public is eroding. Far from vanquished, Al Qaeda is largely residing in the borderlands of Pakistan.

Afghans are increasingly fed up with the corruption and incompetence of President Hamid Karzai's U.S.-backed government. Now Karzai's reelection is in dispute. Government election officials say he won a first-round victory with 54% of the vote in last month's balloting, but the independent Electoral Complaints Commission says it has "clear and convincing" evidence of fraud, and it has ordered a partial recount. Karzai must win fairly or face a runoff. Simply stated, there can be no good argument for risking American lives in support of a government that is considered illegitimate by its own people.

Altogether, the board concludes, the burden of proof is on President Obama to show why we should have a continued military presence in the country.

The board also considers the case of former Assemblyman Michael Duvall, who resigned after his, um, unofficial speech to a colleague about his sexual exploits. It's bad enough that a state legislator was voting in line with the interests of a power company while sleeping with its lobbyist, but why wasn't the assemblyman to whom Duvall was boasting disturbed by the ethical lapses and doing something about it?

Finally, on the Op-Ed page, an environment writer bemoans the loss of Van Jones from the president's environment team. Far from a radical, Jones has evolved into a pragmatic environmentalist, Judith Lewis writes.

Photo: A 2002 memorial for World Trade Center victims shines two columns of light skyward from where the towers stood. Credit: Peter Morgan / Reuters

--Karin Klein
 

Spare a merciful thought, please, for the wild creatures that have suffered so much in this fire, as in all such disasters. They have no evacuation centers, nowhere to go out of the juggernaut of fire that drives them into the concrete spaces that once were not concrete at all, that once belonged to them and their kind.

As my colleague Louis Sahagun wrote of the scene near Mt. Wilson, the charred bodies of squirrels lay at intervals along the roadside. A state forestry captain and his team came across a bunny with a broken back, and put the poor thing out of his misery. Disney, so protective of its images and copyright, laudably allowed Bambi -- made motherless by a hunter's bullet and homeless by a wildfire -- to be used in public service TV spot airing and again this week about preventing forest fires.

A friend in the northern part of Los Angeles County reports deer and coyotes showing up, timid and frightened and forlorn, in her garden, forced by fire from their coverts. Someone told me about a black bear in a store parking lot, and I can only hope that locals and rangers understood his fear and did him no harm.

When the fires come, I can never get out of my mind a poem by Robinson Jeffers, the California bard, who wrote this about our dispassionately apocalyptic fires and their innocent, mute victims. Having read it, you may never be able to forget it, either, nor should you. It is called ''Fire on the Hills.''

-- Patt Morrison

The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front the roaring wave of the brush-fire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders
He had come from far off for the good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue, and the hills merciless black,
The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than men. 

Photo: A deer walks through charred forest on Mount Gleason in the Angeles National Forest on Aug. 31. Credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images.

The Times doesn't buy arguments that Jaycee Lee Dugard's 18-year ordeal as a kidnapping and rape victim is a reason to oppose coming reforms to California's parole system. The Assembly passed a bill Monday that would reduce the case rolls of parole officers by mandating less supervision for low-risk, non-violent ex-convicts, while increasing supervision for more dangerous criminals. That doesn't mean Dugard's alleged abductor, Phillip Garrido, and his ilk would be off the hook -- in fact, it means they would get more attention in the future, the editorial page argues.

What's the upside to the Station fire, which has killed two firefighters, burned dozens of homes, fouled L.A.'s air and destroyed thousands of acres of scrubland? It's that fire is a natural part of Southern California's ecosystem that will clear wild areas for new growth and deposit fertilizer. The real problem, The Times points out, is that the frequency of such fires is rising, and continued sprawl into wilderness areas is increasing the costs and the environmental woes.

And Japan's dramatic changeover Sunday, when the party that has ruled the country almost continuously for half a century was booted from power, gets a thumbs up from The Times. Though the Liberal Democratic Party has helped turn Japan into an economic powerhouse, a one-party state seldom makes for good governance; "competition is as important in politics as it is in business," The Times asserts.

On the Op-Ed page, global warming skeptic Jonah Goldberg wonders whether the media are giving short shrift to sunspots. Evidence is mounting not only that we're living through a period of highly unusual sunspot activity, but that such events can have a dramatic impact on Earth's climate -- meaning the current warming we're experiencing might have more to do with solar activity than the greenhouse gases Congress aims to reduce. "I don't know what [this evidence] tells you, but it tells me that maybe we should study a bit more before we spend billions to 'solve' a problem we don't understand so well," Goldberg concludes.

Rivka Carmi, president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, sounds off against one of his faculty members -- Neve Gordon, who published an opinion piece in The Times last month arguing for an economic boycott of Israel. Carmi says he can't fire Gordon for his controversial views under Israeli law, but his explosive anti-Israel rhetoric could seriously harm both the nation and the university.

Finally, Leo Hindery Jr., Leo W. Gerard and Donald Riegle argue that the "buy American" provisions of Washington's economic stimulus package level the playing field with our trading partners and boost U.S. manufacturing jobs. They back legislation that would expand them to cover all national government procurement. "'Buy American' is neither un-American nor anti-globalization. It is simply good, necessary, balanced and reciprocal economic policy."

* Photo: The Station fire as seen from a hill overlooking Tujunga. Credit: Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times

An extraordinary lawsuit--one that could change the balance of power between multinationals and the indigenous people in the countries where they pull resources from the ground--is nearing verdict in Ecuador, where extensive damage was caused by years of oil extraction: In the first of a two-part series, the editorial board reflects on the damage and the changes in corporate behavior that might come about as a result:

Today, a swath of the Ecuadorean Amazon the size of Rhode Island remains contaminated beyond imagining. At one site after another, oil hangs in the air, slideson the water's surface and saturates the land. Pipelines and waste pits left behind years ago still drip and ooze. Advocates for the plaintiffs have called the former Texaco concession area the "Amazon Chernobyl." Were it in the United States, it would easily qualify as a Superfund site. Neither side in the case disputes the devastation, only who should pay for it. Chevron says it is the state-owned oil company's responsibility; the plaintiffs say it is Chevron's.

On the other side of the fold, the op-ed page offers a trio of tributes to people of accomplishment who have contributed to modern society:

A former aide of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy reveals another side of the Senate powerhouse. He describes the personal, empathetic man who understood what it was like to lose loved ones and regularly called people who were mourning terrible deaths--such as the victims of the World Trade Center attack-- spending expansive amounts of time sympathizing and even crying with them.

Jim Newton, editor of the editorial pages, pulls from his years of experience covering City Hall to pay tribute to Robin Kramer, chief aide to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (and previously, Richard Riordan), who resigned from the mayor's office. Calling her L.A.'s leading grown-up, Newton praises the focus and level head she has brought to Villaraigosa's operation and wonders, with a measure of nervousness, what the mayor's operation will be like without her.

And two academics who have co-authored a book honor the iconic African American civil-rights figure T.R.M. Hunter--flamboyant big-game hunter, plantation owner, and surgeon to the poor. What, never heard of him? That's exactly the point. Now you will have.

--Karin Klein

Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

Today the Opinion Manufacturing Division takes both sides of the debate over whether to investigate CIA interrogators, with columnist Tim Rutten lamenting the appointment of a special prosecutor and the editorial board applauding it. Rutten argues that it would be a "travesty" to charge the small fry without going after the higher ups in the Justice Department and the White House who egged them on. And that, he says, is a road to a place we don't want to go:

The editorial board, on the other hand, sees wisdom in having a respected career prosecutor conduct a limited inquiry into whether interrogators violated laws against torture or exceeded the "minimal" limits imposed by the Justice Department. It also opines:

The board also questions the motives ...

Columnist Tim Rutten returns from vacation to find the "birthers" still discussing citizen grand juries and opponents of healthcare reform bringing guns to President Obama's town hall meetings. There's more than the usual dollop of crazy talk in our politics, Rutten warns:

Read the column, then leave your comments -- rational or otherwise -- below. Elsewhere on the Op-Ed page, criminal law scholar J. Kelly Strader warns that courts around the country are essentially ignoring the Supreme Court's admonition in Lawrence v. Texas that states couldn't outlaw private behavior that clashes with the majority's view of morality. And Vanda Felbab-Brown, a foreign-policy fellow at the Brookings Institute, offers insights on the four front-runners in Thursday's presidential election in Afghanistan.

In the editorial stack, the Times board blasts the California legislature for its failure to mandate more use of renewable energy by state utilities, despite the support of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, utility regulators and most voters. It pooh-poohs GM's eBay initiative, questioning whether the carmaker can do anything truly innovative on sales without hurting its dealer network. And it looks past newly released scores on standardized tests to find something encouraging at Locke High School:

Photo credit: AP Photo / John Bazemore

-- Jon Healey

In an editorial today, the Times notes that a federal judge will soon decide what actions should be taken to help the endangered salmon on the Snake River in southeastern Washington. The populations of four types of fish have been endangered or threatened since four dams were constructed on the river, despite billions of dollars spent on fish ladders, hatcheries and even trucks to haul upstream-swimming fish around the dams.

Noting the importance of the northern salmon habitat to the West Coast stocks of the fish, the board concludes:

The Obama administration should call for settlement talks that include all the parties involved -- power utilities, farmers, fishermen and environmentalists. At least some of the dams must be breached, but only in conjunction with helping the region develop new sources of clean energy and transportation for Idaho's grain. In the long haul, it makes more sense to truck wheat than fish.

But what do you think? Leave a comment!

Bet you thought that the business of your publicly elected California Legislature was, well, public, since your public dollars pay these public servants to make public decisions in the public's Capitol building. Is there a theme in that sentence? There ought to be, especially with the editorial board today bemoaning the Assembly's decision to expunge the record of the individual votes of its members on whether or not to allow drilling off the Santa Barbara coast. In other words, you can't find out how your own Assembly member voted.

Assembly members sometimes complain, privately, that their constituents just don't understand how difficult it is to make laws and balance a budget. But making the very public process of lawmaking into a secret ritual doesn't help matters. On the contrary, it makes Californians feel like they are part of the stuff being fed into the meat grinder.

The board also weighs in on the latest maneuvers to stop a worthy bill that would extend hate-crime laws to cover crimes against gays and lesbians. Since conservative lawmakers in Washington D.C. weren't getting anywhere with the specious argument that halting hate crimes against people because of their sexual orientation would somehow impinge on the perpetrators' freedom of speech and religion, they've come up with a new tactic: making certain hate crimes a capital offense, thus changing the congressional conversation from one about equal rights to one about the death penalty.

And though the people of Afghanistan have a million good reasons to mistrust the election process, the editorial board notes the importance of holding new presidential elections and giving voters hope that they can, at least eventually, have an impact on changing the government that has turned out a disappointment to many of them.

On the other side of the fold, Tim Rutten reprimands Police Chief William Bratton for the timing of his departure from Los Angeles and some of the dealings that took place beforehand:

...The manner and timing of Bratton's departure is almost breathtakingly irresponsible. It also raises troubling questions about his relationship with Michael Cherkasky, the court-appointed monitor who evaluated the LAPD's compliance with the federal consent decree, and about Cherkasky's role in convincing the federal judge to terminate oversight of the department.

And a professor in Mexico calls on President Obama to do more than praise Mexican President Felipe Calderon for his courage in the war on drugs; he must also remind Calderon that the human-rights abuses that his army is accused of in that war are unacceptable.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews / AP

Today's pages are packed with heavy-headed examinations of perennial hot-button items that won't be solved any time soon (think race, education, healthcare and so on), so I'll ease you into the week with Monday's most cuddly topic: wild horses.

The editorial board analyzes a bill that would ban the culling of wild horses despite the fact that there are too many mustangs on the range and it's getting too expensive to keep the 31,000 horses that are corralled (in an attempt to control the growing herd) fed and happy. The editorial board's solution? Birth control:

The board also notes that the July 22 deadline for laying out a plan for Guantanamo Bay came and went with no recommendations by the White House-appointed task forces. The editorial board asks President Obama to keep his word and set a date for closing Gitmo.

On the Op-Ed page, columnist Gregory Rodriguez writes that it's silly for allies of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. to use his arrest as proof that Americans haven't made much progress on race:

Also on the Op-Ed page, John Stobo and Tom Rosenthal weigh in on the healthcare debate, writing that a plan to cut Medicare costs by extrapolating research data from one region of the country to arrive at conclusions regarding another could leave the urban poor and those who live near pockets of urban poverty without adequate care. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa endorses L.A. Board of Education member Yoli Flores Aguilar's proposal to allow a variety of school operators to bid on running new L.A. schools. The mayor says the plan encourages new ideas and puts students first.

Finally, pilot Peter Garrison looks back at millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett's plane crash. Garrison writes that although we'll never know what happened on the day Fossett died in 2007, we do know this:

Photo credit: David Grubs / AP photo/The Billings Gazette