Get a grip on the fertility figures

Been to the doctor’s recently? Despite whatever illness or ailment you saw them for, you can be sure they will also have checked off one or more of the following boxes: Smoking, drinking, diet, exercise and probably swine flu. You can now add to that: don’t have more than two kids and save the planet!

No, you haven’t stepped back into India circa Indira Gandhi or even China today. The advice comes in the once august but now sadly looney-tunes British Medical Journal from John Guillebaud (emeritus professor of family planning at UCL) and Pip Hayes (a doctor). Doctors, they say, should advise patients against having a third child because it is the environmental equivalent of a patio heater or a gas-guzzling vehicle.