Bizarre stuff from The Atlantic, though it seems even Bill McKibben is panning him and when you can’t sell Bill McKibben on crazy, well, you’ve entered a whole new plane of crazy. Me? I welcome our new smaller climate optmized green cat-like overlords. – Anthony
How Engineering the Human Body Could Combat Climate Change
By Ross Andersen The Atlantic
From drugs to help you avoid eating meat to genetically engineered cat-like eyes to reduce the need for lighting, a wild interview about changes humans could make to themselves to battle climate change.
…
One human engineering strategy you mention is a kind of pharmacologically induced meat intolerance. You suggest that humans could be given meat alongside a medication that triggers extreme nausea, which would then cause a long-lasting aversion to meat eating. Why is it that you expect this could have such a dramatic impact on climate change?
Liao: There is a widely cited U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization report that estimates that 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and CO2 equivalents come from livestock farming, which is actually a much higher share than from transportation. More recently it’s been suggested that livestock farming accounts for as much as 51% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. And then there are estimates that as much as 9% of human emissions occur as a result of deforestation for the expansion of pastures for livestock. And that doesn’t even to take into account the emissions that arise from manure, or from the livestock directly. Since a large portion of these cows and other grazing animals are raised for consumption, it seems obvious that reducing the consumption of these meats could have considerable environmental benefits.
…
Your paper also discusses the use of human engineering to make humans smaller. Why would this be a powerful technique in the fight against climate change?
Liao: Well one of the things that we noticed is that human ecological footprints are partly correlated with size. Each kilogram of body mass requires a certain amount of food and nutrients and so, other things being equal, the larger person is the more food and energy they are going to soak up over the course of a lifetime. There are also other, less obvious ways in which larger people consume more energy than smaller people—for example a car uses more fuel per mile to carry a heavier person, more fabric is needed to clothe larger people, and heavier people wear out shoes, carpets and furniture at a quicker rate than lighter people, and so on.
And so size reduction could be one way to reduce a person’s ecological footprint. For instance if you reduce the average U.S. height by just 15cm, you could reduce body mass by 21% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding reduction in metabolic rates by some 15% to 18%, because less tissue means lower energy and nutrient needs.
…
In your paper you suggest that some human engineering solutions may actually be liberty enhancing. How so?
Liao: That’s right. It’s been suggested that, given the seriousness of climate change, we ought to adopt something like China’s one child policy. There was a group of doctors in Britain who recently advocated a two-child maximum. But at the end of the day those are crude prescriptions—what we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that’s the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says “you can only have one or two children.” A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.
“We figured that if everyone had cat eyes, you wouldn’t need so much lighting”
Read the whole bizarre thing here: How Engineering the Human Body Could Combat Climate Change
Kate at Small Dead Animals has a poll
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Great – In Liao’s paper, under
“IV. Potential Concerns Regarding Human Engineering”
he mentions safety, and ponders questions like “Is it ethical for parents to make choices that may irreversibly affect their children’s lives?”, but not once does it occur to him that maybe people are just not that keen on his ideas and he should better design some cool re-education camps first. And the logical consequence, that you would end up with a totalitarian regime, is completely beyond his ethicist mental horizon.
Is ethicist paid so badly these days that they only get bad forgers (Gleick), apologists for said forgers (James Garvey), and wannabe super villains (Liao)?
Tim Ball says:
March 13, 2012 at 11:03 am
A couple of comments refer to Paul Ehrlich’s work on population. What they neglect to mention is that John Holdren, Obama’s science czar co-authored with Ehrlich. He also worked with the people at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) as disclosed in the leaked emails to discredit Soon and Baliumas in the effort to support Mann’s hockey stick. His behaviour in this at Harvard is deeply disturbing.
Holdren was questioned about his views on population control, summarized below from an article here, http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/ when he was before Congress, but said he no longer held them.
• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.
=============================
The Harvard connection ties in with Tickell
“Inaugural Senior Visiting Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment (2002-2004);
and Advisor at Large to the President of Arizona State University (2004 -present).”
http://sustainability.asu.edu/people/persbio-director.php?pid=4809
Delingpole presents an essay on Tickell:
“..here is a fascinating essay from Ishmael2009 (not his real name) on Sir Crispin Tickell is one of the chief architects of Man Made Global Warming’s towering cathedral of half truths, exaggeration, hysteria and Neo-Malthusian lunacy. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the mighty Ishmael2009…..
“Our Man at the Climate Summit: Essay on Sir Crispin Tickell
“Sir Crispin Charles Cervantes Tickell is one of the most influential people behind the idea of man-made global warming. Yet you could easily be forgiven for having never heard of him.
..
“After starting as a bright young thing with the civil service, he spent two years at Harvard, where he addressed himself to the up and coming subject of climate change, the result of which was his 1977 book Climactic Change and World Affairs, a work that detailed the threat posed to Western civilization by possible changes in the world climate. It made his name, and on his return Tickell was made Chef de Cabinet to the President of the European Commission and afterwards advisor to the Thatcher government, where he was instrumental in persuading leading politicians to put global warming on the political agenda”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100069775/the-man-who-invented-global-warming/
And, Tickell’s family connection to Julian Huxley and so to Huxley’s eugenics plan to introduce it under another form:
“Huxley’s cousin, Sir Crispin Tickell, a sometime featured speaker to the British Eugenics Society, who once proclaimed that “Mankind is a disease”, personally launched the present crusade against so-called “global warming” in the late 1970s, boasting that as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s principal science adviser, he had “persuaded her of the importance of climate change”. Among his other activities, Tickell wrote Thatcher’s speeches on climate change, including her 1988 speech to the UN as the first national leader to demand global action; he directed Thatcher to pour funds for the study of global warming into the British Meteorological Office led by John Houghton, which along with the discredited Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University is the source of most of the harum-scarum, idiotic computer-modelled climate change scenarios; and as British Ambassador to the UN from 1987-1990, he organised the establishment of the presently dictatorial Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, with Houghton chairing its scientific assessment office. Britain’s current high priest of climate change, Sir Nicholas Stern, is Tickell’s protégé. (See Aug/Sept 2009 “Carbon trading is Hitler-style Genocide”, for more.)”
– http://cecaust.com.au/main.asp?sub=releases&id=2011_03_04_Brown_Queen.html
===============
..connections, connections..
Yea! I always wanted to be a cat person! But could I have eagle wings as well?
You want to talk about eugenics? Check out this article from The Journal of Medical Ethics (stop snickering guys, the mic is on!!)
http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2012/03/01/medethics-2011-100411.full
It’s pretty sick stuff. And chock full of such wonderful logical gems like, “Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life.”
“A hundred years ago people were much shorter on average, and there was nothing wrong with them medically.”
Sure there was. Lots of infectious disease has been knocked down, Another example is that even into the 1930’s lots of people in the more rural areas never owned a toothbrush, ate sweets, and lost their teeth by their twenties.
What would be the reason that noticably short peoples immigrating to North America have children a foot taller than they are , by age 15….the kids have medical care and more/better nutrition than their parents.
For Lioa to EVEN SUGGEST that a new tallness trait penetrated the North American Population to this extent, this fast, through genetic change, is …is…
ah, forget it.
Good to know taxpayer money is still paying for ignorant, spiteful, dribbling rubbish.
Oy vey. What dross.
Probably not. Humans are no longer at the mercy of the environment. We change our personal climate to suit us. We turn on the AC when it’s hot, and turn up the heat when it’s cold. We live inside instead of out in the elements. We don’t have to hunt to survive. Humans are no longer part of “survival of the fittest”, I mean just look at Pat Robertson.
To: Gail Combs
About vitamin D supplement, it is the D3 (Calciol aka Cholecalciferol) one that shall be used!
Avoid the D2 version (Ergosterol), it is the vegetal version of the molecule.
Sorry about being little off topic, but when I see comment about the use of Vit.D, I fell compelled to provide this info that I consider important.
However, the story of Vit.D2 use is not completly off topic if we make some parallel w/t scientific claim on CO2. In fact this is just another exemple of scientist lurring themself & everyone thinking Vit.D2 is the same thing as the real stuff our molecular machinery is designed to work with. This was probably a consensus… But interestingly there was monetary interest involved at selling D2.
Frankly, thinking we are near “implementing” genetic engineering on human is another proof of disconnection to reality! A complete understanding of the inner molecular working of our basic builting block, the cell, has not been acheived yet. As an exemple: it is not because we are now capable of reading & disasembling the firmware (DNA) of a processor, that we know & can reproduce the innerworking of that circuit. Cancer is hard to cure because cancer is a major disfunction of the cell machineries.
In fact, me think that any attempt at genetic manipulation on human before we master a reasonably complete understanding at “how we work internally” will endup invariably in disaster… When I talk about reasonable undestanding, I meant at least be able to cure EVERY existing diseases & be able to maintaint life function as it is for an indefinite amount of time. In my book we call it immortality, now this is some serious science-fiction is’nt it? Call it fantasy but I call it logic reason; We should be at least able to maintain something in its actual form & be capable of doing repair before doing wet dream about improvement & redesign…
This line of thinking is also completly applicable to environmental science.
Remember something like: First you shall do no harm.
Aristotle said “It is the mark of an educated mind it be able to entertain an idea without accepting it.”
What are these guys really doing? Are they proposing a serious social agenda? Maybe, but I don’t believe it. I’ll give my reasons shortly.
Are they just playing with ideas? If so, great. I enjoyed the similar ideas put forward on 1977 by Science Fiction author Colin Kapp. As Aristotle’s quote indicates, that’s something that educated people do.
However, I see that a lot of his earlier work involves the study of people’s intuitive moral reactions to hypothetical situations. I suggest we’re not the observers of his study, we’re the subjects of it.
O course, the study might still be flawed if he was trying to find out how far people would go in support of an idea that ‘everybody agrees is good’.
I said I’d give my reasons for thinking he’s not proposing a social agenda. Here they are:
Firstly, he’s a professor of philosophy not bioengineering.
Secondly, we don’t have the technology to achieve the results he outlines.
Thirdly I’m sure he’s as aware as everybody else that voluntary take-up of the proposals would be so small as to make them meaningless in terms of the stated goals.
Fourth, any serious proposal to use bioengineering to reduce climate change would not limit itself just to changing humans.
There are more reasons, but four is enough to go on with.
So lets entertain the idea. Let us be able to say, as we do with the carbon-reduction plans of the CAGW crowd, we’ve thought about this, we’ve concluded it’s a really dumb idea, and we know the reasons why its a dumb idea.
oh boy an army of environmentally friendly übermensch.
Nice to see the recognition of how intertwined many issues are; and how they will generally if not always revert to the primal. Population Control, thru many avenues. Eugenics is inevitable. Rational thinking is more circular than linear; extreme rationale eventually crosses over into the irrational. The is always one more ‘improvement’ to implement.
‘Birth control’ for low or no cost. Sound familiar? It’s not just condoms and a pill. Less babies, less burdens is the maxim. The revival of Buck v. Bell is near.
The Circus of Dr. Liao…
What would REALLY be useful would be better BS detectors and a reduced tendency to freak out about imaginary dangers.
Nitrous oxide (laughing gas) is considered to be a greenhouse gas and levels have been rising, therefor we need to genetically engineer people without any teeth and just fit them with false ones.
Yep.. put me down for a research grant, I have this science stuff worked out!!
Harold Ambler has an interesting take on this paper. He calls it an historic event. I do hope he’s wrong. 🙁
I’m ROFL at the aluminum foil hat picture, which was used by local columnist Tom Fletcher in a blog post on the irrational objectors to radio signals from “smart meters”.
My impression of the interview is the supposed ethics person is “meally-mouthed”, dancing around on ethics, including the term “weakness of will”.
Does he clearly say what he thinks is ethical if people don’t adopt the breeding/genetic changes he advocates? Atlantic magazine says he rejects forcing, but given that the climate alarmists he blindly believes obviously want to force people and believe it is their right to …… He says a reason for his suggestions is that people aren’t following the Kyoto Protocol etc. – what next? He claims global warming is a serious problem, human caused, that will harm millions of people.
It’s a control-freak’s weasel-worded solution to a Chicken Little theory by scare-mongering control freaks (neo-Marxists who can’t get their ethics right let alone their science).
The narrative changed among the eugenics ideologues after gauging the widespread repugnance to which these ideas had been put into practice during WWII, as Julian Huxley himself said:
“Julian Huxley, the vice president of Britain’s Eugenics Society (1937-1944), had announced in 1946, “even though it is quite true that radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.” Huxley was then director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).”
And,
“Prince Philip joined with the Netherlands’ Prince Bernhard—a former member of Hitler’s SS—and British Eugenics Society President Sir Julian Huxley in 1961 to found the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), to raise funds for Huxley’s International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN); Huxley stated that the goal of the new IUCN/WWF-led movement of “environmentalism” was to implement the racist goals of eugenics, but “by other language”, given that Hitler had given eugenics a bad name.”
From previous links, http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/GWHoaxBorn.pdf and http://cecaust.com.au/main.asp?sub=releases&id=2011_03_04_Brown_Queen.html
Good points here re this: http://www.lorejournal.org/tag/sinister-science/
Sinister Science: Eugenics, Nazism, and the Technocratic Rhetoric of the Human Betterment Foundation by Katherine Swift, San Diego State
“My analysis of the rhetorical history of the HBF [Human Betterment Foundation] undermines the notion of a “reform” eugenics succeeding “mainline” eugenics by demonstrating, instead, the rhetorical transition from a discredited hereditarian eugenics to an authoritarian socio-scientific eugenics. The HBF’s transmutation from eugenic sterilization to voluntary sterilization is indicative of this new rhetorical strategy of post-WWII eugenicists as they adapted to the prevailing ethos, pathos, and logos of a war-weary public and sought to regain their credibility as technocratic experts for the public good. Furthermore, the narrative history of the HBF greatly complicates the current discussion that takes for granted the idea that family planning, genetic counseling, and population control are all aspects of social “progressivism.” The rhetorical history of the HBF reveals that what some historians have insisted is the post WWII transformation from mainline to reform eugenics is, in fact, the conscious rhetorical and ideological transition from hereditarian to socio-scientific eugenics in order to maintain the viability of a eugenic technocracy in the face of the discredited science of its former political initiatives.
“Burke cautions against the rise of “sinister science” in fascist regimes where universal principles of scientific clarity and fairness are subsumed to the exigencies of national security (A Rhetoric of Motives 35). The technocratic topoi linking EngenderHealth, the Human Betterment Foundation, and Nazi race hygiene programs suggests a rhetoric of motives that begs for broader explication especially in current debate over fertility control and limits to population growth. After all, just whose population is on the table in such discussions? As has been said many times already, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Without the countervailing balance of an informed and responsible public rhetoric, the long shadow of eugenics will continue to cast a sinister pall over ethical considerations in genetics, medicine, and the human sciences.”
This ideology appears to be the single stream running through the background in the lives of the big players here, even the bankers while obviously enjoying the fruits of their creation of money out of thin air are using it to further this cause – it used to be that bankers just played both sides in a war by lending to the protagonists and the step to creating wars to make more money an obvious one, so the military/industrial complex, and of course we all get played for suckers by their system, but their involvement in getting the eugenics movement up and running is key to understanding the funding behind all these social engineering foundations and greenie organisations and especially in providing the monetary incentive for the fraudulent science keeping the AGW con mainstream.
http://www.infowars.com/jay-rockefeller-cant-deny-his-connection-to-modern-eugenics/
How can one possibly convey all of this with its convoluted connections for it to be ‘a history we remember’ so as not to repeat it? Is it enough to bring down one of the pillars holding it up, say the debt money system of bankers creating money out of thin air or the AGW scam? Would that bring the rest down? Even if it did, without the connections being known how is that going to be of value to future generations if this eugenic ideology isn’t known by the majority of us? We won’t have anything to pass down to remember.
Liao has a blog:
http://ethics-etc.com/category/environmental-ethics/
Daily Mail has a piece with photo of Liao.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2114430/Save-planet-genetically-engineering-humans-smaller-suggests-NYU-philosopher.html?ito=feeds-newsxml