Genetically mutating humans to eat insects, controlling the clouds and blocking the sun, changing the oceans, and more. The alarmist propose “solutions” more disruptive and damaging than a couple degrees of warming could possibly be.
“If we eat less meat, we could significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Now, some people would be willing to eat less meat, but they lack the willpower. Human engineering could help…We could artificially induce intolerance to meat, and in this way, we can create an aversion to eating eco unfriendly food,” explained S. Mathew Liao, the Director of the Center for Bioethics and the Arthur Zitrin Professor of Bioethics at New York University in a recent TED Talk, recommending perhaps the least ethical solution to the purported global warming crisis imaginable. It is difficult to believe anyone of sound mind and body can conclude the answer to our problems is to reengineer the entire human race, conceivably, if not likely, against our will. There are lunatics on street corners with more actionable plans to save the human race, but Dr. Liao is not supposed to be a lunatic by any means. He is supposedly a serious person, what Dr. Anthony Fauci might call a “real card carrying expert” as a graduate of Princeton and Oxford, who holds a doctorate in philosophy. New York University itself describes him as providing “students with an education grounded in a broad conception of bioethics encompassing both medical and environmental ethics. He offers students the opportunity to explore the intersection of human rights practice with central domains of public health and regularly teaches normative theory and neuroethics. His courses address how the rightness or wrongness of an act is determined and ethical issues arising out of new medical technologies such as embryonic stem cell research, cloning, artificial reproduction, and genetic engineering; ethical issues raised by the development and use of neuroscientific technologies such as the ethics of erasing traumatic memories; the ethics of mood and cognitive enhancements; and moral and legal implications of ‘mind-reading’ technologies for brain privacy.” Here, however, he is recommending a radical experiment in human nature that would make the Nazis blush. After all, they wanted to engineer the master race through selective breeding. Dr. Liao wants to engineer a race of vegetarians by directly altering our genetic make up, all in the name of saving us from climate change.
At the same time, this proposal can be seen as part of a continuum that begins with the increasingly faddish notion we should all be eating insects to save the planet, a movement that has steadily increased in popularity in elite circles over the years, though whether or not they themselves prefer cockroaches to aged beef remains unsaid. As BBC’s Discover Wildlife put it, “Why eating insects could help the fight against climate change and save the environment.” “Our appetite for meat and dairy” you see, “is suffocating our planet. Surely, for the sake of the environment, it’s time to bring insect-based food to the table?” After all, we happily ate insects once upon a time – some 6,000 years ago, pretty much before recorded history. “Humans across the planet were once hunter-gatherers, with insects widely featuring on the menu. Studies have shown that early hominins (an ancestor of humans who lived about two million years ago) used tools made of bone to dig into termite mounds, while many examples of insect-eating appear in religious literature in Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths.” Today, “Insects offer a promising alternative to a low-ecological-footprint diet: they are genetically very distinct from humans, so viruses are unlikely to make the jump; they produce only small amounts of greenhouse gas, compared to livestock (to yield just 1kg of protein, a single cow produces 2,850g of greenhouse gas, while insects produce just 1g); they can be fed on organic waste, such as vegetable peelings; and they require only tiny quantities of water. We simply need to accept that eating them is okay.” The BBC’s not alone in this push. The World Economic Forum posed “5 reasons why eating insects can reduce climate change,” Science proclaimed, “To Fight Global Warming, Eat Bugs,” and Time Magazine described “How Humans Eating Insects Could Help Save the Planet.” There are so called scholarly articles on the topic as well, including “Climate change and the consumer’s attitude toward insects,” “Edible insects: Marketing the impossible?” and “Why we still don’t eat insects.” The problem, of course, is you and the solution is either coercion or force given some of these articles date back more than ten years, but eating insects hasn’t quite taken off for obvious reasons and the average person still prefers their barbeque. Progressives, however, rarely give up an idea no matter how outlandish. Dr. Liao’s proposal can be seen as the final means to force their will upon the future, literally changing the genetic makeup of your children to serve their own ludicrous ends. Think the COVID lockdowns, masking, and vaccination controls permanently implanted in the human race to give yourself an idea of the magnitude of what is being discussed.
Nor is Dr. Liao alone in proposing radical, ridiculous, unconscionable solutions either. In addition to changing the very nature of our bodies, some want to do the same with the Earth itself. Earlier this year, the Biden Administration released a report on a concept known either as “solar radiation modification” or “solar geoengineering,” that is blocking the light from the sun, as a potential strategy to address the same supposed problem. Politico reported the development this way, somehow managing to keep a straight face, “The White House offered measured support for the idea of studying how to block sunlight from hitting Earth’s surface as a way to limit global warming, in a congressionally mandated report that could help bring efforts once confined to science fiction into the realm of legitimate debate.” Yes, “legitimate scientific debate” now includes messing with the sun itself either by pumping aerosols into the atmosphere (I thought that was bad?), somehow increasing clouds only over the oceans, or removing a certain type of clouds in the upper atmosphere that are believed to reflect sunlight back to the Earth. The European Union is apparently also researching these ideas, after 60 leading scientists requested more funding. “The fact that this report even exists is probably the most consequential component of this release,” explained Shuchi Talati, executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, a nonprofit that wants to include developing countries in the debate over solar modification. “This report also signals that the U.S. government is supportive of well-governed research, including outdoor experimentation, which I think is quite significant.” Like magic, there is a new abbreviation in the lexicon, SRM, and the card carrying experts are lining up to emphasize how this is serious, serious business, requiring “well-governed research,” which we can assume means well-funded, not a ridiculous fantasy we’re wasting valuable money and time on. To put it rather mildly, Politico noted, “There are risks associated with each form of solar radiation modification, the report said, that can affect human health, biodiversity and geopolitics. That’s because modifying sunlight could alter global weather patterns, disrupt food supplies and lead to abrupt warming if the practice was widely deployed and then halted. It also wouldn’t address air pollution from fossil fuels or ocean acidification, a major threat to coral reefs’ ecosystems driven by the overabundance of carbon in the air and seas.” Risks with blocking the sun? Some might argue that cure would be much worse than the disease.
This isn’t the first time so-called scientists have recommended manipulating clouds to mitigate climate change either. In May 2019, the BBC reported on how “Scientists in Cambridge plan to set up a research centre to develop new ways to repair the Earth’s climate.” These means included refreezing the Earth’s poles by altering – you guessed it – the clouds. “What we do over the next 10 years will determine the future of humanity for the next 10,000 years. There is no major centre in the world that would be focused on this one big issue,” Professor Sir David King explained. Dr. Emily Shuckburgh claimed the initiative’s mission would be to “solve the climate problem” because “It has to be. And we can’t fail on it.” “This really is one of the most important challenges of our time, and we know we need to be responding to it with all our efforts,” she added without mentioning that sanity should also be a prerequisite for any effort. The BBC continued to report on the specifics, once again with a straight face. “One of the most promising ideas for refreezing the poles is to ‘brighten’ the clouds above them. The idea is to pump seawater up to tall masts on uncrewed ships through very fine nozzles. This produces tiny particles of salt which are injected into the clouds, which makes them more widespread and reflective, and so cool the areas below them.” This paragraph came complete with a diagram for an “uncrewed, wind powered spray vessel” illustrating how water is sucked up and shot out through the equivalent of smokestacks, making it appear this plan – which is funded by someone, likely the government – is something more than a fantasy or fever dream. There were other crazy ideas as well including “greening” the ocean by growing more plankton. “Such schemes involve fertilising the sea with iron salts which promote the growth of plankton,” but “Previous experiments have shown that they don’t take up sufficient CO2 to make the scheme worthwhile and might disrupt the ecosystem.” You might be wondering what could possibly go wrong, literally engineering the mix of wildlife in the ocean and claiming it “might” disrupt the ecosystem, but according “to Professor Callum Roberts of York University,” presumably another card-carrying expert, “approaches that are currently thought beyond the pale now have to be considered and, if possible, made to work. This is because the alternative of damaging and potentially irreversible climate change is considered beyond the pale.” “Early in my career, people threw their hands up in horror at suggestions of more interventionist solutions to fix coral reefs,” he said. “Now they are looking in desperation at an ecosystem that will be gone at the end of the century and now all options are on the table.”
Some options are more equal than others, however, and rather incredibly, the BBC also put the simple idea of capturing carbon from the atmosphere in the same category as refreezing the ice caps by changing the clouds and altering the mix of sea life in the ocean. As they describe it, “Another new approach is a variant of an idea called carbon capture and storage (CCS). CCS involves collecting carbon dioxide emissions from coal or gas fired power stations or steel plants and storing it underground.” The Biden Administration is also “investing” in this technology – to a tiny degree, authorizing a mere $3.5 billion for a “direct air capture plant,” the first $1.2 billion of which was awarded last month. According to CNN, “Direct air capture removal projects are akin to huge vacuum cleaners sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, using chemicals to remove the greenhouse gas. Once removed, CO2 gets stored underground, or is used in industrial materials like cement. On Friday, the US Department of Energy announced it is spending $1.2 billion to fund two new demonstration projects in Texas and Louisiana – the South Texas Direct Air Capture hub and Project Cypress in Louisiana.” I said a mere “$3.5 billion” because it represents a fraction of what they are spending overall, some $500 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act alone. Of course, plants capture carbon all day, every day, and there’s no reason we cannot do the same if you are truly concerned about global warming (for the record, I am not; at this point, some semblance of sanity seems a much more pressing need). Indeed, some might say the obvious solution to too much carbon dioxide, methane, or whatever in the atmosphere would be to remove it. To be sure, this is not something we have been able to achieve inexpensively at scale yet, but there is nothing in principle that prevents us from doing so – if we simply had the will and a scientific establishment that wasn’t – pardon my language – crazier than a bunch of crack house rats on payday. Instead, they are happy to funnel untold amounts of money to ever more ridiculous schemes and ever more ridiculous claims the world is ending. Somehow, we’re supposed to believe they can genetically engineer humans who love eating insects and clouds that block the sun when they can’t properly install thermometers that work to measure the temperature in the first place. Sense, none of this makes.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 