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Solving Climate Change By Bioengineering Humans?
derekmead writes "Forget CFLs, hybrid cars, and organic jeans. Buying our way out of climate change — even if it's green consumption — won't get us far.
A new paper (PDF), published in Ethics, Policy, and the Environment by NYU bioethics professor S. Matthew Liao, poses an answer: engineer humans to use less. The general plan laid out by Liao is straightforward, ranging from using pharmacological behavior modification to create an aversion to meat in people, to using gene therapy to create smaller, less resource-intensive children. The philosophical and ethical questions, on the other hand, are absurdly complicated. The Atlantic also has a great interview with Liao, in which he talks about gene therapy and making humans hate the taste of meat."
Also, have you ever given up salt for an extended amount of time? You'll be amazed how much it seems like candy after the first time you try it again ( was off salt for a 3 month personal test
You cannot give up salt. You will die with no salt in your diet. Yes that is correct you will die if you don't eat enough salt. While too much salt can be detrimental, this crazy idea that salt is bad for you is just that "Crazy". I'm sure it tasted like candy because your body needed that salt. Salt helps maintain the fluid in our blood cells and is used to transmit information in our nerves and muscles. It is also used in the uptake of certain nutrients from our small intestines. Eat your salt.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
Surely someone must have written a book on how to take over the world in 3 easy steps...
1. Convince everyone that something terrible is happening and it's their fault.
2. Once people have bought into the idea that there is a crisis and we are all going to die, then reveal the "solution" (Final or otherwise).
3. Control! (Profit is a side benefit).
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
(they generate their own pesticide
You say that as if its a bad thing. You do realize that statement describes ALL plants, right? Ever wonder why insects don't just eat everything green, or why plants go through all the trouble of producing secondary metabolites? Pesticides (among other defense mechanisms of course). The misconception that making plants which produce additional pesticides is somehow bad really grates my nerves, especially in this case where we know darned well how that pesticide works and what it effects..if the lepidoptera somehow magically vanished before we discovered the cry proteins (the pesticides inserted into GE crops) we'd never have been able to figure out they even were pesticides. Its also irksome that breeding for insect resistant varieties which may produce additional naturally occurring insecticidal secondary metabolites is fine and dandy, but when genetic engineering is involved, then they're not insect resistant, they 'make their own pesticides,' which compared to 'insect resistant' sounds nice and scary. And of course no one cares about the pesticides that these crops don't need sprayed on them anymore.
This is why high school biology classes really should spend more time on plant physiology.