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Solving Climate Change By Bioengineering Humans?

Posted by Soulskill on from the just-lazy-enough-to-work dept.

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."

3 of 363 comments (clear)

  1. Not going way too far enough! by khasim · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The Green Leopard Plague
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Leopard_Plague
    By Walter Jon Williams

  2. Ethical concerns. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The ethical concerns are only absurdly complicated when trying to justify something which is clearly unethical.

  3. Yet the 1991 Honda CRX/HF still gets 72 MPG by tlambert · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yet the 1991 Honda CRX/HF still gets 72 MPG

    You know, if you don't run it on crappy California reformulated gas. If you run crappy California gas, it only gets 64 MPG. Which puts it in the same ballpark as the 1991 Geo Metro convertible, which gets 64 MPG on non-crappy California reformulated gas.

    Gotta keep that Chevron refinery monopoly going, they did so well by us with MTBE. Never mind that all vehicles since 1981 have Oxygen sensors, so Oxygenation of fuels does squat for pollution, unless you are driving a 1969 Ford Thunderbird or some other vehicle more than 31 years old.

    PS: the US auto industry specifically came up with transverse crash testing to disallow the CRX/HF being imported into the US. Basically, they had to figure out a crash test they could pass that CRX/HF couldn't in order to kill it. Never mind that being simultaneously T-boned from two directions is unlikely as hell.

    -- Terry