Great Idea! Environmentalists Decide "Conventional Approaches" To Global Warming Won't Work; Suggest Genetically Altering Human Beings To Make Them Greener

Among the suggestions? Alter the human genome to give all human beings an intolerance to red meat. So we'll be vegans, which reduces the carbon dioxide output of food production.

Via Hot Air, Maniacs, please stop.

There may be another route to avoid the potentially disastrous effects of climate change: We can deliberately alter ourselves, three researchers suggest.

Human engineering, as they call it, poses less danger than altering our planet through geoengineering, and it could augment changes to personal behavior or policies to mitigate climate change, they write in an article to be published in the journal Ethics, Policy and the Environment.

"We are serious philosophers, but we might not be entirely serious that people should be doing this," said Anders Sandberg, one of the authors and an ethicist at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. "What we are arguing is we should be taking a look at this, at the very least."

Other possibilities? Inflict humans with an engineered dwarfism to make us smaller and hence less hungry.

And dosing us with hormones.

-Make humans smaller to reduce the amount of energy we each need to consume. This could be done by selecting smaller embryos through preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a technique already in use to screen for genetic diseases. "Human engineering could therefore give people the choice between having a greater number of smaller children or a smaller number of larger children," they write.

-Reduce birthrates by making people smarter, since higher cognitive ability appears linked to lower birthrates. This could be achieved through a variety of means, including better schooling, electrical stimulation of the brain and drugs designed to improve cognitive ability, they propose.

-Treat people with hormones, such as oxytocin, to make us more altruistic and empathetic. As a result, people would be more willing to act as a group and more sensitive to the suffering of animals and other people caused by climate change.

Genetically Altering Human Beings To Make Them Greener&bodytext=Among the suggestions? Alter the human genome to give all human beings an intolerance to red meat. So we'll be vegans, which reduces the carbon dioxide output of food production. Via Hot Air, Maniacs, please stop. There may be another...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 03:58 PM

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