Freaky: Kickstarter Project Seeks to Replace Streetlights with... Genetically-Engineered Bioluminescent Trees

I gotta say, I'm against it on aesthetic grounds. I don't expect it to be beautiful (as the interplay between a streetlamp and a tree's leaves often is). I expect it to be scary and nightmarish. Like one of those Glowing Swamp levels I always hated in World of Warcraft.

But the Kickstarter project is already funded.

Further Thought: Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson frequently says global warming is not much of a problem, and to the extent it threatens us at all, it's easily mitigated. He proposes that if excess carbon in the atmosphere really becomes a problem, we could always genetically-modify trees to suck in and store, deep in the roots, more carbon than they do.

This sort of solution is always attacked by the warmists, who react with shock that we would genetically tamper with trees.

And yet this Kickstarter project to make add a bioluminescent gene to trees gets quickly funded.

The difference is really that the warmists insist we simply use less energy, period. When someone like Dyson suggests that we could use as much energy, but then suck more of it out of the air and store it underground in the roots of specially-bred trees, the left/the warmists react with hostility.

And yet the free-carbon-in-the-atmosphere ledgers are the same either way-- whether we add less of it, or we subtract more of it on the back end, less carbon is less carbon. The bioluminescent trees pass muster, not because such trees are "natural," but because they comport with the plan preferred by the warmists (add less carbon).

As if it needed further underscoring: This reveals the anti-science streak of the warmists, a simple Naive Luddism, a fantasia about "returning" to an imagined Eden. It is also an anti-prosperity streak, and, ultimately, an anti-human one as well.

posted by Ace at 12:49 PM

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