Eco-eugenics

Mar 13, 2012
Bishop Hill in Climate: WG3, Climate: other

The latest piece of insanity to emerge from the global warming movement is a paper by S. Matthew Liao, a professor at New York University. His idea is that we should be engineering the human race to be less resource intensive:

In this paper, we consider a new kind of solution to climate change, what we call human engineering, which involves biomedical modifications of humans so that they can mitigate and/or adapt to climate change. We argue that human engineering is potentially less risky than geoengineering and that it could help behavioural and market solutions succeed in mitigating climate change. We also consider some possible ethical concerns regarding human engineering such as its safety, the implications of human engineering for our children and for the society, and we argue that these concerns can be addressed. Our upshot is that human engineering deserves further consideration in the debate about climate change.

There is a long interview with Liao in the Atlantic, in which he argues that his ideas are liberty-enhancing, since the alternative is a compulsory limit to family sizes.

Article originally appeared on (http://www.bishop-hill.net/).