Is he nuts or just a climate extremist?
Perhaps it’s both.
S. Matthew Liao is the Director of the Center for Bioethics and Affiliated Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University and has previously held appointments at Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and Princeton.
He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Moral Philosophy.
In short, S. Matthew Liao is a serious academic who is looking out for the “greater good” and a prime example of why a large swath of conservatives have lost trust in academia.
In a 2013 TedTalk, Liao made several serious suggestions on how to modify human genetics in order to tackle “climate change.”
Liao’s video has resurfaced as the climate “experts” and the press seem hellbent on making people eat bugs, and it is increasingly clear that our “betters” want us all to live in some sort of dystopian nightmare from which there is no escape.
His claim is that the suggestions to engineer the globe that are proposed by some climate extremists — such as Bill Gates’s plan to spray sulfate chemicals into the air to block the sun’s rays — carry a lot of risks. He says that because they have never been tried on such a large scale, they could destroy the entire ozone layer.
Liao thinks a much better plan than geoengineering is human engineering.
Liao suggests engineering humans to become cat-eyed, meat-intolerant, semi-genius, hobbit-like creatures with small families who are drugged into empathy.
What could possibly go wrong with that?
1. Inducing Meat Intolerance
Liao suggests “meat patches” that would induce a mild intolerance to bovine proteins to make eating beef less appealing.
“If we eat less meat, we could significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Now, some people would be willing to eat less meat, but they lack the willpower. Human engineering could help … We could artificially induce intolerance to meat, and in this way, we can create an aversion to eating eco-unfriendly food,” said Liao.
Liao repeated this suggestion years after the 2013 TedTalk.
You don’t want to “eat zee bugz”? No problemo. They’ll just make it unpleasant for you to eat meat. What are you going to do for protein then?
2. Shrinking People
“Our ecological footprints are correlated with how big we are. A car uses more fuel to carry a larger person than a smaller person. Larger people also wear out shoes and carpets more quickly than smaller people, so another possibility is to have smaller human beings,” said Liao.
His suggestion is to screen embryos for height the way that fertility clinics screen embryos for genetic diseases.
But don’t worry — he’s not calling for a genocide of tall people. He says that parents can be given a choice of having one tall child, two medium-sized children, or three munchkins.
3. Raise Cognitive Ability To Decrease Birth Rates
Liao says that people with higher levels of education tend to have fewer children, so we should decrease the birth rate by making people smarter.
How do we do that? Why, using drugs, of course!
In the TedTalk video, he suggests using drugs like Modafinil and Ritalin to enhance cognitive ability and lower birth rates.
4. Drug-induced Empathy
Again, suggesting “Better Living Through Chemistry”, Liao suggests hormone therapy.
BONUS: Cat-Eyes
On the Codebreaker podcast in December 2016, Liao suggested engineering humans to give them night vision like cats have would help reduce energy consumption.
“Cats can see just as well as we can during the day, but they can see about seven times better than we can at night. This could totally affect our consumption of energy. I mean think of that. Who wouldn’t want to see better …. and see just as well during the day?”
Thanks, Prof. Liao, for letting us know exactly where we are …
