Small feet and less meat
As many of you know, I’ve been channeling my inner hippy for the last twelve months, with remarkable success. Of course, that depends on your definition of success; an aversion to shaving, repetitive lounge music and ownership of a solitary pair of shoes are hardly new attributes that will endear myself to everyone. But this bohemian transition has largely been driven by something of a little more substance: a fervent passion for tackling climate change.
I don’t really know from where this zeal sprouted; I’ve never been particularly environmentally minded, to be honest, and my main love in the academic sphere has of course been behavioural economics. But I became so convinced that climate change is the single most dangerous modern challenge facing humanity that I up-and-left Australia for Amsterdam to put my studies (and, I hope, my career) to use in the great greenie fight.
So far, unfortunately, it’s a fight mankind is definitely losing. Behavioural economics hasn’t come far enough to pave the way for applying effective policies to tackle the problem and global politics on climate change mitigation is a joke (and not a particularly funny one). The situation is becoming so dire that the conversation has seriously moved towards some outrageous geoengineering solutions, ranging from placing mirrors in the sky to pumping artificial filters into the atmosphere to scattering iron in the oceans. It sounds a bit like trying to season a soup with a random sample of household cleaning products to me, but desperate times, as they say, call for desperate mirrors. Or something like that.
Enter the latest bright idea: Human Engineering.
Yep, you heard right. Three distinguished academics from Oxford and New York University have come up with a completely bizarre but compellingly intriguing idea. Seeing as climate change is anthropogenic (fancy scientist speak for “Man-made”), why not strike at the root of the problem, and just change humans?
The main argument is that one of the biggest ways we’ve altered the global ecosystem is through our insatiable desire to eat meat – and lots of it. The authors cite facts to support that over 51% of greenhouse emissions come from livestock production; I find this hard to believe, but if the figure is even a third of this figure, it’s food for thought (ha!). In any case, I know it’s now widely known that most of our climate worries would be over if the whole world went vegetarian, but this is one behavioural trait that’s incredibly difficult to influence.
(I should mention that our meat-fetish is largely centred in rich first-world countries: the average American or Australian eats over 120 kilos of meat a year, compared to around 15 kilos in Africa and 3(!) kilos in India. China’s risen to around 50 kilos in the last couple of years, but they’re still a far cry from us carnivorous fatties.)
I don’t want to sound like I’m casting judgement on meat-eaters. Despite being borderline manic about climate change, living with two vegetarians and having recently dated one, I’ve made no such sacrifices myself (and in fact I’m writing this after just enjoying a delicious chicken curry. Can you spell “hypocrite”?). Just like giving up smoking, it’s incredibly difficult it is for humans to alter their taste behaviour – which makes the authors’ suggestions all the more relevant.
So, how do you engineer people to stop eating meat? There are a bunch of ideas put forward by the authors, my favourite being something of a “meat-patch” you stick on your arm that makes you mildly intolerant to meat (and, presumably, reduces your cravings for it). Unlikely to take off, but a neat concept, and it’s at least a little saner than the idea of poisoning our meat so that we vomit after eating it. Really, guys? Who would buy it?
The other human engineering suggestion in the paper is even more controversial: If humans are leaving too big a carbon footprint…why not just shrink their feet?
Yep. Shrinking humans.
The concept may sound ridiculous, but it’s surprisingly defensible (at least a little). Again back to the livestock argument, smaller humans eat less, use up less petrol in car trips, and use less resources (such as clothing). It seems to somehow retard human evolution, but perhaps we’ve evolved to the point where being physically bigger is no longer really an edge. We live in the age of the geeks, after all. (Despite this, I don’t suggest telling the next big gym-junkie you encounter how evoluntionary superior us chess players are.)
One way the authors suggest for achieving this is through preimplantation genetic diagnosis, whereby parents can choose smaller children before birth; another is through post-birth hormonal treatment. Think parents won’t go for it? Never fear; the authors suggest governments offer incentives to encourage voluntary participation in genetic programs to reduce the height and weight of our offsprings, in one of the most unusual baby-bonus schemes I’ve heard.
I… Well. I don’t even want to begin pointing holes in the economic analysys, because the authors mean well, and I think their main point, that we need to start looking at drastic solutions to an increasingly critical global problem, is entirely valid.
However, I think probably the way to go is to keep investigating more subtle approaches to persuading people to change their behaviour. I’ve got my own novel idea. If human engineering really is the best we’ve got, perhaps, instead of genetic modification, we should instead alter evolution by changing perceptions of beauty and thus encouraging men to find short vegetarians attractive. Hey, as opposed to sacrificing chicken curries, at least in this regard I can claim to lead by example.
I wonder if they’ll publish me?
Did man melt the ice ages?
No, the suns fluctuating cycles did.
We cant even predict the weather tomorrow, how can you talk about the future?
Further proof chess intelligence doesnt translate to other fields.
Hi John. I live in Amsterdam now; no chance I’ll make it to Geelong any time soon!
David, I’d love to hear from you.
My father was a dairy farmer near Margaret River. In the early years, he sold cream for butter production, and fed the milk to pigs. Later, he quit the pigs and sold wholemilk for cheese.
He had a fixed area of land, and was able to stock just so many cattle and no more, more cattle meant less milk. Over time, with improved practices, he made some small increases in the stocking rate, and with careful breeding obtained better cream production, but the area of land he had was the big constraint.
And so it is with planet earth. We’ve exceeded its stocking rate, and increased food production simply makes other aspects of the environment worse.
Reducing the size of people, making our use of energy more efficient, Stupid Labor’s “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” or whatever it calls it, they’re all bandaid solutions. I’m sure it’s escaped most Australians that, in the about time Stupid Labor wants to halve our carbon pollution, the ABS thinks our population will double.
And I don’t think The Greens have a proper handle on it either.
David, while you’re pondering over real solutions, how about playing another game of chess. I was disappointed in your absence from Geelong.
My first task in my new research position was to replicate a computer model that had been developed to simulate gene expression in E. coli. Some months later I finally succeeded. My key difficulty had been in determining the assumptions that had been made.
Next the boss asked me to simulate the effect of various changes in the model’s parameters. I politely refused. What would be the point? Unlimited variations were possible, none of which would reveal anything more useful than a child’s scribblings on a piece of butcher’s paper. Fortunately, I found some actual data to model, the product of some ingenious experiments.
Ever since, I have been highly sceptical of computer models where parameters are adjusted willy-nilly in order to predict future events. Think of the subprime mortgage crisis. There computer modelling showed that people with no incomes could repay housing loans. A neat trick!
I would guess that the effect upon the global climate of factors, such as CO2 levels, ocean currents, clouds, rainfall and snowfall, is only really known with an accuracy of plus or minus a few hundred percent. In other words, the multiple interactions are such that it is impossible to predict the future climate.
I am all for not polluting the environment with CO2 and methane. But it is a lost cause. If the global economy is to grow to, say, ten times its present size in the next 50 years due to the rise of India and China, then the reality is that a lot more greenhouse gases are going to be produced. We are going to have to cross our fingers and hope that the feedback mechanisms of our planet’s climate system can cope. My bet is that they will.
PS I have spent too much of my life fighting lost causes. I urge you not to. Use your talents and opportunities to have a career and a family Thereby, one can contribute best to the sum total of global happiness. (I am getting too sentimental. I better post this before I am tempted to hit the delete button.)