Forget CFLs, hybrid cars, and organic jeans. Buying our way out of climate change — even if it’s green consumption — won’t get us far. We’ve got around seven billion people on Earth, more than double the population just 50 years ago, and that number keeps rising. Electricity and transportation aside, we humans collectively eat and drink a lot, and producing all of that food and water has a major impact on the climate. So, while we’re cutting our consumption in other areas, how to we reduce the carbon footprint of our own bodies?A new paper, published in Ethics, Policy, and the Environment by NYU bioethics professor S. Matthew Liao, poses an answer: engineer humans to use less. The general plan laid out by Liao is straightforward, ranging from using pharmacological behavior modification to create an aversion to meat in people, to using gene therapy to create smaller, less resource-intensive children. The philosophical and ethical questions, on the other hand, are absurdly complicated.The Atlantic has a great interview with Liao, which is absolutely worth a read. From the piece:Your paper also discusses the use of human engineering to make humans smaller. Why would this be a powerful technique in the fight against climate change?
Liao: Well one of the things that we noticed is that human ecological footprints are partly correlated with size. Each kilogram of body mass requires a certain amount of food and nutrients and so, other things being equal, the larger person is the more food and energy they are going to soak up over the course of a lifetime. There are also other, less obvious ways in which larger people consume more energy than smaller people—-for example a car uses more fuel per mile to carry a heavier person, more fabric is needed to clothe larger people, and heavier people wear out shoes, carpets and furniture at a quicker rate than lighter people, and so on.
And so size reduction could be one way to reduce a person’s ecological footprint. For instance if you reduce the average U.S. height by just 15cm, you could reduce body mass by 21% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding reduction in metabolic rates by some 15% to 18%, because less tissue means lower energy and nutrient needs.Those numbers are astounding, but not only for the positive environmental impact they promise. They’re also incredible because they highlight the disconnect between the pure empiricism of science and the emotional vagaries that are integral to human life. Considering Liao is a philosopher and bioethicist, that may have been part of his point, something he delves into more in the interview.I mean, the ecologist part of my brain can’t argue with reduction in strain on our food supply those changes would make. Meat is hugely resource-intensive, and helping people trying to quit steak with the “vegetarian pill” doesn’t seem to pose too much of an ethical quandary. But when we’re talking gene therapy, not for curing disease, but to shrink people to physically use less? The phrase “enviro-Nazi eugenics” is just waiting to be coined by the Limbaugh crowd, and it’d likely be one of the lesser-hyperbolic statements they’d likely make.It’s one hell of an ethical question, which is exactly why Liao’s work deserves attention. The paper poses the all-important question with a bluntness as-yet unrivaled within the climate change discussion: At what point does securing the future of the planet’s ecosystems — and thus securing our own future — require measures drastic enough to include altering our own biology? Humans have been growing larger for centuries thanks largely to improving diets. Now that we’re at the point that geoengineering our way out of the climate mess has become a valid point of discussion, perhaps its time we engineer ourselves to be more efficient as well.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter.
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