Weird solutions of climate change

Mankind makes technology and catches up with the threats that technology poses as an afterthought. The threat of nuclear war was ignored or not understood, depending on which propaganda you become a victim to, before launching the weapons that were advertised as a national pride. In truth, however, they are an extinction-causing weapon system. Just like the nuclear weapons are in a few hands around the world, the threat of climate change also has the fingerprints of just a few nations, primarily the industrially advanced west and China.

Several solutions have been suggested to tackle the threat of climate change such as the fossil fuel driven propaganda laden solutions of eating lesser beef, having fewer children, flying lesser, planting more trees, using synthetic and lab prepared beef and a host of other such authentic sounding, yet, non-serious solutions.

One solution suggested almost a decade ago truly baffled me. In 2012, three philosophers S Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg, and Rebecca Roache proposed “human engineering” to fight climate change. The idea is that smaller human beings would need less food and energy. Less food would be needed to grow, which would free up the land that could be used for solar power generation. It would also mean lesser cattle farming, which is a significant source of methane emissions that cause almost twice the damage to the environment in about the same time as regular carbon emissions do. Smaller houses would be needed to accommodate them and their lifestyles. They would drive smaller cars.

I am not quite sure about this as a solution. However, what I do know for a fact is that short people tend to drive larger vehicles. Perhaps they want to project a larger self of their existence or maybe due to being smaller in size they are naturally attracted to larger things. Whatever factors go into the psychology of the mind, I am confident to state that human engineering wouldn’t be able to tackle the human mind and the human psychology. Those arenas are yet to be fully understood.

It is important to know here that a whopping 76% of the global carbon emissions result from energy production. Transportation is a major part of that energy consumed. Furthermore, the generation of energy, even when it is used for purposes other than transportation, is still majorly done with burning fossil fuel. And that is the biggest source of all this climate change threat. Without touching that, smaller humans or consuming lesser beef or producing fewer children would not make any significant dent in global warming.

All of it would only mean that the extinction that can result from unchecked carbon emissions would only slow down. And that is also a hypothetical. It would still be headed in the same direction. What humanity needs is a change in direction, and not a change in speed only. What is needed far less is a change in human sizes. I am also wondering whether the brain size would also reduce when those smaller humans hit the streets. And then I wonder, the humans we see today are the best there is in the journey of evolution. We got to the moon and Mars. We fly around the globe in hours, and we connect with the world in a heartbeat. And yet it is these smart beings that caused these fossil fuel driven carbon emissions. And for the umpteenth time, we accelerated these emissions even more after we came to know about the threat of climate change.

And when I am done wondering about that, I realise that smaller brains would be even more stupid and self-destructive. Their self-annihilating attitude would be even severer. We might just accelerate this journey toward the end. The bottom line is: without ending the use of fossil fuel and introducing carbon tax, the world can only create nonsense solutions. And that is what the fossil fuel industry wants. They are still winning.