Lovelock has drawn the ire of many environmentalists for years for his promotion of nuclear energy. Now he claims that cap-and-trade measures are little more than a scam and that billions of people are going to perish in the climate catastrophe to come. There will however be survivors:
"Lovelock guesses the rump human race will cluster around a few temperate islands in the far northern hemisphere, including his native U.K. He believes that if emergency preparations are made in time-he compares the present moment to 1939-and if the worst-case scenarios of geopolitical conflict are avoided-namely resource scrambles leading to global thermonuclear war-then something resembling a modern and even urban lifestyle may await the survivors. This future civilization will synthesize food from CO2, nitrogen, water, and a few minerals. Simple amino acids and sugars, Lovelock cheerfully explains, can be used as feedstock for bulk animal and vegetable tissue created in chemical vats from biopsies.Yum!"
Comments
Precis in limerick form
A surly and pessimist Druid,
(A Defeatist, if only he knew it!)
Said, "The World's on the skids,
and I think having kids,
is a waste of good seminal fluid...."
Lovelock
Hear, hear! I don't know what people like Lovelock think they are accomplishing by spreading this sort of defeatism. They can only discourage efforts to slow global warming.
Lovelock's science is on the fringe; he could conceivably be right but the overwhelming majority of scientists diagree. His policy analysis is simply ill informed.
Charles Siegel