With CNN using its 7-hour climate town hall to parrot the right’s message that fighting climate change means banning burgers, deniers are seeking out the next poison pill to turn people against climate action.
Instead of telling us what not to eat, according to Breitbart and others, alarmists are going to start controlling what we do eat.
We have seen the food of the future. Apparently, it is us.
It all started with a segment on Swedish news, where a behavioral and marketing scientist talked about a seminar he was presenting at a summit on the future of food, which floated the possibility of eating dead people (in addition to insects and pets) to save the climate.
This was picked up by some fringe outlets, like Shoebat.com and the Epoch Times (yes, that one), and then amplified by ClimateDepot and Breitbart.
Now, having not been at the summit where the idea was initially presented, and lacking strong connections in the Swedish culinary scene, we can’t say for certain what the deal is with this presentation.
But we can say with some certainty that no one is seriously consideringly cannibalism as climate action, and would venture to bet that even the scientist making the suggestions, Magnus Söderlund, wasn’t seriously proposing it.
It’s actually the craziest outlet--Shoebat.com, which is the blog of a man who was (supposedly, but probably not actually) in his words “a radicalized Muslim… involved in terror activity” before turning to pro-Israel advocacy after 9/11 leading to a career of birtherism and islamaphobia on FoxNews--gets closest to what is the most likely answer. In Shoebat’s coverage, it notes that sometimes people float “trial balloons” to begin legitimizing an idea, first introducing it as over-the-top, then seeing how people respond. The blog then goes off the rails, but the interpretation that the Swedish idea wasn’t a literal call to start going Hannibal Lecter is probably right.
Given that Söderlund is a behavioral researcher who talked about what it would take to move people to behave in more climate-friendly ways, a more reasonable explanation would be that he was using cannibalism as an extreme example as a way to make a rhetorical point, a very common figure of speech known as hyperbole.
Because, and this would be rather obvious for anyone who isn’t eager to attack alarmists for fun and profit, it’s much more likely that Söderlund was making a point about how hard it would be for people to embrace the last-ditch survival scenario of eating people, versus a much smaller ask that they eat a little less beef. And if you could theoretically entice people to eat people, you could probably get them to eat more plants, too.
Deniers can rest assured that climate activists aren’t quite ready to start literally eating the rich. Because of course there’s an easier way to avoid having to eat one another to survive the breakdown of society: kick our fossil fuel habit.
But such a Proposal is apparently just a tad too Modest for some...
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