Looking to fly to an exotic locale and enjoy catered dinners while you lament what peasants outside your hotel are doing to the environment? Then you should join fellow elites in the environmental and conservation movement at the 2016 UN Convention on Biodiversity in the resort town of Cancun (if you are an environmentalist on a budget, the Moon Palace Golf & Spa Resort where this is being held has a web special for $600 a night.)
The fringe activist site Friends of the Earth will be there, mobilizing unrest about gene drives and, really, all other science that allows them to make doomsday proclamations (which is why climate change is the only science they accept.) Though they could have learned what gene drives really can do by reading Dr. Julianna LeMieux (What Is A 'Gene Drive' - The Hottest New Thing In Science?) they instead jumped right to calling it "genetic extinction technology" that could "unleash living genetically engineered organisms into nature."
You work hard saving Gaia from poor people. You've earned this! Credit: Moon Palace Golf & Spa Resort
Well, I suppose technically that could happen, the same way critics of a swimming pool may have lamented those could lead to someone drowning without noting there are lots of ways to drown, and who is unleashing this holocaust? Corporations? Where is the profit in being extinct? Are the evil scientists they say are right about global warming doing it, or are only biologists the evil scientists in cahoots with Big Extinction?
In the satire "Team America: World Police", the marionette playing Tim Robbins of the Film Actors Guild nicely explains environmentalist understanding of economic theory:
Credit: Paramount Pictures
The recurring problem with Friends of the Earth and others in the environmentalism movement is that they never learn enough science to be right, their economic beliefs are juvenile, and they are appealing to a common denominator that will not know they are wrong on the evidence as well. Think white nationalists supporting President-Elect Trump - except these folks are on the far left side and see conspiracies against them in the halls of science. That is the mentality FOE wants to get marching and they will issue their clarion call until it happens, no matter how where how often are forced to fly off and enjoy skinny margaritas.
If 'scientists are stupid' doesn't get their base mobilized, threats of "biopiracy" will - especially if it involves scary Internet and digital gene sequences imagery zipping around the Dark Web. FOE worries that the "genes of plants or microorganisms may be sequenced and stored as digital codes that are emailed around the planet" and doom us all.
Yes, they are afraid of email.
In 1980, Friends of the Earth was against home computers also. They said the government and corporations would be engaging in mind control with a PC in every house and companies would use that Atari 400 or TRS-80 to manipulate the public remotely. Ironically, that is what FOE now tries to do in their email blasts twice per week.
Anyway, enjoy the conference, activists. Just kidding about the caviar, though I am told the teppanyaki at Momo is to die for. You deserve it after a long day of scaremongering.
