Climate change activism went from paper straws to Hannibal Lecter way too quickly.

If you had guessed a few weeks ago that climate alarmism would jump from plastic straw bans to directives against having children to the promotion of literal cannibalism, it would have sounded like a ridiculous slippery slope fallacy. But here we are.

A couple of authors argued in an op-ed published by Newsweek that humans might want to break their pesky cannibalism taboo in the future.

“We suspect that we could adapt to human flesh if need be,” the academics wrote. “Some philosophers have argued that burying the dead could be wasteful in the context of the fight against world hunger — but there are much more palatable alternatives on the table than a haunch of human.”

As if that little endorsement of eating human flesh weren’t macabre enough, a Swedish scientist last week advocated for the use of cannibalism to help curb climate change, according to the Epoch Times.

The researcher, Magnus Söderlund, said humans should overcome the “conservative” taboo against cannibalism because it may be necessary for our survival once climate change has decimated the planet. Yes, you read that right. We should be OK with eating each other because the climate may someday require it.

Even he was squeamish about the possibility of applying his own doctrine, though. In response to a question about whether he’d eat human flesh himself, Söderlund said: "I feel somewhat hesitant but to not appear overly conservative … I’d have to say … I’d be open to at least tasting it."

So, there are a couple of options here. Either the Newsweek authors and this poor, misguided scientist think hyperbole will scare people into cutting their carbon footprint, which definitely won’t work , or they genuinely believe their own ivory tower drivel, and they think the concerns of the planet outweigh basic human principles of dignity and morality.

This is the scarier of the two interpretations. As critic Sonny Bunch wrote for the Washington Post, environmentalists make great on-screen villains because their supposedly benevolent machinations are designed to inhibit, or even damage, our lives:



“Environmentalists make a useful villain because their malevolence can be obscured by a patina of reasonableness. Global warming and other manmade problems are going to end the world if we don’t do something — so just about anything is justified!”



The problem of climate change, as significant as it may be, does not necessitate the destruction of norms and mores. Yet climate activists have decided to use rising global temperatures as an excuse to demand fealty to all of their supposedly climate-saving wishes.

This week, author and not-a-climate-expert Jonathan Franzen wrote for the New Yorker that climate change necessitates a sort of war-time mentality on our part. We “must accept the reality of climate change and have faith in the extreme measures taken to combat it” and “be permanently terrified by hotter summers and more frequent natural disasters.” Every day, he writes, “instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about death.”

Well, if you followed the advice of the Swedish scientist, you would be thinking about death at breakfast.

It doesn’t make you a climate denier to push back on the narrative that climate change is so dire it requires that we reframe our entire political structures and systems of thinking. Some changes are reasonable, and paper straws are one thing. But cannibalism is beyond the pale, and any attempt to say otherwise is neither clever nor useful. It's ghoulish, and it's what happens when you make preserving the climate your ultimate standard of morality.