Among the inspirational spokesfolk sermonising about saving the planet from fossil fuels are actress Jane Fonda and ex-husband Ted Turner (2024 net worth $US2.5 billion). Jane ditched Ted in 2001 after 10 years marriage, leaving Ted so heart-broken that he needed a quartet of girlfriends for consolation. He rotated each for one week per month.
Jane extracted $US40 million from Ted as a divorce settlement. This helped keep the wolf from her door as she turned author in 2020 to write “What Can I Do?” about arresting the planet’s imminent death from CO2. The same year, with other Hollywood A-listers, she also signed a petition against excessive consumerism, which demanded that governments fiercely crack down on emissions:
The ongoing ecological catastrophe is a meta-crisis: the massive extinction of life on Earth is no longer in doubt, and all indicators point to a direct existential threat … The pursuit of consumerism[see here] and an obsession with productivity have led us to deny the value of life itself …
For Leigh Sales at ABCTV’s 7.30, the combination of celebrity Jane and more touting of global warming was irresistible. The interview was a classic. Fonda literally wept on camera about emissions “trashing our home” (in her case an $US5.4 million Los Angeles townhouse):
All these wonderful species are going to go and life is going to be very, very difficult to live and eventually possibly the human species will go as well because we are trashing our home and I just, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself or die with myself if I don’t do something.
She grieved with Sales (herself on something north of $400,000) about the cost of living:
Do I need money? There’s that. People forget that we are working people. I belong to three unions. I have to earn a living. I have a bottom line that I’ve got, that I have to meet and its tough right now. I mean, not that tough, I have a roof over my head and a very nice home that’s paid for and food and I have an assistant with me and I’m very, very lucky, but I’m worried. We will have gone almost a year without working and that’s scary…. I have to keep working.
You might by now be asking, “So what? Got anything new to say about celebrities?” Well, yes I have. This essay is about how celebs warn that global warming will turn us into cannibals, maybe you’re not up with that prospect yet? Jane’s ex-husband Ted is a leading public intellectual on this cannibalism forecast. He’s influential too – in 2017 he donated $US1 billion to the United Nations.
By 2038, he believes, the last survivors of the world’s heat-stricken masses will turn on each other for food. His prediction in 2008 was taken up by the conservative Washington Free Beacon online newspaper:
In order to help people prepare for what is coming, the Free Beacon created the Countdown to Cannibalism Clock, which will let you know exactly how much time is left until you must engage in the practice for basic sustenance.
On my calculations, the Cannibalism Clock now stands at 28 minutes to midnight, but I can’t find the clock online. It must be somewhere. The Washington Free Beacon, by the way, is no lightweight . Not part of regime media, this year it disclosed the plagiarisms by Harvard’s diversity President Claudine Gay, forcing her resignation.
Ted Turner forecast temps would be 8 degrees hotter (he was talking Fahrenheit) by 2038, frizzling the world’s crops. “Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state — like Somalia or Sudan — and living conditions will be intolerable.” Who’s to blame? “Too many people are using too much stuff,” replied the billionaire. As he put it, “I lost Jane [Fonda]. I lost my job here. I lost my fortune, most of it, got a billion or two left. You can get by on that if you economise.”
Some say Turner’s cannibalism prediction is already coming true, others claim the cases are just random:
♦ In Pakistan, two brothers were caught digging up corpses and grinding them into curries, forcing the government to bring in new laws against such ingredients.
♦ In Russia in 2010, a couple not only killed and ate from more than 30 people, but put leftovers into meat pies which the wife sold to the military trainees and student pilots at the academy where she worked. Police found they’d also made a least one jar of human pickles.
♦ In Bangkok in 2018, a restaurant owner killed a patron after a row, and tried to disappear the evidence by adding small pieces of his victim to his menu items. As it was a vegetarian restaurant, diners quickly complained and his scheme unravelled.
♦ Also in 2018, a 22-year-old Russian literally axed his landlord, and with his 12-year-old girlfriend Valeria, microwaved and ate him. Valeria, who also cooked parts in a frying pan, told police the heart was too sweet but “the brains turned out to be much more tasty.” Her adult boyfriend killed himself and Valeria was sent to a school in southern Russia, but she bragged so much to classmates about tasty brains that she got transferred to a one-teacher orphanage.
Ted Turner might have got his cannibal inspiration from the cli-fi MGM movie Soylent Green of 1973, which foresaw global warming turning New York City in 2022 (yes, 2022) into a downmarket version of Mumbai and, by the look of it, run by Democrats. The usual odd pair of detectives comprises Robert Thorn (handsome tough guy Charlton Heston, after he got into his Moses robes) and Edward G, Robinson as his clapped-out pal Sol Roth, who complains, ” How can anyone survive in a climate like this, a heatwave all year long, the greenhouse effect, everything is burning up!” [1]
In Soylent Green the usual evil corporation has monopolised half the world’s food supply and provides the masses with edible Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow wafers about the size of domino tiles, made from lentils and soybeans. It has introduced a Soylent Green chip which everyone finds so delicious they riot to get a share each Tuesday.
Without wanting to spoil the plot, Soylent Green is not made from tasty plankton as labelled, but from humans scooped off the streets by riot trucks. Today (2024) human ready-to-eat chips have not eventuated, but the 1973 film’s forecast was spot on about New York’s imperilled electricity. Sol Roth says he has to pedal a stationary bike “half way around the world” to power the pair’s sole light bulb and charge up their room’s battery . Rusted petrol-powered cars litter the streets Havana-style (but I didn’t detect any EVs).
With uncanny prescience the film also foretells the inflation from President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, with a few vegetables and two jars of sauce on offer for $US279.15. A smoker’s fantasy goes, “If I had the money I’d smoke two or three of these every day!” The film also flunks computer-ology, with the heroine 50 years out from 1973 enjoying an arcade Computer Space tussle on a little screen. She chortles, “I demolished five saucers with one rock!”[2]
On the downside, beautiful young women have become “Furniture” for toxic male apartment owners. One owner says, “We give them a day off every month, you would think they would be grateful.” To seduce Charlton Heston, another Furniture Lady promises “to turn that air conditioning up all the way, I will make it cold like winter used to be.” Heston replies, “You are a hell of a piece of furniture.”
For some reason all the corpses on Dr Evil’s conveyor belt remain in cloth shrouds as they’re processed into wafers, which must give Soylent Green, however delicious, a cottony taint.
Reviewers were scathing: the New Yorker said the “pompously prophetic thing of a film hasn’t a brain in its beanbag.”
While New York human-sourced wafers circa 2022 are interesting, my editor is always keen on local angles on cannibalism. There does happen to be one involving the Western Sydney University PhD thesis of Jungian psychotherapist Dr Sally Gillespie, stalwart of the Melbourne-founded Psychology for a Safe Climate band of sisters. It’s titled Mapping Myths, Dreams and Conversations in the Era of Global Warming but sadly is no longer publicly accessible.
For scholarly purposes she created a seven-member group of mainly excitable women, some 50-plus, to share their climate-apocalypse dreams – “fellow crew members sailing a vessel of inquiry.” It’s thrilling to discover what makes climate feminists tick. By their second meeting they’re fantasising about surviving “systemic collapse.” They suspect their present core values might alter. For example, “stories of cannibalism are shared” (p106).
Dr Sally: I wonder what those stories are serving for us at the moment, in teasing us into these questions. Not only the literal question: would I eat someone else or not? [but] what’s the value of human life and culture and society?
As I wrote at the time, if you’re on the plump side and walking up Alexandra Parade, Fitzroy, cross the median strip if Sally’s team’s is coming. You just never know!
That reminds me of another academic, a Swedish professor asking a conference audience about their willingness to eat human corpses. What precisely went on there is in dispute, and I’ll do my best below to get you the facts.
The professor is behavioural scientist and marketer with the Stockholm School of Economics. He allegedly told a Gastro Summit in Stockholm on September 3, 2019, that we could combat global warming by eating corpses. This could help save the human race if only people would “awaken the idea”. Using a Powerpoint display, he acknowledged that the project would need to overcome many taboos, and said it could be more plausible to eat insects and your pet cats and dogs.
Tackled in the international hullaballoo, he said he’d been misquoted. He told Swedish TV4 in an interview the same day that he had merely been gauging how far consumers would go in terms of breaking taboos in the context of global warming.[3]Just a marketing man’s hypothetical, in other words, and what’s more, the google-translate of his Swedish was rough.[4]
Well, said the sceptics, let’s see your notes, your Powerpoint and that video of your talk, and we’ll get them translated. But the video is unavailable and Professor Soderlund had no notes to provide. His Powerpoint was not readily available “for technical reasons,” he said. I can’t imagine what those technical reasons might be. The conference people might have deleted their electronic copy and he might have lost his USB stick, but wouldn’t the file still be on a home or office computer where he created it?
The left-wing oracle for exposing urban myths is snopes.com. You can bet your life they wanted to debunk the mockery of climate alarmists. Söderlund emailed snopes:
I believe that the issue has somehow been hijacked by people who do not believe that global warming and other climate issues should be taken seriously — and, given this, it may indeed be useful to refer to events indicating that climate activists have completely crazy ideas (such as that we should eat each other). Just for the record: I do not want to eat human meat, I do not want to be eaten, I do not think that eating humans influences the climate, I am not an activist, I am just a researcher who thinks that it must be possible to ask questions about also the dark sides of what we humans do and do not do.
But without the video and Powerpoint, and given Soderlund’s denials, snopes’ reluctant verdict on true-or-false was, “Mixture”. Snopes notwithstanding, the reporter for the right-of-centre Epoch Times, Swedish-speaking Celia Farber,[5] who broke the story, had clearly seen Soderlund’s video presentation. She wrote
In his talk, Soderlund asks the audience how many would be open to the idea. Not many hands go up. Some groaning is heard. When interviewed after his talk, he reports brightly that 8 percent of conference participants said they would be open to trying it. When asked if he himself would try it, he replies, “I feel somewhat hesitant but to not appear overly conservative … I‘d have to say … I’d be open to at least tasting it.”
The logo for the talk, titled “Food of the Future: Worms, Grasshoppers, or Human Flesh,” featured a splash of blood as part of the graphic design. Marketing blurbs were
Are we humans too selfish to live sustainably? Is cannibalism the solution to food sustainability in the future? At GastroSummit, you will get some answers to these questions…”
In any event, Soderlund’s premise was that global food supply was on the brink of disaster, which like most or all previous climate predictions is baloney. Food output and yields continue to feed population growth. Output can keep rising (even without greater land use) through better harvest logistics, “smart” targeted use of water and fertilisers, innovation spread among peasants via mobile phones and AI, and so on.
I’d like to say this is the last word on cannibalism and climate, but it ain’t. There’s a veritable industry of academics out there specialising in alarm about how global warming will accelerate cannibalism among a vast variety of non-homo sapien species. This industry’s motto should be “All warming is bad, even in Melbourne” (top temp today: 12degC).
Without even trying I’ve turned up dire climate cannibalism papers about lobsters (aka “Attack of the cannibal lobsters”), six unfortunate Neaderthals, glaucos-winged seagulls ($US300,000 grant and two PhD dissertations), Arizona tiger salamanders (water lizards), damselflies (little dragonfly lookalikes), polar bears, caddisflies (“very hairy”), wolf spiders, Alaskan snow crabs, Arctic foxes and, last but not least, wind farms (when they eat up each others’ downstream windiness).
Well , enough on cannibalism. I call out to my wife, “Plenty of potatoes with the roast tonight!” Wife replies, “No need, I’ve got Swedes”.
Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here
[1] A curiosity is that in 1973 the climate science hive-mind was in fear of global cooling. If you doubt that, see here.
[2] This was the 1970s era’s first depiction on screen of a computer game.
Dr Gillespie’s book ‘Climate Crisis and Consciousness: Re-imagining our world and ourselves’ “draws upon my professional background as a Jungian psychotherapist and my doctoral research into the psychological terrain of ongoing engagement with climate crisis.”
[3] Soderlund, asked in the interview if he’d eat human flesh himself, replied that he’d “be open to at least tasting it.”
[4] In snopes‘ translation of Soderlund’s TV4 interview, the interviewer asked how likely he thought it was that eating human flesh would catch on, in the same way that eating insects has been touted as a possible means to lower carbon emissions and combat food shortages. He thought cannibalism was unlikely to become appealing, having an even greater “yuck” factor than eating insects. He added: “But if we need to turn over every stone when it comes to climate and sustainability, it’s still worth raising this question.”
[5] Celia Farber is a Swedish-American writer with a background in magazine reportage and investigative reporting. She has written for Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and others.
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