There’s a big, big debate brewing about "geoengineering" — messing deliberately with the earth’s climate to tweak it to our liking. This article in The Economist is a decent primer.
You can already see the shape of the debate emerging, and it’s strikingly similar to the nuclear debate. A massive, unproven, problem-ridden, techno-utopian solution is advanced as representing Science!, and critics who warn of hubris and point to more human-scale solutions are derided as … you guessed it … dirty hippies.
I’m going to write a lot more about this soon.
