I'm not surprised that there is so much pessimism about this topic, but i'm slightly surprised to see so much here. I'd expect more than a few Hacker News readers to be enthusiastic about an idea like this. If we do nothing, this world is on track for a series of sustained crisises. We no longer have the luxury of "safe" solutions. This is extreme, and has huge potential for unintended effects. But not doing anything might be worse. Maybe more productive then "we shouldn't do this" is a conversation around strategies for minimizing potential issues.
No it isn't. We should strife to zero carbon emissions. No amount of insulation or reduction of consumption will achieve this. The best these reductions do is delay the onset of the negative consequences of climate change.
The solution is to replace carbon emission based energy sources and there are plenty of basically infinite energy sources out there. Solar energy, geothermal energy, tidal energy, nuclear fission, possibly nuclear fusion.
Until we've scaled those up we should be reducing our energy consumption. But it's just a stopgap, not a solution.
A solution has to be possible for it to be a viable solution. There is no way the world's population is just going to decide to live an ascetic life suddenly, and there is no world organization nor will to force that to happen. Not only that, but I don't want to live in a world where we have to sacrifice the gains we have made in living conditions just to survive. We need to use our innovative powers to come up with a way we can continue to progress while maintaining the livability of our planet.
We don't need to get to poverty levels to be carbon neutral. But we need to stop consuming for consumption's sake, and reduce some important bad habits. The structure of pricing must also change. People don't feel poor for not being able to eat caviar daily today, they don't have to feel poor for not affording beef daily tomorrow either.
I get the feeling this is where the skepticism is rightly coming from.
Humans as a whole should have learnt many times over, that we're not properly equipped or clever enough to mess with nature with absolute confidence.
