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Comment by tgirod | Hacker News Reader

Hey, we are fucking up the environment by altering such a complex system way too fast for it to keep balance. Maybe if we alter it on a whole new scale with our limited understanding of the consequences, we can fix things up?

To be more constructive, this is exactly the kind of hubris that gets me very wary of technoscience.

Let's assume Project Vesta is run by well intentionned folks and has the potential to offer a net positive in a distant future. Even in those conditions, such a project serves the toxic political agenda of not facing the elephant in the room: our growth based economic model is not sustainable and we need to transition away from it.

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Agreed, but climate change is a monumental issue and even if we assume the government can act in a timely manner to shift the economic model to one that is more environmentally friendly, that won't be enough to fix the problem. I don't think this should be viewed as a cop out, or an alternative to economic change, but rather as something that augments it and moves us in the right direction.

IMO the problem here is the leap of faith you are making by believing an untested technology, operating on a planet scale, will help.

We only have one planet here, so instead of betting on a massive terraforming technology to suck the CO2 out of the air, I'd rather use a more conservative approach such as massive reforestation - something that is low-tech, can be done by anyone, anywhere, and improve the resilience of the ecosystem rather than kicking its balance again.

Could you explain more what you mean about our growth based economic model not being sustainable? This is a topic that I'm fairly new to and the only substantial thing I've read about it is Tyler Cowen's "Stubborn Attachments" which presented what I found to be a very compelling argument that long term economic growth is very good and is in fact the only sustainable way forward.

I've been hoping to read some counter arguments to that idea to round out my exposure to the topic.

Well, first there is the common sense part - infinite growth with limited resources is likely to bump on a wall at some point. Someone (especially here) will probably argue that the resources are not really limited because technology and spaaaace, but that's precisely the kind of hubris I was reacting to in the first place.

I think the first extensive study on the subject is [the limits to growth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth).

A compelling thing I've seen (sorry can't find the exact source, I think it was from [the shift project](https://theshiftproject.org)) is the very strong correlation - almost linear relation - between GDP, energy consumption and co2 emission. So far we haven't been able to decorrelate those three.

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