Engineering and the Ecomodernist Manifesto

From the Breakthrough Institute:

"The Anthropocene, the unofficial name for our human-influenced geological age, has become a popular shorthand for environmental apocalypse. In mid-April, however, a group of eighteen researchers, activists, and philanthropists published a six-thousand-word tract, called “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” that envisions a different sort of Anthropocene—not only a good one but a great one. Most of the manifesto’s authors are associated with the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank in Oakland, California. Calling themselves ecomodernists and ecopragmatists, they argue that technology, supported and accelerated by government investment, can allow humanity to simultaneously mitigate climate change, protect land, and relieve poverty. They approve of urbanization, intensified agriculture, nuclear power, aquaculture, and desalination; they disapprove of suburbanization, low-yield farming, and forms of renewable energy with large acreage demands. High-efficiency solar cells, advanced nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion, they write, “represent the most plausible pathways toward the joint goals of climate stabilization and radical decoupling of humans from nature.”"