Can technology save the environment? Lessons from Iain M. Banks’ Culture series

Jase felt pleasure at the girl’s words (if not the snort), but at the same time detected in them a tinge of that mixture of contempt and patronizing smugness the Culture found it so difficult not to exhibit when surveying the mistakes of less advanced societies, even though the source civilizations of its own mongrel past had been no less fallible. Still, the underlying point held; experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place. Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas