Comment by mmooss
This is silly. The 'society' has done very, very many things over the centuries (including other awful ones - slavery, Japanese-American internment, segregation, oppression in Latin America and elsewhere, climate change, etc etc). To pick one and say it's necessary to CO2 scrubbers is just a rhetorical/philosophical game.
That can be fun - we're on HN after all - and even informative to explore, but is not tied to reality.
The point I’m trying to get at is that you seem to be trying to smuggle “liberty and justice” in under the cover of CO2 scrubbers. But the same “politics and institutions” that created our technologically advanced, prosperous society, also did those other things. Even if they weren’t individually “necessary” to that advancement, it seems like being fairly insensitive to such outcomes has been a feature of the approach that has made the U.S. successful. So why fix what isn’t broken?