NO. The article is talking about releasing sterile mosquitoes. This is a chronic intervention in the sense that you need to continue releasing sterile mosquitoes over time in order to keep populations low. The gene drive technology is a one-shot deal: you release a few mosquitos and a few generations later none of them can be infected with malaria.

It's not the same.

The modified mosquitoes in the article breed sterile offspring. The modification doesn't go beyond that. This has been already done in the wild.

As far as I know, genetic drive have not been used outside the labs. It works by "imposing" the inheritance of a selected gen even if it is bad for the individual.

Theoretically, this could be used for change a full population or even exterminate it. It seems that a first candidate that everybody think about is mosquitoes.

I'd rather people enjoy tropical forests than clear-cut them. I know it's not a binary, but mosquitos don't stop us from destroying rainforests.

Gene drives do not have to be used to eradicate mosquitos (although they can be used that way). They can be used to spread malaria resistance genes to mosquitoes, thereby rendering mosquito populations immune to malaria infection.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1521077112

I don't living in an area where mosquitoes spread any diseases, but I would still like to eradicate them just to make it more enjoyable to take a stroll in the forest. I imagine people in the tropics might feel the same.