The mentioned novelist, Kim Stanley Robinson, is probably best known in HN circles for the Red/Blue/Green Mars trilogy about terraforming the planet. There's a certain irony here about how hard we're finding it to control even the Earth's climate.
Not ironic at all. The Mars trilogy is hardly a utopia. Instead, it's a repudiation of our political economy. Certainly his recent Aurora is an overt criticism of terrestrial hubris which posits that future generations would, if they could, come back and punch us in the face.
Humans can't control the Earth's climate. No amount of taxes, protests, or memes are going to change it, one way or the other. It is sheer arrogance to assume we can. We are simply along for the ride. Sure, we can destroy our environments with nuclear war, China-level pollution, and strip-mining, however only to the point where it destroys us. After we're gone, it keeps going the way it has for a billion years.
Sure we can. For example, by generating enough greenhouse gases to insulate the planet and raise average temperatures. Isn’t this a website for engineers? A strange forum for mystical Gaia reasoning.