[maxander]

Impracticality of physical economic analysis aside, I'm now curious about the engineering problem of cooling down a planet overheating from sheer exothermal industry. Can you pack enough waste heat into a canister that launching it into space is a net decrease in energy? Can space elevator tethers be used for evaporative cooling into the vacuum?

As I recall, in Niven's books an alien race moved their planet away from its sun in order to deal with the problem, but I assume that wouldn't even buy us an order of magnitude in planetary energy dissipation capacity.