You read the part about it being a specific couple of species, right? So unless somebody comes up with a brilliant plan that targets specifically those species, and only in the parts of the world where they're not native, and nothing else, we're still risking the same kind of consequences as with DDT, or neonicotinoids. The kind we can't predict in advance are going to fuck us over.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the optimism inherent in a perspective on the world that says there's necessarily a technological solution to everything, and more than that, one that modern-day humans are certainly smart enough to find. I just wish it didn't so lend itself to hubris.
The sterile-insect technique does work, but it's not going to achieve the kind of eradication people in here are talking about. Wild-eyed ideas about mass pesticide application and CRISPR gene drives are more the sort of thing that actually concern me, or would if I thought anyone talking about them was anywhere near the required levers of power to actually make them happen. As it is, I just wish people had enough sense of history to understand the import, although I suppose in the age of alternative facts that's far more than can reasonably be expected.
Strile-insect achieves 90-95% (e.g.[1]). Sustained and combined with a bit from the other approaches (netting, drying some swamps, this article suggests a medicine to make infected biting mosquitoes die, etc.), we can at least repeat what happened in much of the West - the population was reduced so much the parasite went extinct, when the population bounced back it was 'clean' (in other places in the West these mosquito simply went extinct).
