Let's take a step back and look at goals here. The Venusian Terraforming Project (VTP) is being run by Sailor Moon Fen, who want to make Crystal Tokyo. They've got giant 'castles' in orbit (at least the first of which was probably a dozen heavily decorated trailor homes lashed together) from whence they're doing this.
They don't want Crystal Tokyo in ten years, or a thousand. They want it tomorrow, or the day after. They're not going to say, 'how can I make the planet venus like earth?' They're going to say, 'How can I use this can of goop to build a city on that overheated ball of rock?'
Then, the brighter and more creative amongst them is going to say, 'Well, we want a city made of crystal, right? And Diamond is a crystal. And there's lots of carbon down there, and I read on the internet that you can make artifical diamond in super-hot chambers using gasses and carbon. So let's just make our cities out of diamonds, and build giant diamond domes around them!'
And everyone will cheer, because when you're living in an RV in space with nothing but a bucket of goop to keep you alive, This All Makes Perfect Sense.
And you know what? It's handwavium. You raid the equipment from a derelict microchip manufacturing plant, you put it together into something only slightly larger (and far stranger looking) than a bulldozer, and you start converting the CO2 in the atmosphere into accreted, synthetic diamond (and O2). You build domes and houses out of this diamond. You very quickly get a city made of crystal - perhaps not the best 'crystal tokyo' possible, but certainly a lot faster than if you tried to make the whole darn planet liveable, and suddenly you have a ground base of operations to work from. You pump the dome full of breatheable atmosphere, apply liberal amounts of 'wavium so that you don't boil alive inside the dome, and viola, you've got yourself a city on venus.
Estimated time to completion: A year to have a liveable dome for a hundred people. Additional domes cropping up on a regular basis, attaching to the first one like barnacles, so that eventually you end up with something that looks like a cross between a giant mutant snowglobe and a mass of soap bubbles.
Issues: After all that effort, you have a city in a bubble, with expansion work likely continuing to build additional bubbles on all the time. You'll have to import all of your starting atmosphere and water, probably enough to get a small ecosystem started (so food can be generated locally), and most of your 'wavium supply is going to go towards maintaining the giant crystal bubble.
On the plus side, you'll have an ever-growing city of fen on the surface of venus, in addition the the floating castles. Plus, no one is EVER going to crack those domes (they're made of diamond, after all).
The Broadleaf plot is completely unaffected, since you're not making a significant environmental impact on the planet as a whole, just one spot of it.
"Not this again!" Minerva said. "Albus, it was You-Know-Who, not you, who marked Harry as his equal. There is no possible way that the prophecy could be talking about you!" - Harry Potter and the Method of Rationality, Chapter 84
They don't want Crystal Tokyo in ten years, or a thousand. They want it tomorrow, or the day after. They're not going to say, 'how can I make the planet venus like earth?' They're going to say, 'How can I use this can of goop to build a city on that overheated ball of rock?'
Then, the brighter and more creative amongst them is going to say, 'Well, we want a city made of crystal, right? And Diamond is a crystal. And there's lots of carbon down there, and I read on the internet that you can make artifical diamond in super-hot chambers using gasses and carbon. So let's just make our cities out of diamonds, and build giant diamond domes around them!'
And everyone will cheer, because when you're living in an RV in space with nothing but a bucket of goop to keep you alive, This All Makes Perfect Sense.
And you know what? It's handwavium. You raid the equipment from a derelict microchip manufacturing plant, you put it together into something only slightly larger (and far stranger looking) than a bulldozer, and you start converting the CO2 in the atmosphere into accreted, synthetic diamond (and O2). You build domes and houses out of this diamond. You very quickly get a city made of crystal - perhaps not the best 'crystal tokyo' possible, but certainly a lot faster than if you tried to make the whole darn planet liveable, and suddenly you have a ground base of operations to work from. You pump the dome full of breatheable atmosphere, apply liberal amounts of 'wavium so that you don't boil alive inside the dome, and viola, you've got yourself a city on venus.
Estimated time to completion: A year to have a liveable dome for a hundred people. Additional domes cropping up on a regular basis, attaching to the first one like barnacles, so that eventually you end up with something that looks like a cross between a giant mutant snowglobe and a mass of soap bubbles.
Issues: After all that effort, you have a city in a bubble, with expansion work likely continuing to build additional bubbles on all the time. You'll have to import all of your starting atmosphere and water, probably enough to get a small ecosystem started (so food can be generated locally), and most of your 'wavium supply is going to go towards maintaining the giant crystal bubble.
On the plus side, you'll have an ever-growing city of fen on the surface of venus, in addition the the floating castles. Plus, no one is EVER going to crack those domes (they're made of diamond, after all).
The Broadleaf plot is completely unaffected, since you're not making a significant environmental impact on the planet as a whole, just one spot of it.
"Not this again!" Minerva said. "Albus, it was You-Know-Who, not you, who marked Harry as his equal. There is no possible way that the prophecy could be talking about you!" - Harry Potter and the Method of Rationality, Chapter 84