Are We About To Be Assailed By Private Companies and Governments Implementing Geoengineering Experiments?

Geoengineering involves manipulating the natural environment of Earth to address global warming. It includes technologies like carbon capture and sequestration, and direct air carbon capture, technologies currently being implemented in numerous projects assisted by government legislation such as the American Inflation Reduction Act.

But it also covers actions such as seeding the upper atmosphere with aerosols to reflect solar radiation back into space, the launch and placement of sunshade satellite arrays in near-Earth space, or the artificial seeding of the oceans with iron, lime, and other minerals to reduce acidification caused by increased carbon dioxide (CO2) absorption.

Sequestration projects that were dead in the water a decade ago are now all the rage as the fossil fuel sector attempts to remain viable well into the future by implementing backend carbon capture solutions.

And as for seeding the atmosphere and the ocean, other than a rogue player or two, no government or company has yet launched large-scale operations to tweak either. There are good reasons for humans not to attempt these types of interventions without doing much-needed legitimate research and experimentation. And yet here we are with a new rogue start-up announcing, without approval from any government entity, that it has already begun releasing aerosols into the upper atmosphere.

The company is Make Sunsets, which on its website states the following:

“We make reflective, high-altitude, biodegradable clouds that cool the planet. Mimicking natural processes, our “shiny clouds” are going to prevent catastrophic global warming. 

Specifically: we release a natural compound via reusable balloons to create reflective clouds in the stratosphere. They’re *really* effective: 1 gram of our clouds offsets the warming that 1 ton of CO₂ emissions creates for a year. After three years, our clouds compost and settle back to Earth. 

Because we deliver our clouds via reusable balloons, we’re able to offset CO2 at <1% of the cost of other solutions. Uniquely, we can also scale to offset *all* of global warming. We can offset warming from all global annual CO₂ emissions with ~$30 million of our clouds, and every $1 billion of our clouds will cool the world by ~0.1 Fahrenheit! 

Sounds like sci-fi? It’s not: we’ve already launched our first clouds, and we’ll offset a substantial amount of warming in 2023!”

Make Sunsets hasn’t asked permission from anyone, not even the country of Mexico where it did its first launches. It hasn’t talked to the United Nations. It hasn’t invited climate scientists to engage it, and it hasn’t asked permission from the public to dump aerosols into the atmosphere. And now it is selling $10 US cooling credits per gram of particles it releases. That, states CEO, Luke Iseman, should offset warming from one ton of carbon per year.

Iseman confirmed two initial launches in an article appearing in a recent issue of MIT Technology Review. He plans future launches with much larger payloads and knows that some would describe him as a “Bond villain” based on this rogue act. He, however, is convinced that not doing it would be morally wrong considering the current state of global warming.

Janos Pasztor, Executive Director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, who has called for government and international scientific oversight of any geoengineering or other climate-altering technologies, describes the actions by Make Sunsets as “a very bad idea.” Other scientists believe it is a threat to legitimate climate change mitigation research and will erode trust in the science.

Stratospheric Aerosol Dumps Need Study

This isn’t the first article written about geoengineering on this site, and I am sure it won’t be the last. In a previous posting, I described a scenario and unintended consequence of just such an act as described in a work of fiction entitled “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From Our Future.” Written from the perspective of a 24th-century historian looking back at our present and near future, it describes a 2059 initiative to do what Iseman is currently doing. In that year engineers inject aerosols of submicrometer-sized particles into the upper atmosphere. Over the first three years, global atmospheric temperatures drop. Then, in year four, the Indian Ocean monsoon stops causing massive crop failures and famine throughout South Asia. This is followed by a temperature rebound of 5 Celsius (9 Fahrenheit) when aerosol injections are stopped.

When asked about Make Sunsets rogue initiative, Kelly Wanser, Executive Director of SilverLining, a nonprofit organization doing research on climate risks and interventions like geoengineering stated: “From a business perspective, reflective cooling effects and risks cannot currently be quantified in any meaningful way, making the offering a speculative form of junk credit.” 

Even David Keith, at Harvard University, a leading expert on solar geoengineering, who has been working on a controlled small-scale experiment to use commercial aircraft to seed the stratosphere with aerosols, expressed concern about Make Sunsets private initiative to beat him to the punch noting the lack of “transparency and trust” in the deployment as well as the attempt to sell cooling credits. One scientist when asked in the MIT article stated that Make Sunsets was “violating the rights of communities to dictate their own future,” and that the credibility of the claim per gram outcome was not backed up by any legitimate research.