Inevitable & Obvious

A planetary sunshade is one of those ideas that gets filed under science fiction and left there. A constellation of thin reflectors, parked at the gravitational balance point between the Earth and the Sun, shading the planet by a percent or so and buying us time on warming. The reason to take it seriously now is that the industrial base required to build one is the same base that SpaceX, NASA, and...

SRM Is Coming Faster Than You Think — Ben Kalina on 15 Years Filming Climate’s Most Controversial Idea Sunlight reflection has spent decades as an idea scientists batted around at academic conferences. Now venture-backed companies are racing to build deployment systems, state legislatures are passing bans on weather modification research, and the public still mostly thinks the contrails overhead a...

Iceland is the first country to formally declare a potential AMOC collapse a national security threat. Páll Gunnarsson, founder of the Reykjavík Institute, has been close to the political process that produced that declaration. He explains why a country of 400,000 people moved faster than larger Atlantic-rim nations, what made the declaration possible, and why he believes intervention capability r...

A former UN Assistant Secretary-General spent seven years trying to get world leaders to talk about planetary cooling. Most of them told him the same thing: "We can't talk about this publicly." Janos Pasztor led the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative (C2G), the first organization to systematically bring solar radiation modification governance to governments, diplomats, and the UN system. In th...

Luke Iseman is putting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere with high-altitude balloons and selling cooling credits to pay for it. And he doesn’t care if you approve. Make Sunsets is maybe the most polarizing company in climate interventions right now, and I wanted to have Luke on the show so we could learn more about how they think and what their goals are. We discussed the question that if we as...

Stratospheric aerosol injection might be one of the only interventions that could reduce global warming on the timescales that actually matter, but we don't yet know enough to say if it's completely worth the potential tradeoffs, and we're not on track to find out in time. Dakota Gruener is the founder and CEO of Reflective, an independent nonprofit trying to change that by radically accelerating...