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US-Israeli startup plan to block sun with airborne chemicals

A US-Israeli geoengineering startup has raised $60m as part of its plan to test ‘sun-reflecting technology’. Critics are warning the new tech could have unexpected negative impacts on global weather and drive “geopolitical conflict”. Supporters, meanwhile, have pointed out it might not do that.


Geoengineering

If you’re unfamiliar with solar ‘geoengineering’, it’s essentially climate change in reverse. Much like how we’ve caused global warming and other changes by releasing carbon, methane, and other gases, scientists believe we can reverse the problem by releasing particles which reflect sunlight back into space.

Recreating the problem which got us here in the first place only in reverse — what could go wrong, eh?

As it turns out, quite a lot.

In a report titled The Risks of Geoengineering, the Center for International Environmental Law summarised:

  • Geoengineering technologies, if deployed at scale, could have profound, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible effects on biodiversity, both through their direct impacts and as a result of compounding and exacerbating existing planetary crises caused by pollution, climate change, and unsustainable land use.
  • If deployed at scale, geoengineering technologies would likely cause a range of harmful impacts, including changes in precipitation, uneven cooling, and oxygen depletion, as well as degrade nutrient cycling, weaken the ozone, and disrupt food webs with significant deleterious impacts on biodiversity and human well-being globally.
  • As it is impossible to test geoengineering technologies for their intended impact on the climate except through large-scale deployment, geoengineering proposes turning the Earth into a laboratory, with the risk of locking in a wide range of harmful and potentially irreversible impacts, including exacerbating climate change and its associated harms.

Capital fights back

As reported by Politico, this latest geoengineering plan is being led by US-Israeli startup Stardust Solutions. Their technology involves custom particles which the company claims are ‘inert’. They also believe these particles will not accumulate in humans or ecosystems, will not harm the ozone layer, and will not create acid rain.

Stardust Solutions’ founders are nuclear physicists who worked for the Israeli government. Although they insist their new project is unaffiliated with the state of Israel, they are headquartered outside Tel Aviv. This could cause problems for them worldwide given the boycott of Israel which began during Israel’s apartheid era and continued throughout the genocide.

Speaking to Politico, CEO Yanai Yedvab said:

putting their trust in the concept of, we need a safe and responsible and controlled option for sunlight reflection, which for me is [a] very important step forward in the evolution of this field

Noting that backers include “venture capital firms”, Politico highlights that:

The startup’s fundraising haul was led by Lowercarbon Capital, a Wyoming-based climate technology-focused firm co-founded by billionaire investor Chris Sacca.

It was also backed by the Agnellis’ firm Exor, a Dutch holding company that is the largest shareholder of Chrysler parent company Stellantis, luxury sports car manufacturer Ferrari and Italy’s Juventus Football Club. Ten other firms — hailing from San Francisco to Berlin — and one individual, former Facebook executive Matt Cohler, also joined Stardust’s fundraising round, its second since being founded two years ago.

Speaking about the private nature of this enterprise, Politico notes that even advocates of geoengineering think the ‘for-profit’ model is the absolute worst way of pursuing this technology. One person they spoke to was Gernot Wagner, a climate economist who authored Geoengineering: The Gamble. 

Wagner said:

They have convinced Silicon Valley [venture capitalists] to give them a lot of money, and I would say that they shouldn’t have. I don’t think it is a reasonable path to suggest that there’s going to be somebody — the U.S. government, another government, whoever — who buys Stardust, buys the [intellectual property] for a billion bucks [and] makes the VC investors gazillions. I don’t think that is, at all, reasonable.

Won’t somebody think of the billionaires?

The problem with fighting climate change is that it negatively impacts the people who want to profit from climate change. Rather than reducing the use of fossil fuels, then, why not instead go full steam ahead while also making a killing by stuffing the atmosphere full of patented particles?

Things may go horribly wrong, of course, but that doesn’t really matter when you see every disaster as an opportunity to make more money.

Featured image via Picryl

By Willem Moore

This post was originally published on Canary.