Its approach is novel: Most geoengineering research today is led by scientists in the US at universities and federal agencies, and the work they are doing is more or less accessible to public scrutiny. Stardust is at the forefront of an alternative path: One in which private companies drive the development, and perhaps deployment, of technologies that experts say could have profound consequences for the planet.

First, that isn’t a novel approach. Second, being accessible to public scrutiny should be a requirement, since the consequences will affect all of us. Third, the people behind this have questionable backgrounds.

There’s a great chapter on geo-engineering in Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything.

Main take aways are that it’s extremely dangerous and in a best case scenario likely to render parts of the global south unhabitable.

I think the most significant question, it’s a quote from a scientist in that chapter, is “Can the same human beings who accidentally engineered the climate crisis, be trusted to engineer a new, safer climate?”. You can draw your own conclusions, but mine is definitely a big no.

Extra point, my own opinion, is that acting like warming is the only thing causing issues for us in climate change is very short sighted. The ocean, our world’s most important ecosystem, is being massively impacted by acidification, if that doesn’t stop, we’ll face big issues, regardless of temperature increase. Plankton creates more than half the worlds oxygen, so, I don’t really know what we’re gonna do without that.

For me, this is the key paragraph:

Few outsiders have gotten a glimpse of Stardust’s plans, and the company has not publicly released details about its technology, its business model, or exactly who works at its company. But the company appears to be positioning itself to develop and sell a proprietary geoengineering technology to governments that are considering making modifications to the global climate—acting like a kind of defense contractor for climate alteration.

If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that we don’t want to become more beholden to private capital for critical societal needs, and a stable atmosphere is at the absolute bottom of the pyramid. Dave Karpf has a great take on the geoengineering situation, so I’ll let his words take it from here:

First, we have to believe that the science of geoengineering is rock-solid. Second, we have to believe the science of real-time climate modeling and forecasting has been basically perfected. You need your climate models to be extremely good in order to forecast what the effects of geoengineering will be. And you need the geoengineering not to have any surprising downstream consequences that the engineers couldn’t predict. You particularly need this because “termination shock” is itself a warning – once you start this process at scale, you cannot end it without disastrous consequences. You had better be right.

Geoengineering would absolutely be a minefield of unintended consequences. It has never been attempted before. We are incapable of testing it at scale without, y’know, actually pulling the trigger and trying. The degree to which we just don’t fucking know what the unintended impacts of geoengineering would be is off the charts here. The models are based on two major volcanic eruptions, with limited contemporaneous data collection. We’re starting from an N of TWO! Model it all you want, but those models will be based on assumptions that can only be refined once we’ve pulled the trigger on the giant silver bullets.

"Wait, so we have all the technology we need to stop climate change, but we have to sacrifice some profits to do so?

Well, since it’s impossible to stop climate change with current technology, I guess we just have to dump chemicals into the atmosphere and hope for the best."

“We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we do know that it was us that scorched the sky.”

The Matrix (1999), spoken by Morpheus

Isn’t that the plot of Snowpiercer?