For-Profit Startup Secures $60 Million for Climate Cooling Technology

Recent news that Stardust has succeeded in raising $60 million for its work on SAI research and development (R&D) reflects two important developments:

1. Given the state of global heating now and as expected for the rest of the century, some investors believe that profits could be made in the area of owning/deploying SAI technology; and
2. Stardust was able to convince investors that their work may contribute to the above.

This raises a number of problems/challenges:

1. Stardust has not communicated much about the details of what it is doing (lack of transparency), so the world does not know what is going on;
2. It is wrong and dangerous for the private sector to fund and do R&D on SAI without social license, covering R&D and most importantly the direction of travel concerning the deployment or not of SAI;
3. Lack of action by governments has led us here and is irresponsible. Governments must wake up and develop governance to either ban such activities, or to provide socially acceptable framework(s), including guardrails and transparency requirements for such R&D. They must also consider pathways to eventual decision-making on whether or not to deploy SAI, and if so, how.

SRM (solar geoengineering) should not be a commercial endeavor. Full stop. We are, after all, talking about a technology that has woefully few global guardrails, and if deployed at scale, would affect every country in the world, but not necessarily equally. Those communities already being hurt first and worst from climate change have the most to potentially lose, or gain, from such an endeavor. And yet they don’t know – none of us know – what Stardust is hoping to put in the stratosphere – for a profit.

The Centre for Future Generations believes that such research cannot be driven by for-profit motives. Without full transparency of their actions and findings, following a strict code of conduct, Stardust is sowing the seeds of distrust that could very well undermine its entire operation – and should.

More research on SRM is needed to answer uncertainties, analyze risks, benefits, and trade-offs, and to inform decisions that policymakers will soon have to make. Uninformed decision-making is not a smart strategy, especially when millions of lives are potentially at stake. Publicly funded research is needed to ensure transparency and accountability to the public – not to profit seekers. Stardust’s model is setting exactly the wrong precedent.

The injection of $60 million of private venture capital into the solar climate engineering experiments proposed by Stardust is another ratchet in the wheel that is turning towards the eventual deployment of this global climate control technology. Those scientists who have been advocating for more research into the technology are getting what they wanted – but probably not in the way that most of them would want. Yet they should not be surprised at this latest move. Their own advocacy of solar geoengineering research into the technology is being used as cover, and justification, by private speculators who see that there is money to be made on the back of the climate crisis.

I hope this latest development exposes the naivety of those scientists who continue to think that this technology – its research or deployment – could ever be governed in the public rather than the private interest. All public-minded solar climate engineering advocates should dial-down their own stridency and criticise this latest rogue venture.

There are so many challenges that stand in the way of being ready to have a rational, honest conversation about whether – and if so, how – SRM can in fact help reduce climate risks, advance human well-being, and protect the environment. In rough, top-of-head order:

1. What laws and policies are needed to make progress toward a capability for competent and legitimate decisions about its use and its effects on mitigation and other climate responses?
2. How to identify, assess, and respond to geopolitically disruptive actions or declarations, including unilateral steps toward deployment or performative pseudo-deployments?
3. How to limit the harm from viral conspiracy theories and misinformation?
4. How to credibly project the multiple important dimensions of impact from realistic deployments, pushing beyond the promising but insufficient results from present modeling studies?
5. How to assess policy implications and risks of potential nearer-term steps toward deployment, including modifying conventional aircraft in pursuit of higher-latitude deployments?
6. How to understand and manage the political and policy implications of fuzzing the boundary between regional or small-scale interventions (from current weather modification activities through to regional-scale pursuit of marine cloud brightening or cirrus cloud thinning) and larger-scale, clearly international ones?
7. How to deal with the fact that the best understood and most prominent potential aerosol for SAI deployment and the most prominent naturally occurring aerosol in the stratosphere, sulphuric acid, has harmful environmental impacts, albeit very small ones relative to the huge harms from current emissions of the same pollutant at ground level?

Stardust’s technology attempts to tackle number 7 on this list. This is so far from the most important problem, however – I’m guessing it’s just that this was the one for which they could come up with a protectable technical solution. But they won’t disclose what it is or how it works, so how can anyone tell even whether their claim to solve problem #7 holds water? And their business model is to sell to national governments, presumably after officials evaluate their performance claims under a non-disclosure agreement? I can think of so many ways this could do harm, and am having trouble coming up with any by which it could help.

SRM is a complex field. Research should be maximally transparent and open as a first, uncompromisable step to be responsible.

Companies like Stardust and those who fund them are putting profit in front of public interest, and the only thing they will accomplish (aside from making a few people rich, and don’t even get me started on the pretence they’re conducting an “experiment”…) is, rightfully but sadly, burning away the slivers of public trust people have been working hard to build, making sure the pathway to a serious and robust understanding of SRM is precluded.