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The year is twenty thirty one. A last ditch attempt to cool down our overheating planet by dimming the Sun's rays has failed, plunging the Earth into an ice age and throwing humanity into chaos. The remaining survivors struggle to make do with limited resources, living out their days aboard a train endlessly circling the globe. Wealthy citizens live in safe luxury. Society's cast outs are confined to the back of the train. Podcasters document everything from small chili studios.
It's the end of the world as we know it, Okay, just kidding. Aside from that last part, this is just the plot of the twenty thirteen sci fi film Snow Piercer, and don't worry us. Present day podcasters are fine. The studio is pretty cozy. No ice age yet. But this idea of humans trying to fight climate change by blocking the sun has appeared in movies and books for years.
Usually the effects are disastrous, like so many dystopian fantasies, though they've got some basis in reality because the science that some of these stories draw from actually exists.
It's very cheap at the low end, seven billion dollars a year to do this in a way that would actually slash further warming in half, which is pretty significant.
Sophia Alexander is a wealth reporter who covers billionaires and philanthropy for Bloomberg. This approach she's talking about is called solar radiation modification or SRM for short, and it's part of a broader field of research called geoengineering, and recently it started getting a lot more attention from venture capitalists, startup founders, and billionaires.
I mean, climate change is the issue of our generation and probably generations to come, and so it is a huge problem that people want solutions to. And for my beat covering a lot of billionaire philanthropy, it's a topic that a lot of these billionaires are interested in. It's not really a question of if we can. We definitely can, it's just a matter of are we sure we want to do this?
Today on the show, why funding for SRM research is ramping up and why Silicon Valley's interest in experiments to block the sun is getting some advocates and researchers worried. I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg news, Sophie, you've been digging into some new enthusiasm around a not so new idea to slow climate change. Tell me about it.
So this is called solar geoengineering or solar radiation modification, and it's an idea that goes back to the fifties but is really only picking up steam now. And the idea is to essentially block the sun. There's a number of methods, but the best researched one is to spray sulfates into the stratosphere and all of those particles would reflect sunlight and then make the planet less hot.
Where does the idea come from.
The idea actually comes from volcanoes. So something similar happens. One of a volcano erupts, It shoots all kinds of stuff up, and if it's a very powerful eruption, then all of those particles will be shot all the way up in In the past, we've seen volcanic eruptions shoot millions and millions of tons of sulfates into the stratosphere. Basically the year after these big volcanic eruptions, all kinds
of stuff happens. But one of the things that happens is the planet is cooled, and so Everyone's like, oh wow, this could block the sun.
Wow, and then the idea has picked up steam ever since.
It didn't really pick up steam again until like the late nineteen nineties in the early two thousands, when a couple of researchers in California stood in modeling what would happen if you did this? And they actually set out thinking that they were just going to put the idea to rest, but then it turns out that it actually
could work. This Nobel Prize winner Paul Kurutsen publishes a paper citing their work, and all of a sudden people start taking it seriously, and so it's really starts picking up in two thousand and six ish, still a very controversial idea, but more and more people are picking it up.
What made you want to start looking into this? Now?
More philanthropic funding than ever is being put into solar geo engineering right now, and that is coming from all the world, including in the UK and in New York. But most of the interest and most of the new names who are really starting to talk about this and start funding this are in Silicon Valley. The fact that it's concentrated in Silicon Valley, it makes sense for a lot of reasons. For one, that's where the new money is, but also like, it just sounds cool. It's using technology
to block the sun and save the planet. That's very appealing to a Silicon Valley crowd.
But it's not just that it seems cool. Some people think that, faced with a rapidly warming planet, SRM could be one of our best bets. What do proponents say about its potential?
In an ideal world, we would get off greenhouse gases and take the steps necessary to stop heating up the planet. But we're not doing that, and so we don't want to get ten years down the line and realize, oh, we don't have any knowledge about this thing, and we're just going to have to start doing it because we don't have any other choice. So that's what the proponents of specifically research think. The proponents of just deploying it right now are like, we're already at that point. What
are we waiting for. Let's do it. We can figure out what happens later.
What do the critics say?
The critics say, that's just it's not a good idea. I mean, the critics say, we don't know what's going to happen, and so it's just too risky to start doing this all of a sudden. There are just so many things that we would need to get into place before we were to start doing it.
But if there's one thing Sophie knows about the tech industry, it's that it doesn't always wait for permission to start experimenting. One startup called Stardust Solutions has raised fifteen million dollars just to do research and development on planet cooling tech. Others are forging ahead. Tell me about some of those startups. What are the companies that are actually trying to make SRM work.
So the best known one is make sunsets, but it's very controversial in the actual solar geoengineering world because they kind of just have this very like stereotypical silicon value mentality of move fast and break things. What they do is they launch balloons filled with sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere.
But it's just simply not enough sulfur dioxide to actually be doing anything because if you have it patchwork, if you're only deploying sulfates and one part of the globe, that's going to have adverse effects on the climate, on rain patterns, on things like that this needs to be evenly distributed around the whole planet, which is why there's so much emphasis on this being, you know, a geopolitical hurdle.
And I mean, there's this novel, The Termination Shock by Neil Stevenson, and that was actually the inspiration for make Sunsets. And in that novel there's this billionaire mc cooligan.
Nike Cooligan logan pretty on the nose.
And he shoots sulfur into the statosphere and like it's not a happy ending, Like by any means, it's not good.
After the break. Why the tech sector's interest in SRM is so worrying to scientists and nonprofits? Where government regulation comes in and what happens when communities affected by geoengineering experiments push back. We've been talking to Sophie Alexander, a wealth reporter for Bloomberg about solar radiation modification. It's a controversial technology that's meant to cool the warming planet by
blocking the sun. I ask Sophie why the tech industry's involvement in SRM is especially divisive.
Well, I mean, first of all, it's just controversial to begin with, to geoengineer the planet. We don't know what might come from it, which is why so many people are committing all of money to research. For the most part is so we can figure out, Okay, how is this going to affect rainfall, How is this going to affect you know, malaria patterns and things like that.
Spraying sunlight reflecting sulfates into the stratosphere could have any number of unintended consequences. Critics say cooling the earth too much could cause crop failures and disease outbreaks, but turning off the sulfate guns too quickly could also risk plunging the Earth into something called termination shock. The Grave scenario Neil Stevenson's sci fi book is named.
After Termination Shock is what would happen if we weren't to wean ourselves off of solar geoengineering. If we were to all of a sudden cold Turkey and stop shooting sulfates into the air, then the planet would just heat up really fast. It would basically like make up for lost time, and that would cause all sorts of weather problems and other problems.
With the global stakes of solar geoengineering. So Hi Sophie says, there are also major concerns about how this kind of technology would be regulated. And which governments or individuals would be calling the shots.
There is a camp that is trying to make sure that we are prepared for the inevitable geopolitical issues that will come with this, which include getting more of this research to come from the Global South so that if the time comes where governments are making the decision of okay are we going to do this, countries in the Global South can go to their own researchers and say, well, should we do this? How will this impact us?
But Sophie says, the people driving these efforts aren't always thinking about that impact. A few years ago, a Harvard University led SRM research project, funded in part by Bill Gates, was set to launch in the Swedish Arctic. The indigenous community that lived there wasn't consulted first, and after protests and pushback, the experiment with canceled.
The move fast and break things ethos is sort of like, well, I don't have time to make sure that everyone's okay with this, We just need to do this.
The US and the EU are beginning to dip their toes into funding SRM research, but while the US is trying to develop ways to suss out rogue launches. The space is still largely unregulated. When Sophie asked the US's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration whether it had any protocols to deal with an unauthorized deployment of the technology, for example, it said it wasn't aware.
Of any If we wanted to do this, like we could start doing this. It's really more of like a political issue, Like the US government has really taken its time with touching this at all. They only designated explicit funding for SRM research through NOAH in twenty twenty.
Some of the people that you're talking to are worried that the developing this technology are not going to wait, that they're going to apply silicon valleys, move fast and break things mentality to this rollout. Why is that so scary to some people?
There is the risk that if we move fast and break things on the scale of make sunsets, which is small or a more medium sized scale, or even a bigger scale, you're just going to erode trust in the public. That is necessary because a lot of people are afraid that people want to use this technology to sort of push back the date that we can reduce our emissions. We are getting hotter and hotter, and there's no signs of that stopping.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Thomas Lum. It was edited by Erin Edwards and Brian Japatta. It was mixed by Alex Sugira. It was fact checked by Adrianna tak. Our senior producer is Naomi Shavin. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beamster. Board Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you
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