Rogue geoengineering startup attempts to affect atmosphere despite warnings
jpost.com
jpost.com
Not sure how releasing sulfur into the atmosphere can be legal so.
At a guess: nobody thought to make a law against it yet and/or nobody with power has yet tried to apply an existing law to it.
This was the most surprising thing we discovered, it's the wild west. The closest thing we found was https://2009-2017.state.gov/t/isn/4783.htm. We're not hostile, we come in peace.
I very very much doubt this can't be shut down by some environmental agency, if they only care to look. Even if there is no specific law about it, you can't normally just release stuff into the shared environment - you have to have some kind of dispensation for it (like the oil and coal industries unfortunately have for their own pollution, for example).
Launching sulfur into the stratosphere with the noble goal of increasing Earth's albedo might sound good locally but you don't seem to have applied any systems theory or scientific experiments to understand what complex interactions your actions might generate. The atmosphere is not a simple system, your actions might have very unintended consequences and you don't even seem phased by that...
Bearing gifts of free blankets!
Since you're calling this the "wild west," I sure hope you know your history.
Many have tried to trace down some proof of this happening, but no one has been able to do it. Others have tried to figure out where the anti-American underground that Zinn drew from came up with the idea, and the best they could find is a letter from a British military official speculating that this is something the UK should do to the Indians in their North American colony. But there is no evidence this idea was ever implemented, by the UK or anyone else.
Some lefty professor found the letter, concluded it happened, then during the retelling in various anti-american teach-ins and seminars, this changed from British doing it during the colonial era to the US doing it, time shifted to the civil war era in the wild west. But it never happened. It is one of many fabricated events in "People's History", but to be fair, Zinn didn't make it up, he just collected all the various unsourced rumors circulating in the underground at the time and decided to publish them as fact.
> I sure hope you know your history.
Indeed.
I rarely engage in comments like this, but I think what you're doing is irresponsible, selfish, myopic and needs to be pointed out.
Tone down the god complex if you really want to help the cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeys_and_apes_in_space
> The first primate launched into subspace was Albert, a rhesus macaque, who on June 11, 1948, rode a rocket flight to over 63 km (39 mi) in Earth's atmosphere on a V-2 rocket. Albert died of suffocation during the flight and may actually have died in the cramped space capsule before launch.[1][2][3]
Killing Albert was entirely unneeded; we did it because we could.
However, you aren’t being “edgy” or “bold”, you are being unwise.
This is not a place to shoot from the hip.
Rationalizing from science fiction, has serious failure-modes, and your approach risks poisoning public support for an important climate intervention.
If you want to do right by this, you need to steelman the scientists critical of your work. Reflect back to them the best version of their argument until they agree that you understand it.
So, the ending of the book is a bit open ended. But it's a "the cat is out of the bag" type ending as well. As in, since we're trying this anyway and it seems to be working, multiple countries start replicating the effort and people move on. By the end of the book, there are multiple countries doing this. And they would be the countries most affected by the consequences of global warming.
There are a few zones in the world where billions of people live that are going to be ground zero for any such effects that are also booming economies. Basically, much of Africa, China, India, etc. And indeed parts of the US with some extremely high value real estate on some of its coastal areas (like Houston, as the book speculates). So, the notion that these people in these economies are just going to sit there fiddling their thumbs until their economies collapse under the effects of global warming is unlikely. When something plausible comes along that works or might work, they'll support it. And some will start acting pro-actively. And others will counter act. It might get ugly.
I think the book mostly got this right and we'll see this play out in slow motion in the next few decades.
Rightly so - this type of intentional pollution of our shared environment is simply not acceptable, even as a scientific study.
You can't run a controlled experiment by releasing gases in the upper atmosphere, so it's very hard to understand what scientific value there could be to this anyway.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/446759.The_King_the_Mice...
> There seems to be a current attempt to get this kind of dangerous nonsense accepted as 'normal'.
"The scariest thing about this proposition is that models suggest that many of the people who could well be most harmed by these technologies are already disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Imagine this: North America decides to send sulfur into the stratosphere to reduce the intensity of the sun, in the hopes of saving its corn crops — despite the real possibility of triggering droughts in Asia and Africa. In short, geoengineering would give us (or some of us) the power to exile huge swaths of humanity to sacrifice zones with a virtual flip of the switch."
The problem is Geoengineering is not a zero sum game - if India decided to try and engineer the next ice age for example, to get access to the shallower parts of the Indian Ocean.
Those are real, important issues to be worked through, and to your point, and they are better served by a multi-stakeholder approach that values climate justice.
There is research and work needed both on policy and the technology aspects of this.
Prediction: Americans will make it a Dems vs Reps thing. Pro and Against alignment will largely only depend on who first tweets about it. The other side will just blindly look for arguments against it (regardless of accuracy), even if we found out it performs well.
Now, I don't know if this is a bad or a good thing myself (out of my depth here), but I see why experts would be concerned with this, as I imagine it's got far reaching consequences
Some people think that Mhyrvold's approach to climate-change-mitigation has already been implemented rather than just being an idea.
> We are all going to die from climate change in 12 years anyway, right
We aren't there yet, that we know of.
Pretty, let's say, optimistic without any scientific proof. If it wasn't for the YC angle, I would call it a scam. Know what, I'd say it is one regardless of YC, after all they funded a start-up that attempted to mate the gig economy with organized smuggling (forgot the name of that fun idea of paying traveling students tu transport all kinds of things past customs in their luggage).
He’s been bouncing around the TEDx circuit (i.e. open mic night for wannabe influencers) for awhile with half thought out environmental/subsistence farming ideas for years now. He’s apparently a good bullshitter for some of the VC crowd, but when you watch him, he’s thoroughly unimpressive. Nothing moves beyond hobby level — nor could it.
Here’s a video of him showing around his projects from a few years ago. Container hydroponics and rocket stoves.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HWIJc144mgQ
After watching this, I’m not afraid of him or Make Sunsets at all.
If you watch him, and then read his interviews about the fallout of Make Sunsets, he says what he did. He put some spoonful of sulfur into a helium balloon. That’s it. He even says, he didn’t measure anything. He doesn’t even know where the balloon ended up. (All those viral videos about launching a cell phone to stratosphere collected more data!) There’s literally NOTHING of use here beyond a press release. He could have accomplished the same by just saying he launched a balloon.
To be perfectly honest. I don’t think the former Director of Hardware for Y Combinator is smart enough to move the climate at all. It’s just selling party balloons and calling them carbon credits.
Now, someone else might be able to do it, but it ain’t this guy.
Once it seems sort of OK for anyone to do it, it'll become a massive free-for-all, with geoengineering schemes that overlap or compete with different goals. We could easily end up with unintended consequences — dueling programs with net near-zero result but massive new pollution, mutually reinforcing programs that massively overshoot, etc. Then a bigger program to fix that one, and another to fix that one...
I deeply feel the urgency to get started yesterday, and there's an initial feelgood rush reading this. But thinking for a few seconds on the cascading results of allowing rogue efforts and it turning into a free-for-all — sure, let's just play "move fast and break things" with the entire global climate.
No thanks.
We'd be better off choosing to play Global Thermonuclear War (it'd be over in ~48 hours and the global effects would be more brief).
This is a crime against humanity and these people should be jailed accordingly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_eruption_of_Mount_Pinatub...
I have driven ICE cars of course and without guilt even. So, don't get me wrong here. Just pointing out that it's irrational to go fuming at one thing without doing it for the other thing. If you own or drive a car, you are a part of the problem. We all are.
This is a “I’m unilaterally rolling the dice with our future” type of situation. People have a different response because it’s a different situation!
I'm curious how you are planning to validate that this works and doesn't have negative side-effects.
> That’s in part because it’s highly controversial. Little is known about the real-world effect of such deliberate interventions at large scales, but they could have dangerous side effects. The impacts could also be worse in some regions than others, which could provoke geopolitical conflicts.
[...]
> By Iseman’s own description, the first two balloon launches were very rudimentary. He says they occurred in April somewhere in the state of Baja California, months before Make Sunsets was incorporated in October. Iseman says he pumped a few grams of sulfur dioxide into weather balloons and added what he estimated would be the right amount of helium to carry them into the stratosphere.
> He expected they would burst under pressure at that altitude and release the particles. But it’s not clear whether that happened, where the balloons ended up, or what impact the particles had, because there was no monitoring equipment on board the balloons. Iseman also acknowledges that they did not seek any approvals from government authorities or scientific agencies, in Mexico or elsewhere, before the first two launches.
Probably $0 if you didn't have his background. 100% he got funding because he went through YC twice and was the Director of HW, but we welcome competition. I'm sure a VC out there will fund a startup that can scrub SO2 in the stratosphere to negate our efforts.
Why wait young man. You guys should do it and run both outfits. You already give off serious SBF vibes, so go all the way, and congrats on being the first to float an environmental scam.
Btw, when do you think we will have the first "environmental terrorism" charges filed?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/ADX_pris...
Efficacy and the benefit:harm ratio is still to be determined until we scale up our deployments, but here is a lecture by David Keith, the leading researcher in stratospheric aerosol injection. Towards Quantitative Comparison of the Risks and Benefits of Solar Geoengineering (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ8TZqfwzdU&t=2247s)
TL;DW: it's 100:1 at conservative estimates.
The best read on this is from Naomi Klein in the New York Times from 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/opinion/sunday/geoenginee...
Saying she is the best argument against something is to me like saying ISIS and Breitbart released a join resolution against something. About as strong argument-from-authority for that-thing as one can make.
There are far better ways to do this btw.
> He says they occurred in April somewhere in the state of Baja California, months before Make Sunsets was incorporated in October.
> But it’s not clear whether that happened, where the balloons ended up, or what impact the particles had, because there was no monitoring equipment on board the balloons. Iseman also acknowledges that they did not seek any approvals from government authorities or scientific agencies, in Mexico or elsewhere, before the first two launches.
And now this article is linked on the company's front page as a "feature": https://makesunsets.com/
Given the obvious incentives to lie or exaggerate here, until some actual evidence turns up, I'm going to assume this is just a guy lying to draw attention to his startup.
This is not a morality issue, or a matter of clever legal interpretation. Outside of the US the courts have spoken. In all these cases Uber and Airbnb either broke those laws, or their business model required knowingly enabling people to break these laws.
The fact that this is still up for debate in 2022 is indicative of the problems within modern democracy.
Taxis were licensed and regulated, but that gave you a benefit of using taxi stops, taxi lanes and grabbing people off the streets. Also, customers - in theory - could expect quality.
It also created issues which required and still require lawmaker to adjust.
If we really want to geoengineer this it has to be pulling to C02 out of the air, rather than hoping two different issues cancel out
It's fairly well established why we swallowed the fly
Perhaps we'll die?
I'd definitely like to see more research into this though!
If you have something that's partly a company and partly a cult, it's mainly a cult.
>“To go ahead with implementation at this stage is a very bad idea,” Pasztor
Dunning Kruger, with a pinch of religious zealotry, to taste.
>The company says it has raised $750,000 in funding from Boost VC and Pioneer Fund, among others, and that its early investors have also been purchasing cooling credits.
>“The current state of science is not good enough … to either reject, or to accept, let alone implement solar geoengineering," Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, told MIT Technology Review.
No. You are wrong and Iseman is wrong.
What's the mechanism of the possible opposite effect?
Also, even with those companies we have regulations that forced them to filter out most of the pollution and we’re implementing regulations that will shut them down altogether.
I think the outrage might be a part of the plan, yes.
We all here own cars spitting CO2 into the atmosphere like no tomorrow, directly affecting the climate in serious ways.
Someone picks a gas to release to try and reverse this, and everyone panics and wants regulations, fines and jailtime? LOL.
( Not SUVs | 'trucks' etc )
Mind you, a 500 MW plant can service ~350K multi car homes; so the C02 output of that plant is within the ballpark (ie. less than a x10 factor) of the C02 output from the cars in the homes serviced by the plant.
ie. They're each as much of an issue as the other and change would be good here.
These are single entities blowing out crazy amounts of CO2. In my eyes, we should start replacing and shutting them down asap.
I picked a size that delivers approx the order of 1 million passenger cars worth of C02.
I also wanted to contrast black V. brown coal and to offer a comparison to a large number of cars (allowing people to think of the emissions coming from a city of a few million homes and vehicles (sans industry, which is another facet again)).
If you'd like to generate a table for other sizes then by all means go ahead.
FWiW South Australia (the entire state) recently spent an entire contiguos week using only renewable energy (and exporting via grid to other states an excess), and Western Australia has a significant percentage of renewable energy production (total production higher than SA) as a fully independent grid | state, but still some need for base load production).
Other Aus. states have larger populations and demands and still have a way to go.
Residential electricity use in Australia is below 1/3[2].
I’m not sure if residents and their cars are the first to blame.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_stati... [2]https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Electricity-consumption-...
https://www.usgs.gov/programs/VHP/volcanoes-can-affect-clima...
They do a terrible job of arguing against this tech on the basis of risk. They suggest that it could be counterproductive, but the ONLY mechanism they even suggest for how this could be the case is that geoengineering could reduce the incentive to tackle climate change in other ways, such as by reducing CO2 emissions. But if geoengineering works and has no problematic side effects, then... so what? This is pure status quo bias; the argument would be just as valid (or rather, just as absurd) if we flipped it and said that all attempts to reduce carbon emissions are dangerous and immoral because they reduce the incentive for solar geoengineering. This mindset - where attempting to develop any new safeguard against a danger is presumed to be unethical on the basis that it could reduce the incentive to use other safeguards - is not how we think about any other kind of risk and I see no reason at all why climate change risks should be a special case.
And it gets even more aggravating when they argue against doing even small-scale experiments with this tech on the basis that "The current state of science is not good enough". Again, unless you are articulating some kind of plausible downside to the experiment, this is a fully general argument against all science. It makes no sense to argue against research into a technology on the basis that we don't yet know whether the technology will work - that's what the research is for!
I have only a layman's understanding of climate science, and my first instinct is to be scared of attempts at global-scale climate engineering going catastrophically wrong and destroying the world, but if all the world's climate scientists can't articulate anything that I would understand as a risk and instead seem to be terrified by the prospect that the tech will solve climate change so effectively and harmlessly that it makes their ideologically preferred set of social changes unnecessary, then that sounds fantastically reassuring and I wish everyone working on this tech the best of luck.
It's technically interesting, and potentially of existential importance to humanity (whether as savior, or as reckless ecoterrorism/genocide). It's also linked to YC.
edit: still hasn't taken my money. You may want to use another payment processor. For reference, my card is mastercard/revolut.
Unfortunately what I think will happen is this startup will release a ton of pollutants into the air, and nobody will be held responsible.
On the contrary, companies and individuals should absolutely be responsible for the consequences of their actions.
Culpability for damaging the environment should rest on the person who caused the damage.
This is basic stuff.
When the potential damages of an action far outweigh what it is even conceivably possible that the entity doing the action could ever hope to repay, the standards for preventing that action change.
The company is still at fault and should still be legally punished within the local legal system. The difference is that the government has now got to accept liability on the international stage, since the company is incorporated in that country. The liability has "expanded", not changed from one entity to another.
Looks like the plot of Snowpiercer, minus the perpetually moving train part.
> damaging the atmosphere in any measurable way, both him his company should be on the hook.
Or maybe, just maybe, it’s actually me who is responsible because I’m the one who bought it and decided to drive it.
Is Philip-Morris responsible for lung cancer, just because they purchased and refined the tobacco and sold it to consumers? It's the consumers who bought it and decided to smoke it.
No, he absolutely should not. This is not some stupid B2C nonsense where if you "move fast and break things" you can always redeploy. If it turns out that these people are not as smart as they think they are, and that's my guess, do they have a better backup plan than saying "whoops" and walking away? I doubt it.
Hopefully, as others have pointed out, these people are not really trying to do what they say they're doing and it's just a publicity stunt to sell a variation on the old carbon offset scam.
>“They’re violating the rights of communities to dictate their own future,” she says.
As if the current model of supranational technocrats dictating acceptable levels of energy consumption doesn't usurp "communities" or the individual's right to dictate their own future.
The enterprise is interesting because of the questions it raises. Yes, they want carbon credits and carbon trading because climate doom, but not this.
>“What they’re claiming to actually accomplish with such a credit is the entirety of what’s uncertain right now about geoengineering,”
Contrast this appeal to uncertainty to the certainty of the climate doomer's models. Contrast this appeal to uncertainty to the certainty that supranational institutions know what is best for the climate or can identify what the ideal climate would be.