MIT Tech Review: "How one controversial startup hopes to cool the planet"
by James Temple
Generating returns
Stardust may be willing to wait for governments to be ready to deploy its system, but there’s no guarantee that its investors will have the same patience. In accepting tens of millions in venture capital, Stardust may now face financial pressures that could “drive the timelines,” says Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia University.
‘Sentiment of hope’
Others have certainly imagined the alternative scenario Yedvab raises: that nations will increasingly support the idea of geoengineering in the face of mounting climate catastrophes.
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel, The Ministry for the Future, India unilaterally forges ahead with solar geoengineering following a heat wave that kills millions of people.
Wagner sketched a variation on that scenario in his 2021 book, Geoengineering: The Gamble, speculating that a small coalition of nations might kick-start a rapid research and deployment program as an emergency response to escalating humanitarian crises. In his version, the Philippines offers to serve as the launch site after a series of super-cyclones batter the island nation, forcing millions from their homes.
It’s impossible to know today how the world will react if one nation or a few go it alone, or whether nations could come to agreement on where the global temperature should be set.
But the lure of solar geoengineering could become increasingly enticing as more and more nations endure mass suffering, starvation, displacement, and death.
