In support of geoengineering

In which we are obligated to do bad things for a good reason, again and again

On semantics, and geoengineering

I was lucky to have a chance to meet Yanai, CEO of Stardust, at a gathering a couple of weekends ago at investor (and general climate-mench) Maex Ament’s house—a room of entrepreneurs ultra-quiet as Yanai, soft-spoken, presented in front of bracing graphs. With announcement of the funding round now public, I want to share a few thoughts that I haven’t been able to shake.

The era of the geoengineering startup has seemingly arrived, and tactics like solar radiation management (SRM) and stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) look to enter the wider discussion. It is a mostly unpleasant moment: the dread that precedes a time of predictable pain, the unhappy righteousness of having foreseen a bad thing, the letting-go of the hope that perhaps, in the end, we wouldn’t have to face the music.

Almost everything about geoengineering generally (and Stardust specifically) will be unpopular. We have spent decades failing to have the courage to take collective responsibility for our actions. It has proven advantageous to kick the can down the road, to act as though we are not, in fact, at the wheel. What I admire most about Yanai is not the ingenuity or ambition of his vision, or even the determination to build a team and a technology, but the willingness to take responsibility. The more serious, the more complicated the problem, the more critical it is to have ethical, thoughtful people who are capable of rising to the occasion in positions of power. In my short time with him, Yanai appeared to be just that.

To that end, I want to say publicly that I support his work, and repost some of my thoughts on geoengineering from the last couple years now. I wrote the following short essay in March 2023 on Twitter (and please forgive the tone—it was written on and for that platform).

This is a bit of a rant, but we gotta talk about geoengineering, because either I’m going insane or we’re going to kill ourselves over semantics. What defines geoengineering? Let’s say that it’s an activity that changes the climate. Look around you—nearly everything people do is a geoengineering machine either directly or indirectly: your car, your heater, your oven, the way you get to work, the food you eat. And from a certain perspective, we’re doing a remarkable job—we have developed an incredibly resilient, distributed method for geoengineering the planet.

If, in 1700, you had told everyone that humans were capable of meaningfully changing the seasons, I doubt you would have been believed. And yet, here we are! Nevertheless, that’s not how we talk about cars, heaters and geoengineering, so clearly that definition is wrong. I think it’s safe to say that people think that geoengineering only counts if you mean it. As in, the activity only counts if your explicit intention is to change the climate. This idea—that there is only geoengineering intention and no such thing as geoengineering behavior—puts us in a tough spot. By default, humans emit, without intention to change the climate—but living the life of the average American is not considered to be geoengineering.

For example, the sulfur dioxide emissions of the global shipping industry—millions of tons of SO2 every year (which results in a half degree of cooling!) is seen as the natural outcome of our shipping industry, and therefore doesn’t qualify as geoengineering. But 3 balloons filled with 10 grams (!) of sulfur dioxide released to “cool the planet” causes moral panic. Annual sulfur dioxide emissions of the shipping industry are billions of times larger than the balloon, but only one is geoengineering. https://cnbc.com/2023/02/22/solar-geoengineering-startup-make-sunsets-lets-off-balloons-in-nevada.html

The ratchet: there is no friction for activities that change the climate as long as they are default behavior or considered externalities within existing systems. But lots of friction for intentional behavior that seeks to change the climate—even if it’s the same activity. And, because our default behavior is to emit greenhouse gases that warm the earth, the ratchet favors warming—it is socially, culturally, and economically easy to do things that warm the planet and challenging to do activities that cool it. Nevertheless, nearly every argument against geoengineering applies to our behavior now. When people say, “but we don’t understand what we happen if we add SO2 to the atmosphere, so we shouldn’t do it.” Too late! We’re already doing it!

And the critics are absolutely right that we don’t know what’s going to happen! We’re currently in the midst of an uncontrolled experiment—pretending that we’re not doesn’t change that fact. For example, what happens if some geoengineering experiment goes wrong, and say, like half of the insects on earth die? Never mind! We’re already doing that! Or what if it sets off a self-reinforcing cycle—already happening too! Check out those methane emissions graphs!

We must accept that we are practically geoengineering the planet now. Our default behavior, our current behavior, is resulting in dramatic and uncontrolled changes to the climate, the implications of which we cannot and do not understand. I can’t overstate this: we are ~250 years into a global geoengineering experiment. We are not in a position to decide *if* we want to *start* geoengineering.

If we pretend that our intentions are the only things that matter, that view and definition of geoengineering will hamper our ability to 1) talk about the opportunity cost of inaction, 2) test strategies needed to improve our world, 3) build narratives about our role and relationship to our climate that convey both our level of agency and responsibility. The question isn’t if we should do geoengineering, it’s what kind we should be doing. It isn’t if we should start, it’s how we should continue. It isn’t if we should be making decisions like this, it’s how to make good ones.

The point here isn’t to scare, but to empower—we are geoengineers. Therefore, we must change the way we think and talk about geoengineering so that we can take responsibility for everything humans *do*, not just what we *mean to do.* It’s time to grow up.

And one more for good measure

This summer, I posted the following response to the tweet below (link here).

This would constitute a dramatic response to climate change, and one the general public is rightly afraid of, *AND* —

1. The costs and consequences of such work have to be weighed against the costs and consequences of inaction—not of some fairytale view of the world in which we “don’t want to start geoengineering the planet.”

2. It’s not required that we full send to start, but pretending we can learn fast enough later to put off deployment is ridiculous. “I’ll research cancer after the diagnosis.”

3. Even if you consider this to be a low probability solution, it’s worth referencing how we dealt with the chance of a nuclear exchange with the USSR.

4. In the case that the pollution of the atmosphere worries you, it would be easy to set limits that are below historical exposure. While it feels challenging, we could decide to sacrifice particular places for testing—as we have done with SO many technologies in the past.

5. In some ways the search for certainty around geoengineering faces the same dynamics as the search for AI: while safety is important and valuable conceptually, it’s challenging to coordinate the underlying the political and economic incentives that will condition development and deployment. Therefore, any coordination and information gathering we can do now - before the prisoners’ dilemma is upon us—has extraordinary value.

6. I feel this one lastly more keenly than all the others: We have to take responsibility for our planet for generations to come. Pretending that something is out of our hands, practically or ethically,is something we should fight desperately against. In every real sense, this is our planet. No matter what you believe: We are god’s children, Gaia’s stewards, or rational technologists dragging humanity to a Type I civilization—we must do our best. We have a responsibility to solve every problem, pursue every solution, not drop our hands before the job is done.

Back to philanthropy shortly.