cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/4087
A US-Israeli geoengineering startup has raised $60m as part of its plan to test ‘sun-reflecting technology’. Critics are warning the new tech could have unexpected negative impacts on global weather and drive “geopolitical conflict”. Supporters, meanwhile, have pointed out it might not do that. 🚨Big News in Solar Geoengineering Stardust Solutions, an Israeli-U.S. startup developing […]
By Willem Moore
If you’re unfamiliar with solar ‘geoengineering’, it’s essentially climate change in reverse. Much like how we’ve caused global warming and other changes by releasing carbon, methane, and other gases, scientists believe we can reverse the problem by releasing particles which reflect sunlight back into space.
In a report titled The Risks of Geoengineering, the Center for International Environmental Law summarised:
Geoengineering technologies, if deployed at scale, could have profound, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible effects on biodiversity, both through their direct impacts and as a result of compounding and exacerbating existing planetary crises caused by pollution, climate change, and unsustainable land use.
As reported by Politico, this latest geoengineering plan is being led by US-Israeli startup Stardust Solutions. Their technology involves custom particles which the company claims are ‘inert’. They also believe these particles will not accumulate in humans or ecosystems, will not harm the ozone layer, and will not create acid rain.
Stardust Solutions’ founders are nuclear physicists who worked for the Israeli government. Although they insist their new project is unaffiliated with the state of Israel, they are headquartered outside Tel Aviv. This could cause problems for them worldwide given the boycott of Israel which began during Israel’s apartheid era and continued throughout the genocide.
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that's sort of a backward upside of it. the island nations who are most affected by warming and sea level rise could cobble together a few million dollars to unilaterally start doing it and then everyone else has a gun to their heads to keep it going.
better for the "west" to have communist revolutions of course but we aren't building those fast enough either.
it's not a great idea for them. It's expensive without high altitude missiles and launch facilities, white skies sort of ruin the tourism aspect of their beaches, cooler oceans absorb co2 more quickly which will harm reefs and other life hotspots reducing fishing and other maritime industries.
Changes in rainfall patterns and ocean currents that are hard to predict is also not a great idea when you're a small island that can't buffer that or has the industrial base to support mass desalination and shit.
Also if you have smol military anyone who doesn't like you doing it will invade or blockade to stop you unless you have powerful backing. In which case, powerful backer is really the one doing it but with colonialism.
the thing is that's pretty cheap, speaking on the scale of nation-states. you can probably pay musk to do it, for example.
it's not a good plan but i could see people with a few million dollars and their backs to the wall going for it out of desperation
You can't pay musk to do it without the consent of a nation state with launch facilities where the rockets are located and the military permits the use of the airspace.
Nation states jealously guard the ability to launch rockets.
are rockets actually necessary to disperse these aerosols?
yes
has something changed from when they were proposing this on trans-pacific freighters?
That was spraying water droplets into the air wasn't it?
is it irrelevant?
You could probably do it with balloons but I assume payload is limited
there were proposals to disperse these from cargo ships a couple years ago
but yeah, a hot air balloon is extremely cheap and could do that shit easily
I vaguely remember someone here saying this is a plotline in a novel, whereby India launched the first missiles and there was an eco errorist (?) group called the children of kali, or something
I'll try to dig it up if the search function blesses me
Edit: multiple people. The book is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
Terminaton Shock by Neal Stephenson also as simmilar themes and plot points
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)
everyone else is going to start shooting at these nations. when responsibility is spread to the self-interest of the nations everyone will be encouraged to maximalize aerosols that don't blow over their own territory, and everyone subject to these crop-failure clouds will retaliate.
the only semi-rational, last resort way to do this would be with strict international control and scope but every compounding failure of global climate policy has set the stage for profound violence