Climate Manipulation: "How One Company Wants to Make Geoengineering Profitable"
From UnDark, March 17:
Stardust, an Israeli-U.S. startup, intends to patent its unique technology for temporarily cooling the planet.
In July 2012, a renegade American
businessman, Russ George, took a ship off the coast of British Columbia
and dumped 100 tons of iron sulfate dust into the Pacific Ocean. He had
unilaterally, and some suggest illegally,
decided to trigger an algae bloom to absorb some carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere — an attempt at geoengineering, a tech-based approach to
combating climate change. It was a one-off, the largest known
geoengineering experiment at the time, and a harbinger for more to come.
Now a startup called Stardust seeks something more ambitious: developing proprietary geoengineering technology that would help block sun rays from reaching the planet. Stardust formed in 2023 and is based in Israel, but incorporated in the United States.
Its approach is novel: Most geoengineering research today is led by
scientists in the U.S. at universities and federal agencies, and the
work they are doing is more or less accessible to public scrutiny.
Stardust is at the forefront of an alternative path: One in which
private companies drive the development, and perhaps deployment, of
technologies that experts say could have profound consequences for the
planet.
Geoengineering projects, even those led by climate scientists at
major universities, have previously drawn the ire of environmentalists
and other groups. Such a deliberate transformation of the atmosphere has
never been done, and many uncertainties remain. If a geoengineering
project went awry, for example, it could contribute to air pollution and
ozone loss, or have dramatic effects on weather patterns, such as disrupting monsoons in populous South and East Asia.
But as global temperatures rise, public and scientific sentiments are
shifting. If those temperature trends continue, governments or private
entities may ultimately use geoengineering to alleviate or avoid the
worst impacts of extreme weather, including deadly heat waves,
firestorms, and hurricanes. And whoever deploys the technology will need
to keep it up for decades while pent-up greenhouse gases gradually
dissipate or are removed.
Few outsiders have gotten a glimpse of Stardust’s plans, and the
company has not publicly released details about its technology, its
business model, or exactly who works at its company. But the company
appears to be positioning itself to develop and sell a proprietary
geoengineering technology to governments that are considering making
modifications to the global climate — acting like a kind of defense
contractor for climate alteration.
Stardust is moving ahead amid few national and international rules and oversight, and a recent report
by the company’s former climate governance consultant, Janos Pasztor,
called for the company to increase its transparency, engagement, and
communication with outsiders. The report provides rare insight into the
so-far reticent company. But, so far, Pasztor told Undark, the company
has not met all of his requests. Stardust still needs to implement his
recommendations, and “be as transparent as possible, be available
proactively to respond to questions people may have, and also to engage
with other actors,” he said, because they do not, or not yet, have a
“social license” for geoengineering activities.
Such a deliberate transformation of the atmosphere has never been done, and many uncertainties remain.
The company is led by CEO and cofounder Yanai Yedvab, a former deputy
chief scientist at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, which oversees
the country’s clandestine nuclear program. Through Eli Zupnick, a
communications officer hired by the company, Yedvab never accepted
Undark’s many requests for an interview. But in an emailed statement to
Undark sent via Zupnick, Yedvab wrote: “Stardust is a startup focused on
researching and developing technologies that may potentially stop
global warming in the short term.” The company, he continued, is
“studying and developing a safe, responsible, and controllable solar
radiation modification” and “our goal is to enable informed and
responsible decision making of the international community and
governments.”
Despite Stardust’s low profile, the company rejects being referred to
as “secretive.” “Publishing all the products of our research without
any exception is critical,” Yedvab wrote, adding that the company is
“unwaveringly committed” to publishing results “as one of the measures
to gain public trust.” Stardust has not published any of its research at
this time, but Yedvab stressed they will do so once “scientific
validation is concluded” on all of their results.
For decades, researchers
have explored a variety of approaches to hacking the climate. Today,
the most common approach is a type of solar geoengineering that involves
flying high-altitude aircraft or balloons to release reflective
particles in the high atmosphere, well above the flight paths of
commercial planes. The technique, known as stratospheric aerosol
injection, requires deploying tiny, carefully- chosen particles in
precise amounts. In order to work well, the particles need to be
periodically replenished.
Scientists have accumulated evidence for this approach by studying
natural events that have flung small particles into the atmosphere. For
instance, after an eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide hung in the atmosphere and measurably cooled the planet for more than a year....
TL;dr: he was right about the efficacy of what is probably the safest approach to geoengineering: sequestering CO2 by feeding nutrients to plankton. However, he was absolutely wrong to go it alone as a profit-making venture: despite being safer than say sunshielding in the upper atmosphere the risk of the plankton approach is you could start a literal ice age.*
Here's another little company that thinks they can do whatever they want:
This is why you want to be careful with the geoengineering proposals. Some links after the jump....
*****
One
of the reasons we ran Plankton Week last October—no, not as
counterprogramming to Shark Week—was to refresh memories of one of the
topics of conversation at all the better salons and soirées circa 2007.
The headline quote is from oceanographer John Martin during a 1988 lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Here's NASA's Earth Observatory archive page on the statement.
It
is a bit of an exaggeration, you may need ten of those Valemax bulk
carriers, currently the second largest ships in the world at 400,000 dwt
(Euronav's two TI oil tankers at 441,000 dwt are bigger), to make an
environmental change but what a change it would be. The orders of
magnitude of carbon the iron-fed plankton would sequester are almost
mind-boggling:
...Martin gathered the results of the incubation experiments and laid out
the evidence in support of the Iron Hypothesis together with some
back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations and presented his findings at a
Journal Club lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in July of
1988. He estimated that using a conservative Fe : C ratio that 300,000
tons of iron in the Southern Ocean induce the growth of phytoplankton
that could draw down an estimated two billion tons of carbon dioxide.
Then, putting on his best Dr. Strangelove accent, he suggested that
“with half a ship load of iron….I could give you an ice age.” The
symposium broke up with laughter and everyone retired to the lawn
outside the Redfield Building for beers (from Chisholm and Morel,
Editors, preface to: What controls phytoplankton production in
nutrient‐rich areas of the open sea? Limnology and Oceanography, 36, 8 December 1991).
This
year's energy-sourced emissions of CO2 should come in at 30.6
gigatonnes ( 30,600,000,000 tonnes) of which a large part will reenter
the carbon cycle, becoming plant material etc. but it is the stuff that
remains in the atmosphere after the rest is sequestered that is
available to feed the plankton.
