Catalyst with Shayle Kann - The Carbon Copy: A rogue geoengineering startup sparks worry

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

We’re bringing you a special crossover episode this week from Catalyst’s sister podcast, The Carbon Copy. It’s about a rogue startup that was trying to do something we’ve talked about on this show: solar geoengineering.  Last year, Time staff writer Alejandro de la Garza found himself on the floor of a hotel room in Nevada with two guys trying to cook sulfur dioxide out of a tin can.  Luke Iseman and Andrew Song are the co-founders of Make Sunsets, a startup claiming to be implementing solar geoengineering by launching weather balloons filled with SO2 into the stratosphere. Their first experimental launch in the Mexican state of Baja California resulted in a swift regulatory response from the Mexican government. But when they ran another test launch a few weeks ago just outside of Reno, Nevada, Luke invited Alejandro to join them.  This week, we speak with Alejandro about his Time profile of the controversial startup. Plus, we talk with geoengineering experts Holly Buck and Kevin Surprise. “Any single person you talk to in solar geoengineering research, whether they’re bullish or against it, they all think that what Make Sunsets is doing is a bad idea,” explains Alejandro. Make Sunsets represents a turning point for the field of geoengineering, with rogue actors pushing the field from academic debate into the real world. Is the company’s recent balloon launch an act of performance art — or an open door to an uncontrolled climate experiment? Recommended Resources: Time: Exclusive: Inside a Controversial Startup's Risky Attempt to Control Our Climate The Guardian: Solar geoengineering could be ‘remarkably inexpensive’ – report MIT Technology Review: This technology could alter the entire planet. These groups want every nation to have a say. US Geological Survey: The Atmospheric Impact of the 1991 Mount Pinatubo Eruption Catalyst: Solar geoengineering: Is it worth the risk? Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media. Support for Catalyst comes from Climate Positive, a podcast by HASI, that features candid conversations with the leaders, innovators, and changemakers who are at the forefront of the transition to a sustainable economy. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Catalyst is supported by Scale Microgrids, the distributed energy company dedicated to transforming the way modern energy infrastructure is designed, constructed, and financed. Distributed generation can be complex. Scale makes it easy. Learn more: scalemicrogrids.com.

Hey everyone, Daniel Waldorf here. I work with Shale as a producer on Catalyst. This week, we're bringing you a special crossover episode from our sister podcast, The Carbon Copy. It's about a rogue startup that was trying to do something that we've talked about on this show, solar geoengineering. A company called Make Sunsets was launching balloons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Their goal to cool the planet. It sounds crazy, but we know from research on volcanic eruptions that it could, could actually cause global temperatures to drop, maybe by up to half a degree of Celsius, and that is huge. Catalyst did an episode on solar geoengineering with researcher Dan Vizioni. I remember listening to that interview and being struck by how cheap it could be to do it. Dan estimated that someone could cause a half a degree of cooling with maybe a few billion dollars. That's compared to trillions of dollars for actually decarmonizing the global economy and scaling up carbon removal. But I was also struck by how little we know about how this kind of.

kind of solar geoengineering could affect rainfall patterns, agriculture, and ecosystems, and all in potentially dangerous ways that we just don't understand yet. And there are other big questions. Who would govern this process, whose hand would be on the global thermostat? And could solar geoengineering distract us from the hard and necessary work of actually decarbonizing everything? And yet, make sunsets a startup with two employees, started doing it Anyway, on the carbon copy host Stephen Lacey talks to time reporter Alejandro de la Garza about his profile of the company. Stephen and Alejandro talk about how Make Sunsets is pushing academic theory into the real world, perhaps opening the door to an uncontrolled climate experiment. If you like the show today, go over to Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe to the carbon copy.

We'll be back next week with another episode of Catalyst, but for now, here's the carbon copy. from the studios of PostScript Media and Canary Media. A few weeks ago, Time Magazine staff writer Alejandro de la Garza found himself on the floor of a hotel room in Nevada with two guys trying to cook sulfur dioxide out of a tin can. We're pretty confident that... So it's sulfur lit on fire. Yeah.

In the presence of adequate air reacts with oxygen to make sulfur dioxide. And so now we're going to try literal tin-canned, sulfur dioxide in there, on fire, then we're going to connect this to the vacuum, running through a vacuum chamber in dry ice to try to precipitate some out. These two guys are Luke Eisman and Andrew Song. They're the co-founders of Make Sunsets,

a startup claiming to be implementing solar geoengineering by launching weather balloons filled with sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Their first experimental launch in the Mexican state of Baja resulted in a swift regulatory response from the Mexican government, but undeterred, they were ready to run another test, and a few weeks ago, they launched some more balloons

just outside of Reno, Nevada, and Luke invited Alejandro to meet them. The first I saw of him was walking into this hotel room in Reno, and they have these respirators, and his partner, Andrew, hands me a industrial respirator, one of these, like, you know, P-100 M3 respirators, and says, you're going to need this, and they have all these tubes and a cooler

and all this scattered equipment over this hotel room. They were experimenting with a new method to produce sulfur dioxide, right in front of Alejandro. It involved burning fungicide in a tin can and then sucking the smoke through some tubing and cooling it with dry ice to turn it into liquid SO2. Again, this is in a hotel room. What are you seeing in there?

There are a little bit of water-looking stuff that's clear liquid. I'm pretty sure it's sulfur dioxide. Yeah. Okay. Is it supposed to be clear? Yeah. They, I think, referred to it as looking like they were cooking meth a couple times. Did at any point when you went into that hotel room and it looked like some weird drug manufacturing operation, were you like, what am I doing here? Yeah.

Yeah, I think I was trying not to put them on edge. And I was also trying to suss out whether I was going to die from inhaling this stuff. They assured you it was like taking a bong hit. Is that right? Yeah. Like, if you've ever done a massive bong hit, like, it's not, it sounds like a bong hit is worse than that. Look at work you're going to do in terms of the pain. Okay.

But there was a problem. Luke and Andrew weren't collecting enough sulfur dioxide in their pressure cooker, so they reverted to their original method. They went to a local Walmart to buy a grill and then headed to a park. It was like a dog park kind of on the outskirts of Reno. So they had this charcoal grill. and they dump a bunch of this fungicide in the charcoal grill and light it on fire and then have a shop vac. And they're vacuuming the smoke from this burning fungus side into these garbage bags and then tying them off and putting them in this camper that Andrew has.

Correct. Yeah. Please don't let that down. Please don't let that. That will be. I want you to hold that in. And then taking those garbage bags out and trying to squeeze them from through a, vacuum cleaner hose into these weather balloons.

Honey? Yep. We'll squeeze this in. We're going to be way over full on that. Maybe what it becomes is, can you lift your hands up more? And took it out into a field and filled it up with helium and tied it off and let it go. And so there were people walking around when this is happening. Yeah, yeah. There was, you know, families, kids, dogs walking around.

There was like these drifting clouds of solid. sulfur smoke that would kind of sting your eyes if you walked through it, kind of drifting through the parking lot. You know, I was under the impression that we were going to go out in the desert somewhere to do this launch. I didn't think we were just going to, like, drive 10 minutes and go do it in this park. I've got to say it felt a little weird letting go that balloon, man. Yeah? Yeah. So we got clearance by the FAA.

Like, we just got issued a note of them. Okay, so it was a legal launch. Yeah. Absolutely. Despite the swift regulatory response, their initial experience, got in Mexico, and the fear of spy balloon still fresh in America, there was no regulatory backlash to their recent launch near Reno. The amount of sulfur dioxide that they're releasing, I mean, for the record, is tiny.

There's no federal regulation that prohibits someone from putting some of that burned sulfur in a balloon and letting it go. So for now, they can do what they want. Make Sunsets represents a turning point for the field of geoengineering. When rogue actors are pushing it from academic debate out into the real world, Any single person you talk to in solar geoengineering research, whether they're the most bullish on it or the strongest against it, they all think that what makes sense it's doing is a bad idea. This is the carbon copy. I'm Stephen Lacey. This week, a geoengineering provocation is make Sunsets balloon launch an active performance art or an open door to an uncontrolled climate experiment. Or both. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub.

Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility, built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at Energy Hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure,

but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made.

Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. So geoengineering refers to a very wide spectrum of approaches to influencing the climate in order to slow global temperature rise. Carbon dioxide removal, stuff like direct air capture, is one less controversial form. Solar geoengineering, on the other hand, is the third rail of climate discourse. Solar geoengineering is a pretty radical and potentially dangerous. proposal that relies on altering the atmosphere to temporarily block the sun. One proposed method is known as stratospheric aerosol injection. Intentionally emitting aerosols like sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere make sunsets calls this sunscreen for the Earth. While these aerosols have a temporary

cooling effect, a geoengineering program would need to be continuously maintained over decades while carbon and methane emissions are reduced. It could have a whole host of negative consequences that scientists can't even predict as the atmosphere shifts, ranging from acid rain to impacts on the ozone layer to detrimental shifts in local environments. It's incredibly risky, like playing planetary roulette. It's why no one has done it. It's what makes the people behind make sunsets so brazen.

And it's what attracted Alejandro de la Garza to the story of these guys cooking up sulfur dioxide in a hotel room. Who in the world are Luke Eisman and Andrew's song? Andrew calls himself sort of the, or says he's the suit of the company. He specializes in early stage card startup sales, as I understand it, trying to get revenue for early stage startups. Luke Isman is a serial entrepreneur. He worked at Y Combinator for a while as their head of hardware, director of hardware. So he has a lot of sort of street cred in the sort of DIY startup VC community. Luke is, he gives the impression, I don't know, of someone you want to be friends with, or just, you know, he's very charismatic.

It feels like Andrew's got a bit of the move fast and break things attitude, and Luke has a bit of a punk rock vibe to him. Does that feel accurate to your interpretation at all? I think that's basically right. I think Andrew is move fast, fast, break things sort of in the more, like very, very much the typical Silicon Valley line. and Luke is just strictly breaking things. I mean, he makes things too, and then they break, and then he makes other things, and they also break, and then he makes a third thing. I mean, that's sort of his deal.

He's the, like, you know, build it, figure it out as we go fly the plane while we're, you know, building it kind of guy. At no point did I hear the words, atmospheric scientist in that description. He is not an atmospheric scientist. So I met a... Andrew in October at a conference. I knew nothing about the company.

I had never heard of them before. And he was very open about what they were doing. I had a good conversation with him, but I walked away from the conversation being like, wow, nothing is going to stop these people. What's your reaction to their personalities and what's driving them? I'm sure Andrew probably told you at the time they want to save the world. Like, that's their plan. And they're not going to let anyone tell them and it's a bad idea.

Make Sunsets business model rests on this idea of a cooling credit. Now it's like a carbon credit, these tradable certificates for carbon emissions created on the idea that those emissions will be cleaned up elsewhere, maybe by planting trees, restoring an ecosystem, etc. Make Sunsets goes a step further than that, claiming to sell credits that will cool the planet directly through solar geoengineering. So for $10, you can buy a promise from Make Sunsets that they're going to inject one gram of sulfur dioxide into the stratoset.

And also that one gram of sulfur dioxide, they say, will offset the emissions of one ton of carbon dioxide for a period of one year. So basically you're canceling out one ton of carbon dioxide emissions for one year for $10. That's the pitch. To be clear, this claim is in no way scientifically backed or verified. Here's Dr. Kevin Surprise, a scholar of geoengineering at Mount Holyoke College. I'm still not entirely sure where they got those numbers from. They really, at this point, don't have any way to measure whether or not they're actually releasing the proper amount of sulfur, if it's making it into the stratosphere.

And it's easy, like these just round, easy numbers of correlation from one gram to one ton just seem really dubious and more of a marketing scheme. than anything backed up scientifically. There is a ton of debate within the geoengineering field about methods and morals. Out of all the unknowns and disagreement about geoengineering, researchers do agree about one thing. What Makes Sunsets is doing is a bad idea. For some of the folks who are more pro-Giative engineering,

that might have to do somewhat with the fact that makes Sunsets maybe they think is making them look bad or making the field look amateurish. But regardless, none of them like it. We spoke with a couple of experts who agreed with Alejandro's characterization. Here's Mount Holyoke College's Kevin Surprise again. And so the brazen attempt to attract investors and attract customers through selling cooling credits with this kind of dubious scientific link that we talked about earlier is kind of the worst manifestation of how this technology might,

one of the worst fan manifestations of how this technology might come about. One, this is a great example of the ways in which the scientists who are researching this stuff are well-meaning and well-intentioned and are attempting to be very careful. But even with those safeguards that they're trying to impose on themselves, they are not going to have control over how this technology actually operates in the real world. We also spoke with Dr. Holly Buck, a geoengineering expert at the University of Buffalo. Her biggest fear is that the project will delegitimize. the entire field of geoengineering?

I mean, the main danger is that it inhibits the very real research that we need because people are too alarmed from the whole topic or they just write it off. And then the scientists, who I hope, would be doing the good work on this, can't continue their work. And that would be a loss for all of us because climate change is really bad. The impacts are really bad. we should know more about this idea, even if it's just to rule it out. We're going to take a very short pause here.

When we come back, we'll hear more about Alejandro's reporting and hear from those geoengineering experts about what else could go wrong. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity, but enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence, knowing those resources will perform when dispatched, and being able to prove it from the control room to the living room, Energy Hub's platform handles the full picture, from near real-time forecasting,

locational dispatch, and the kind of rigorous verification that holds up when regulators, grid operators, or leadership ask, did it deliver? Easy enrollment creates momentum, proven performance builds trust. That's why more than 170 utilities rely on Energy Hub to manage over 2.5 million devices delivering 3.4 gigawatts of flexible capacity. See what that looks like at energyhub.com. We're living through a profound economic shift, and energy sits at the center of all of it. Trillions of dollars are flowing into power plants, transmission lines, battery factories, data

centers, but the future of energy isn't shaped by technology alone. It's shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. Join me for my brand new show, Critical Capital, as I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building projects. Together, we unpack how risk is priced, how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The small amounts of sulfur dioxide that makes sunsets is releasing now won't have a measurable impact on the climate. But geoengineering at scale could have a whole host of negative consequences,

some of which scientists don't even know about yet. There's a bunch of different ways it could go wrong. The first is just moral hazard of even considering the option at all. Again, here's Kevin Surprise. The risks of moving this forward, even at the research and experimentation level, are many. They are the potential for solar geoengineering to become a kind of techno-fix that is latched on to by particular economic and political actors to delay mitigation. and energy transitions, the fossil fuel industry,

and in so doing, that it becomes a kind of a crutch that particular interests will lean on to avoid cutting emissions. Then there's the environmental and climate effects of sulfur dioxide pollution itself, which Alejandro explored in his story. For one thing, no one exactly knows, because we've never done this.

But it has the potential to be very hairy. We're talking about slightly reducing, you know, reducing the amount of sunlight that hits the Earth's surface. And what climate scientists have told me is it's not, it's not a switch where we turn it and we get back an atmosphere that we had in the year 1900 or the year 1800. We have a new atmosphere. We have a new climate. And we don't know exactly what that climate looks like. There's a potential for places that were wet to become dry, places that were dry to become wet. You know, it's going to re-scramble things in a way that we don't fully understand. And unlike in a situation where global emissions, you know,

the situation we're already entering where carbon dioxide emissions are, you know, creating these knock on effects. In this case, it's sort of a purposeful action. So there's also this heightened risk of even more geopolitical tension and conflict because you could have one country that, you know, is pro-Solar geoengineering and maybe their effects from it are looking pretty good, whereas maybe India is getting royally screwed, and they want the other country to stop. Then what happens? Then, of course, there's the consideration that solar geoengineering doesn't actually mitigate global warming. It just masks it. Once you start, you can't stop. Or else all those warming impacts will just come roaring back. Holly Buck explains. If you did a real research program, it would mask warming for a while. We have air pollution in the troposphere that's currently masking quite a bit of warming.

by some calculations, you know, half a degree, perhaps even more. There's some uncertainty around that. But as we continue to clean up our air pollution, which we absolutely need to do for human health reasons, that warming is going to come for us. And so there are these questions about, you know, should you maybe mask warming by particles into the stratosphere where they stay aloft for longer periods of time, perhaps a year? compared to a couple of days in the troposphere. And the answer to those questions, I think, is we really don't know what the impacts would be because we haven't done very much research on this at all.

Dr. Buck says that a real effort to research geoengineering would have to be international and publicly funded, basically the opposite of a project like Make Sunsets. Well, it's inevitable if you have the kind of leadership void we have on climate right now that self-appointed Silicon Valley types are going to step into that void and either do performances or perhaps someday something more organized and serious. And I think it's a very clear indication of why we need a robust international,

publicly funded research effort in this space to at least fill the void in research. But we also need a coordinated governance. effort for the kind of just more basic leadership void when it comes to decision-making. I don't really see this effort as relating to geoengineering. Actually, like, it's basically performance. You could call it performance art. I don't know if it meets the threshold of art. But it's more of like a performance that is meant to be a provocation or a conversation starter

rather than an actual geoengineering event. So it's important that people understand that, at least. It's like not actual geoengineering research. It's, you know, a stunt, which maybe some good conversations can come from a stunt. I'm not really sure. I don't think that's been the case yet, but we'll see. The slow, deliberate approach that Holly and Kevin described is what annoys people like Luke and Andrew. And in many ways, Make Sunsets does have a lot in common.

with performance art as a way to push the conversation. I spent about two and a half hours in the car with Luke driving, and I talked with him for a while about sort of his mentality and where he sees himself. And it turns out that he has, you know, sees himself as having a lot in common, sort of with the young people who were throwing soup at paintings in Europe. And he sees kind of what he's doing.

It's sort of like a startup-themed, you know, radical climate provocation that, you know, he also thinks might make money. I've worked with PhDs before in previous rules, and, you know, I get what they do. They're very challenging smart. They can look very far into the future, but at the end of the day, when the rubber meets the road, they need someone like me to actually continue. Right. The scientists that created the Saturn B rocket didn't go into space.

It was some monkey first, right? Yeah. We're the monkey. We're not in Nashville. Throwing a few grams of SO2 in the atmosphere is not going to do anything for geoengineering, but it certainly suddenly takes these academic papers and this field that is mostly in the literature and leaps it out into the real world. Do you think this will have a material impact on the geoengineering field?

I don't think they would necessarily call it an art piece, but it certainly, I mean, gets attention in the same way that a piece of, you know, provocative protest does. I think it does have an effect. As small as it is, this is the first attempt. And, you know, reports just came out that a researcher in the UK has what amounts to another rogue geoengineering experiment, this time with a lot more instrumentation and sort of a, you know, perhaps some, you know, maybe they're going to get some kind of scientific findings from what he's doing. but what Luke and Andrew did will always be the first one. Some kind of critical mass has been reached where two years ago,

a strongly worded letter from indigenous groups and Greenpeace and other environmental organizations was enough to dissuade the researchers at the time from doing this kind of thing, in that case, it was doing some outdoor geoengineering experiments over Sweden. Now we have a combination of people and conditions where that doesn't matter anymore. Like, they're going to do it anyway. So I think it's a marker of the moment we're in.

Absolutely wild story. Alejandro, thanks for telling it. And we appreciate you coming on and talking to us about it. Thanks for having me. Alejandro de la Garza is a staff writer at Time magazine. We have a link to his story profiling make sunsets in the show notes. The field tape you heard in the story was collected by Alejandro. So thanks for that.

And you also heard from Dr. Kevin Surprise of Mount Holyoke University and Dr. Hollyoak of the University. and Dr. Holly Buck of the University of Buffalo. This episode was produced and written by Alexandria Her. It is Alexandria's last episode. She is moving on to go work for rewiring America. We're going to miss you, Alexandria. Thanks for all the great work you did on this show.

Sean Mark Wand is our engineer. Original music came from Echo Finch and Blue Dot Sessions. PostScript media is supported by Prelude Ventures. Pralood is a venture capital firm that partners with entrepreneurs to address climate change across advanced energy, food and agriculture, transportation, logistics, advanced materials, manufacturing, and advanced computing, and help us out by sending a link to this show to someone in your life who you think would love it. And give us a rating review if you haven't already.

Thanks so much. We'll catch up with you on social media and we'll catch up with you here next week. I'm Stephen Lacey. This is the carbon copy.