Today, Explained - Block the sun, save the earth?

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Solar geoengineering — the idea of cooling the planet by deflecting the sun’s rays — is so risky that scientists and policy experts can’t even agree on whether to research it. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Matt Collette and Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back in the early 70s, a Russian scientist named Mikhail Budiko wrote a book predicting two things. First, he said people weren't going to stop using fossil fuels. And second, we were going to have to consider ways to counteract climate change. The idea that he floated at that point was we could imitate volcanoes, which have a cooling effect. Volcanoes spew a lot of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. That's why after a volcanic eruption, you get these fantastic sunsets. But you also get cooler temperatures for a while because the sulfur dioxide forms these little droplets

and they're actually reflecting sunlight back to space so less direct sunlight is hitting the Earth. Dimming the sun on purpose with gases like sulfur dioxide. It's called solar geoengineering. And some people want to research it in a real way. Other people say, have you seen Snowpiercer? Ahead, the debate on Today Explained. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever.

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Today Explained. Today Explained. Today Explained. Today Explained. Today Explained. Today Explained. Today Explained. Noel King here.

Earlier this week, my colleague, Today Explained producer Avishai Artsy, was talking to a tech entrepreneur named Luke Eisman about Luke's hack to fix climate change. OK, so last year, Luke was sitting around in Baja, Mexico, making some enviro-friendly plans for a piece of land he owns there. I plan to just build solar-powered off-grid house down here and basically enjoy my semi-retirement spearfishing and hanging out at the beach. And reading or listening. He was listening to an audio book called Termination Shock by Neil Stevenson. And in it, a billionaire in Texas builds the biggest gun in the world to put sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The idea is that sulfur dioxide

particles could reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the surface of the earth. Less sun, less heat, a cooler planet. It's called solar geoengineering. The more I researched, the more convinced I became that this is the one technology that has a practical chance of keeping us below 2C of climate change. With that conviction, Luke started a business called Make Sunsets, through which he sells cooling credits. What that means is companies pay Luke to send balloons full of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The Mexican government, however, was not convinced. And when it found out what Luke was doing, it shut the whole thing down.

The Mexican government put out what is basically a press release saying that we're going to investigate the benefits versus harms of solar geoengineering and eventually pass a moratorium. So Luke came back to the United States and from there he kept going. A couple of weeks ago, we launched three balloons successfully from Reno, Nevada. Luke and people like him are forcing us all to consider some big questions. Is solar geoengineering a possible solution to climate change? Or is it a deranged and dangerous distraction from the fact that actually we human beings just need to live and work and produce and

consume differently? We don't know. But would-be solar geoengineers have made things very interesting for sci-fi writers and very tricky for policy experts and governments. It's very controversial that Mexicans didn't want, you know, someone just fooling around with this, probably on their territory, sort of suggesting that it was just sort of a free for all. My name is Elizabeth Colbert. I am a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of a book called Under a White Sky, which deals with geoengineering. The people who you think are reasonable, perhaps, or rational, perhaps, how do they describe what this process would be? To the extent that there's any sort of consensus on how you would do it, you'd use airplanes that could reach the stratosphere. And, you know, right now, commercial airliners reach into the lower stratosphere. And you would be pouring some kind of reflective substance

into the stratosphere that could be sulfur dioxide it could be calcium carbonate is something that people talk about that's basically limestone dust very eminent scientists mentioned to me we could use tiny little diamonds industrially produced diamond dust and it would have to be more or less continuous. This stuff would drift around the world. It would form a sort of global haze. But these particles drop out of the stratosphere after a certain amount of time. So you would have to be constantly replacing them.

And if you're constantly pouring CO2 into the atmosphere the way that we are now, then to maintain the same level of temperature, you'd actually have to be pouring more and more reflective stuff into the stratosphere. So you can see how this becomes a potentially pretty risky gamble. little progress has been made over the last 50 years, even as the dangers of climate change, the science of climate change, voluminous, voluminous science on climate change, we're seeing the impacts of climate change all around us now. This idea remains, you know, extremely controversial. And the only real science that's been done around it involves computer modeling. What's so controversial about it?

There are a couple of aspects of it that are very controversial. One is that if you dangle in front of people this idea that we could not actually cut our emissions, but just counteract them in some way. This will take whatever pressure there is to reduce emissions. It will remove that. Going back all the way to the American Enterprise Institute about, what, 15 years ago, you know, they led a little bit of an effort, which was explicitly saying that geoengineering might give us the capacity not to reduce emissions and still come out all right. It's sort of a version of the moral hazard argument and will just make the problem worse and worse and worse, even though those who, you know, advocate at least researching geoengineering are very explicit that you have to cut emissions at the same time. You could never really counteract endlessly growing emissions.

Let me be clear. There is no way that we can use the atmosphere as a free dump for carbon dioxide and expect to have a good climate simply by reflecting away some sunlight. Solar geoengineering is a supplement to emissions control, not a substitute. It is not a quick fix. So that's one argument. It's very difficult to govern. How would you govern it? And there are many, many potential side effects that are, you know, potentially dangerous. Is it bad for the planet potentially? Well, let's say we're talking about shooting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere that has potentially, you know, ozone depleting problems attached to it. It could change regional weather patterns. I think that's a very big

concern. You'd be warming the planet on one level and cooling it at another, and that could have potentially very complicated impacts. After volcanic eruptions, you do tend to get changes in the monsoon pattern, so that could be potentially quite dangerous. You are reducing the amount of direct sunlight that's hitting the earth that would actually impact things like solar power production. One last one I'll mention is you would actually be changing the tint of the sky. That's why I called my book Under a White Sky. The sky would actually get whiter. Obviously, no one's tried doing this for all of Earth. Has anyone actually tried doing this on a kind of a smaller level? I don't think anyone is really advocating geoengineering. They're simply saying, look, we haven't cut our carbon emissions. They continue to grow. We may find ourselves in a

place where of all the many bad options, this is less bad than a lot of other ones. And we should look at that because this is a long-term research effort. You don't want to suddenly, you know, launch a fleet of aircraft into the stratosphere. You could do solar geoengineering research and find that there are really, there are disastrous consequences that you never want to experience and just drop the whole thing. That's theoretically one potential outcome of doing a research effort. That's why we do research. How does it fit in with other technological solutions to address climate change, technological ideas even to address climate change, whether they've proven to be solutions or not? Well, I think it falls into a separate category of not exactly a solution.

You're not cutting carbon emissions, you're simply papering them over, you know? And so it has this sort of old lady who swallowed a fly character where you're taking a problem and then trying to counteract it by, you know, doing sort of the reverse thing. And by some accounts, you could get something better. And by some accounts, you could get something that's even worse, just two problems compounding each other. So that, I think, is the real fear around it that you don't really know. When you're messing with a stratosphere, you're really, really messing with a key part of

the Earth system that we don't understand that well. And I think there's a lot, rightly, a lot of nervousness about that. Does this concept feel like science fiction to you? Does it feel like something out of one of those books about the near or far future where we try something desperate? Yes, it definitely has a sci-fi aspect to it. And, you know, all those stories tend to end badly. So I think that that

is worth thinking about. One key place that it emerges is in Kim Stanley Robinson's latest book, The Ministry for the Future, which is a big hit. In Ministry for the Future, without planning it, what I think I did by accident was to take future history, where history really has happened, and I jammed it into the near-future science fiction moment. So stuff that I used to write about happening 200 years from now, I said, look, it's happening in the year 2035. The book begins with India suffering a terrible, terrible heat wave and single-handedly launching a geoengineering effort. It's sort of a very temporary effort, which I don't know how the scientists would feel about that. They launch this effort and then the world comes together

and actually decides to take climate change seriously. So it sort of has a good outcome in that book. But that's one example of a sci-fi work that takes on geoengineering. Isn't this how Snowpiercer starts? The men of science tried to cool the earth to reverse the damage they had sown. But instead, they froze her to the core. I think we don't know exactly what has happened, but yes, some mucking around, right, that has led to a frozen world.

What do you think it would take for the world to agree that solar geoengineering is something that we need to do, and then to say, we're going to do it? Well, there are efforts, privately funded NGO efforts, but it's very hard to imagine exactly what a global effort on this would look like, precisely because we can't agree on very many things. And starting something like geoengineering, it's very, very hard to imagine the whole world concurring on that. And that brings us to this question of whether, you know, a small group of countries, powerful countries, could do it without the rest of the world concurring. And that's certainly theoretically possible. Coming up, who is behind the push for this potentially very dangerous and world-changing idea? It matters. Thank you. wire cutter AuraFrame to make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing. Block it out. Kevin, why don't we begin with you telling me your full name, your surprising full name, and what you do.

My name is Kevin Surprise. I'm a lecturer in environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College. I've been studying solar geoengineering for about 10 years now, looking at some of the many risks and the way that this technology has been normalized and moved forward in climate policy and the actors that have been involved in that process. Kevin, we just heard Betsy Colbert of The New Yorker tell us that scientists are very worried about the risks of solar geoengineering. What are the risks? There are many risks.

When you introduce a novel climate that would result from injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, there are going to be effects on climate and weather globally and regionally. You could potentially alter precipitation patterns, which could shut down the monsoon in South Asia on a regular basis. It could create large droughts in sub-Saharan Africa. It could create diebacks in the tropical Amazon region. But we won't really know what is going to unfold until it's fully deployed. And then we're in, you know, an experiment Earth situation, which is deeply concerning. How do you think we should be doing real-world research? Or do you think maybe we shouldn't be? At the moment, I am not in favor of taking any of

this research outdoors and experimenting in the real climate. Why not? There are few known environmental regulations to govern the kinds of experiments that would take place in the stratosphere. Those could feasibly be dealt with, but there's also the precedent-setting nature of actually taking this stuff and moving it down the line from just the models into the real world, which eventually we're going to have to, if we want to learn anything about this, continually ramp up the experiments into larger and larger areas and more and more material being released. And there's questions as to how far that should go and who would be responsible for deciding how far that should go,

for governing it, for managing it? What happens if there are transboundary effects from experimentation? States is far and away the leader on solar geoengineering research, whether it's in terms of housing a number of different research programs or moving legislation forward to get federal research going on these technologies to the U.S. military and intelligence community, having written reports that include scenarios for solar geoengineering and the potential conflicts that might result. So there's, you know, a number of really powerful actors that have an interest in the way that these technologies develop and in ensuring that they are developing according to the needs and interests of powerful states. Where is the push to experiment with this coming from? Who's behind it? I mentioned the United States. There was in 2021 a major report from the U.S. National Academies that called for a federally funded five-year research program that would be funded up to

the tune of $100 or $200 million over the five-year program, that would be funded up to the tune of $100 or $200 million over the five-year program, which would be the largest investment in these technologies that we've seen yet. Australia has a number of different programs for other types of solar geoengineering interventions. There's been a smattering of interest and investment from various governments in the European Union and India and China. And then even beyond that, it's largely coming from academic research programs who have been moving forward through funding from philanthropic organizations, from Bill Gates to a number of other philanthropies tied closely to the Silicon Valley technology world. But at the moment, the majority of the research and interest is coming from largely industrialized countries in the global north.

And there is an attempt to expand research beyond that, but it's limited at this point. And even when those programs in the Global South are taken up, it's usually at the behest of organizations that are kind of lobbying for this technology around the world. So the people that I see as not part of the conversation are civil society organizations, primarily from the Global South, social movements, grassroots-led climate justice organizations, when they have taken a position on solar geoengineering, which is few and far between, it has normally been in opposition. Deliberate climate change as a solution to climate change is not just insane, but it is, as Einstein said, repeating the mindset that got you into the crisis

in the first place. To be completely fair to folks that I normally tend to disagree with over this issue, most of them are motivated by a sincere desire to deal with climate change and do so because it is going to largely affect the global poor and those who are already vulnerable and are being made more vulnerable by climate change. So there is a desire, but I think it is rooted in Silicon Valley way of thinking about problems, right? Which is that there's this wicked problem out there

and it requires some sort of smart technological solution to, you know, as it's been phrased, to hack the planet, rather than going through the really difficult hard work of making the kind of energy and economic and political transformations that are necessary to get to the root of the problem. Much of those solutions would, by the way, threaten the, you know, elite economic status of many of the people in Silicon Valley. In the meantime, our federal government is studying solar geoengineering. George Soros, Bill Gates are talking about it. I mean, from where you are sitting, is there an air of inevitability? Not that we will necessarily do this, you know,

change the climate from down here on Earth in the next five years, but that we will necessarily do this, you know, change the climate from down here on earth in the next five years, but that we will continue to research it? Yeah, that's a really great question. And that is pretty much exactly how I would frame it. With the momentum generated by the very actors that you mentioned, those billionaires and people deeply connected to large corporations and so on on and their power to shape policy. Yes, I do think that we are going to see, if not inevitable deployment, a significant increase and ramp up in interest and attention to so-called solutions like solar geoengineering rather than the potentially more transformative solutions that would be necessary.

The Earth is on course to easily surpass a two degree Celsius rise in global temperatures. Even if today we stopped emitting carbon altogether, something magic happens, somebody waves a wand and okay, we stop. We're likely going to see catastrophic results on Earth. Do you think there's a world in which folks like you regret not taking this crazy idea more seriously, not being more open to the idea that a crazy solution just might be the thing we need? Yeah, I think about that all the time. I do not approach this issue or my position on it lightly. However, my deepest concern is what it would actually require. You know, some of the most detailed and leading studies that say, you know, this is what deployment

might look like, say that something like year 15 of a moderate solar geoengineering program, we're going to need a network of bases where 90-something airplanes are continually flying hundreds of flights per day, over 60,000 per year, to deliver 1.5 megatons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. This is a massive undertaking that at a very minimum would require decades of coordination, likely centuries, because if we do not draw down carbon, reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and continue to mask the warming effect with solar geoengineering, we're setting ourselves up for a really dangerous situation that's often referred to as the termination shock, right?

Where if the program were to be suddenly stopped and all of the warming that was being masked was suddenly allowed to interact with the atmosphere, the rate of warming, the rate of change would be rapid and unprecedented and very, very difficult to adapt to. So we'd be getting ourselves into a very risky situation. And I don't see why we would want to embark on such a risky venture in the world that we have now, where we can't even agree on some of the most basic measures to deal with climate change, right? We can't think about solar geoengineering as somehow abstracted from geopolitics and this thing that the world will magically get together to govern rationally and democratically when that is not how the world functions now. When we're seeing an increased

animosity between the United States and China, and we've seen unprecedented geopolitical ramifications in terms of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, right? We are not in a position to introduce this global scale, potentially dangerous technology that we might need to manage collectively for centuries. That was Kevin Surprise over at Mount Holyoke College. Today's episode was produced by Avishai Artsy and edited by both Matthew Collette and Amina El-Sadi. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. explained. Thanks for watching!