The Risky Climate Weapon Whose Time May Have Arrived
On this episode of the Bloomberg Originals series Primer, we visit the startups using geoengineering to find a silver bullet for global warming.
Make Sunsets sends balloons into the atmosphere that disperse sulfur dioxide in an effort to reflect sunlight back into space, a technique also known as solar-radiation management.
Photo Illustration: Bloomberg Originals
While the world below heaves with military conflict, trade wars and political tension, the atmosphere above quietly continues to get warmer. After 150 years of burning fossil fuels and with record amounts being burned now, civilization’s half-hearted efforts to slow greenhouse gas emissions haven’t been enough. Scientists project that, unless there’s some sort of worldwide epiphany, humanity and all of the planet’s other denizens are in for a catastrophically hot future.
Which brings us to geoengineering. Most people have heard of efforts to seed clouds to trigger rain, but new startups looking for a silver bullet to slow global warming are somewhat more sophisticated. Still, the problem with geoengineering is no one really knows its side effects or whether it will make things worse. On this episode of Primer, we explore this corner of environmental science, one that—given the climate crisis and lack of consensus in addressing it—has become known as the “terrible idea whose time has come.”