It'll be interesting when the MAGA base gets hold of this, since the
chemtrails conspiracy theorists are so embedded in that.
I've been saying this for 24 years, but I'll say it again - any
intervention which does not achieve as much uniformity of effect on a
planetary scale as humanly possible is doomed to fail geopolitically.
It would be difficult to distinguish interventions at continental or
sub-continental scale from acts of clandestine or asymmetric war.
Reversibility is another necessary characteristic of any intervention
- you have to be able to turn it off if things aren't going according
to plan. Interventions based on atmospheric aerosols fail that litmus
test too.
Robert Kennedy (K3TVO)
president
Tennessee Valley Stellar Corporation (www.stellarcorp.tv)
On Thursday, November 6, 2025 at 1:12:28 PM UTC-5 Geoengineering News
wrote:
Geoengineering startup has been secretly lobbying Congress for months
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2025/11/05/geoengineering-startup-hires-powerhouse-lobbying-firm-00635123
Stardust Solutions hired Holland & Knight, but the lobbying giant
says it "inadvertently" failed to publicly disclose its work for
the startup, as required by law.
*By Corbin Hiar, Karl Mathiesen*
*
*
*05 November 2025*
CLIMATEWIRE | An American-Israeli geoengineering startup seeking
U.S. government contracts to cool the planet has quietly begun
lobbying on Capitol Hill.
Stardust Solutions hired the the law firm Holland & Knight in the
first quarter of 2025, but the firm didn't disclose its lobbying
"due to a clerical error," Holland & Knight spokesperson Olivia
Hoch said. Stardust's lobbying efforts have not been previously
reported.
Hoch declined to say how much Stardust had paid the firm or the
specific issues it had lobbied on. That information would be
disclosed in "the required forms in the coming days," she said in
an email.
Stardust is developing an integrated system to produce reflective
particles, distribute them in the stratosphere and monitor their
effectiveness. The startup and its investors are hoping the U.S.
or a coalition of other governments will eventually decide to pay
for the use of its technology.
*Source: Politico Pro*
On Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 7:28 PM Geoengineering News
<[email protected]> wrote:
https://heatmap.news/climate-tech/stardust-geoengineering
U.S. firm led by former Israeli government physicists,
Stardust seeks to patent its proprietary sunlight-scattering
particle — but it won’t deploy its technology until global
governments authorize such a move, its CEO says.
*Robinson Meyer*
*October 24, 2025*
The era of the geoengineering startup has seemingly arrived.
Stardust Solutions, a company led by a team of Israeli
physicists, announced on Friday that it has raised $60 million
in venture capital to develop technological building blocks
that it says will make solar geoengineering possible by the
beginning of next decade.
It is betting that it can be the first to develop solar
geoengineering technology, a hypothetical approach that uses
aerosols to reflect sunlight away from Earth’s surface to
balance out the effects of greenhouse gases. Yanai Yedvab,
Stardust’s CEO, says that the company’s technology will be
ready to deploy by the end of the decade.
The funding announcement represents a coming out of sorts for
Stardust, which has been one of the biggest open secrets in
the small world of solar geoengineering researchers. The
company is — depending on how you look at it — either setting
out a new way to research solar radiation management, or SRM,
or violating a set of informal global norms that have built up
to govern climate-intervention research over time.
Chief among these: While universities, nonprofits, and
government labs have traditionally led SRM studies, Stardust
is a for-profit company. It is seeking a patent for aspects of
its geoengineering system, including protections for the
reflective particles that it hopes governments will eventually
disperse in the atmosphere.
The company has sought the advice of former United Nations
diplomats, federal scientists, and Silicon Valley investors in
its pursuit of geoengineering technology. Lowercarbon Capital,
one of the most respected climate tech venture capital firms,
led the funding round. Stardust previously raised a seed round
of $15 million from Canadian and Israeli investors. It has not
disclosed a valuation.
Yedvab assured me that once Stardust’s geoengineering system
is ready to deploy, governments will decide whether and when
to do so.
But even if it is successful, Stardust’s technology will not
remove climate risk entirely. “There will still be extreme
weather events. We’re not preventing them altogether,” Yedvab
said. Rather, tinkering with the Earth’s atmosphere on a
planetary scale could help preserve something like normal life
— “like the life that all of us, you, us, our children have
been experiencing over the last few decades.” The new round of
funding, he says, will put that dream within reach.
Yedvab, 54, has salt and pepper hair and a weary demeanor.
When I met him earlier this month, he and his cofounder,
Stardust Chief Product Officer Amyad Spector, had just flown
into New York from Tel Aviv, before continuing on to
Washington, D.C., that afternoon. Yedvab worked for many years
at the center of the Israeli scientific and defense
establishment. From 2011 to 2015, he was the deputy chief
research scientist at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. He
was also previously the head of the physics division at the
highly classified Israeli nuclear research site in Negev,
according to his LinkedIn.
Spector, 42, has also spent much of his career working for the
Israeli government. He was a physics researcher at the Negev
Nuclear Research Center before working on unspecified R&D
projects for the government for nearly a decade, as well as on
its Covid response. He left the government in December 2022.
Stardust’s story, in their telling, began in the wake of the
pandemic, when they and their third cofounder — Eli Waxman, a
particle physics professor at the Weizmann Institute of
Science — became curious about climate change. “We started
[with a] first principles approach,” Yedvab told me. What were
countries’ plans to deal with warming? What did the data say?
It was a heady moment in global climate politics: The United
States and Europe had recently passed major climate spending
laws, and clean energy companies were finally competing on
cost with oil and gas companies.
Yet Yedvab was struck by how far away the world seemed to be
from meeting any serious climate goal. “I think the thing that
became very clear early on is that we’re definitely not
winning here, right?” he told me. “These extreme weather
events essentially destroy communities, drain ecosystems, and
also may have major implications in terms of national
security,” he said. “To continue doing what we’re doing over
the next few decades and expecting materially different
results will not get us where we want to be. And the
implications can be quite horrific.”
Then they came across two documents that changed their
thinking. The first was _a 2021 report_
<https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/2021/03/new-report-says-u-s-should-cautiously-pursue-solar-geoengineering-research-to-better-understand-options-for-responding-to-climate-change-risks>
from
the National Academies of Sciences in the United States, which
argued that the federal government should establish “a
transdisciplinary, solar geoengineering research program” —
although it added that this must only be a “minor part” of the
country’s overall climate studies and could not substitute for
emissions reductions. Its authors seemed to treat solar
geoengineering as a technology that could be developed in the
near term, akin to artificial intelligence or self-driving cars.
They also found a much older article by the physicist Edward
Teller — the same Teller who had battled with J. Robert
Oppenheimer during the Manhattan Project. Teller _had warned_
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/01/on-its-hundredth-birthday-in-1959-edward-teller-warned-the-oil-industry-about-global-warming>
the
oil industry about climate change as early as 1959, but in his
final years he sought ways to avoid cutting fossil fuels at
all. Writing in //The Wall Street Journal// weeks before the
Kyoto Protocol meetings in 1997, an 89-year-old Teller
_argued_
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB877028953900981000?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqfcQr-BlKCubdGxAFI0xmyf2zZwBzByWqUknRfa5EJaXLpKxNti2HcaYzs1qtE%3D&gaa_ts=68f7ea0c&gaa_sig=N2R5UsjoMl3XQM-sCgcFC1Hw8XcWIqhjTMSB5tLza3ty-l-xrPWLpJXcEfzh5JEfy2H5KgbJzBIgS3Oie5PV1Q%3D%3D>
that
“contemporary technology offers considerably more realistic
options for addressing any global warming effect” than
politicians or activists were considering.
“One particularly attractive approach,” he wrote, was solar
geoengineering. Blocking just 1% of sunlight could reduce
temperatures while costing $100 million to $1 billion a year,
he said, a fraction of the estimated societal cost of paring
fossil fuels to their 1990 levels. A few years later, he wrote
_a longer report_
<https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/15005941> for the Energy
Department arguing for the “active technical management” of
the atmosphere rather than “administrative management” of
fossil fuel consumption. He died in 2003.
The documents captivated the two scientists. What began to
appeal to Yedvab and Spector was the economy of scale unlocked
by the stratosphere — the way that just a few million tons of
material could change the global climate. “It's very easy to
understand why, if this works, the benefit could be enormous,”
Yedvab said. “You can actually stop global warming. You can
cool the planet and avoid a large part of the suffering. But
then again, it was a very theoretical concept.” They
incorporated Stardust in early 2023.
Economists had long anticipated the appeal of such an approach
to climate management. Nearly two decades ago, the Columbia
economist Scott Barrett _observed_
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-007-9174-8> that
solar geoengineering’s economics are almost the exact opposite
of climate change’s: While global warming is a “free rider”
problem, where countries must collaborate to avoid burning
cheap fossil fuels, solar geoengineering is a “free driver”
problem, where one country could theoretically do it alone.
Solar geonengineering’s risks lay in how /easy /it would be to
do — and how hard it would be to govern.
Experts knew how you would do it, too: You would use _sulfate
aerosols_
<https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/glossary/sulfate%20aerosol> —
the tiny airborne chemicals formed when sulfur from volcanoes
or fossil fuels reacts with water vapor, oxygen, and other
substances in the air. In a now classic natural experiment
Teller cited in his /Journal/ op-ed, when Mount Pintabuo
erupted in 1991 in the Philippines, it hurled _a 20 million
ton sulfur-dioxide cloud_
<https://www.usgs.gov/programs/VHP/volcanoes-can-affect-climate> into
the stratosphere, cooling the world by up to 1.3 degrees
Fahrenheit before the sulfates rained out.
But to Yedvab, “sulfates look like a poor option,” he told me.
Sulfates and sulfur oxides are nasty pollutants in their own
right — they can cause asthma attacks, form acid rain, and
_may damage_
<https://news.ucar.edu/942/stratospheric-injections-counter-global-warming-could-damage-ozone-layer>
the
ozone layer when in the stratosphere. For this reason, the
International Maritime Organization _adopted new rules_
<https://www.imo.org/en/mediacentre/pressbriefings/pages/02-imo-2020.aspx>
restricting
the amount of sulfur in cargo shipping fuels; these rules — in
yet another natural experiment — seem to have _accidentally
accelerated_
<https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2024EF005011>
global
warming since 2020.
Yedvab and Spector anticipated another problem with sulfates:
The atmosphere already contains tens of millions of tons of
them. There is already so much sulfate in the sky from natural
and industrial processes, they argue, that scientists would
struggle to monitor whatever was released by geoengineers;
Spector estimates that the smallest potential
geoengineering/ experiment/ would require emitting 1 million
tons of it. The chemical seemed to present an impossible
trade-off to policymakers: How could a politician balance
asthma attacks and acid rain against a cooler planet? “This is
not something that decisionmakers can make a decision about,”
Yedvab concluded.
Yanai Yedvab and Amyad Spector in Stardust\u2019s offices in
Rehovot, Israel
*
o
o
o
o
o
*
*
Yedvab, left, and Spector.Courtesy of Stardust / Roby Yahav
Instead, the three founders tried starting at the end of the
process, as they put it. What would an //ideal
//geoengineering system look like? “Let’s say that we are
successful in developing a system,” Yedvab said. “What will be
the questions that people like you — that policymakers, the
general public — will ask us?”
Any completed geoengineering system, they concluded, would
need to meet a few constraints. It would need, first, a
particle that could reflect a small amount of sunlight away
from Earth while allowing infrared radiation from the planet’s
surface to bounce back into space. That particle would need to
be tested iteratively and manufactured easily in the millions
of tons, which means it would also have to be low-cost.
“This needs to be a scalable or realistic particle that we
know from the start how to produce at scale in the millions of
tons, and at the relevant target price of a few dollars per
kilo,” Yedvab said. “So not diamonds or something that we've
done at the lab but have no idea how to scale it up,” Yedvab said.
It would need to be completely safe for people and the
biosphere. Stardust hopes to run its particle through a safety
process like the ones that the U.S. and EU subject food or
other materials to, Yedvab said. “This needs to be as safe as,
say, flour or some food ingredient,” Yedvab said. The particle
would also need to be robust and inert in the stratosphere,
and you would need some way to manage and identify it, perhaps
even to track it, once it got there.
Second, the system would need some way to “loft” that particle
into the stratosphere — some machine that could disperse the
particle at altitude. Finally, it would need some way to make
the particles observable and controllable, to make sure they
are acting as intended. “For visibility, for control, for, I
would say, geopolitical implications — you want to make sure
you actually know where, how these particles move around,
Yedvab said.
Stardust received $15 million in seed funding from the venture
firm AWZ and Solar Edge, an Israeli energy company, in early
2024. Soon after, the founders got to work.
The world has come close to solving a global environmental
crisis at least once before. In 1987, countries adopted the
Montreal Protocol, which set out rules to eliminate and
replace the chlorofluorocarbons that were destroying the
stratospheric ozone hole. Nearly 40 years later, the ozone
hole is _showing_
<https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/Ozone> signs
of significant recovery. And more to the point, almost nobody
talks about the ozone hole anymore, because someone else is
dealing with it.
“I would say it was the biggest triumph of environmental
diplomacy ever,” Yedvab said. “In three years, beginning to
end, the U.S. government was able to secure the support of
essentially all the major powers in solving a global problem.”
The story is not quite that simple — the Reagan administration
initially resisted addressing the ozone hole until American
companies like DuPont stood to benefit by selling
non-ozone-depleting chemicals — but it captures the kind of
triumphant U.S.-led process that Stardust wouldn’t mind seeing
repeated.
In 2024, soon after Stardust raised its seed round, Yedvab
approached the Swiss-Hungarian diplomat Janos Pasztor and
invited him to join the company to advise on the thicket of
issues usually simplified as “governance.” These can include
technical-seeming questions about how companies should test
their technology and who they should seek input from, but they
all, at their heart, get to the fundamentally undemocratic
nature of solar geoengineering. Given that the atmosphere is a
global public good, who on Earth has the right to decide what
happens to it?
Pasztor is the former UN assistant secretary-general for
climate change, but he was also the longtime leader of the
_Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative_ <https://c2g2.net/>,
a nonprofit effort to hammer out consensus answers to some of
those questions.
Pasztor hesitated to accept the request. “It was a quadruple
challenge,” he told me, speaking from his study in
Switzerland. He and his wife frequently attend pro-Palestine
demonstrations, he said, and he was reluctant to work with
anyone from Israel as long as the country continued to occupy
Gaza and the West Bank. Stardust’s status as a private,
for-profit enterprise also gave him pause: Pasztor has long
advocated for SRM research to be conducted by governments or
academics, so that the science can happen out in the open.
Stardust broke with all of that.
Despite his reservations, he concluded that the issue was too
important — and the lack of any regulation or governance in
the space too glaring — for him to turn the company away.
“This is an issue that does require some movement,” he said.
“We need some governance for the research and development of
stratospheric aerosol injection … We don’t have any.”
He agreed to advise Stardust as a contractor, provided that he
could publish his report on the company independently and
donate his fee to charity. (He ultimately gave $27,000 to
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.)
That summer, Pasztor completed his recommendations, advising
Stardust — which remained in stealth mode — to pursue a
strategy of “maximum transparency” and publish a website with
a code of conduct and some way to have two-way conversations
with stakeholders. He also encouraged the company to support a
de facto moratorium on geoengineering deployment, and to
eventually consider making its intellectual property available
to the public in much the same way that Volvo _once opened its
design_
<https://www.volvogroup.com/en/about-us/heritage/three-point-safety-belt.html>
for
the three-point seatbelt.
His report gestured at Stardust’s strangeness: Here was a
company that said it hoped to abide by global research norms,
but was, by its very existence, flouting them. “It has
generally been considered that private ownership of the means
to manage the global atmosphere is not appropriate,” he wrote.
“Yet the world is currently faced with a situation of //de
facto// private finance funding [stratospheric aerosol
injection] activities.”
Pasztor had initially hoped to publish his report and
Stardust’s code of conduct together, he told me. But the
company did not immediately establish a website, and
eventually Pasztor _simply released_
<https://www.linkedin.com/posts/janos-pasztor-85465421_report-to-stardust-on-governance-implications-activity-7239141519784378369-1Oms/>
his
report on LinkedIn. Stardust did not put up a website until
earlier this year, during the reporting process for _a longer
feature_
<https://undark.org/2025/03/17/stardust-geoengineering-profitable/>
about
the company by the MIT-affiliated science magazine //Undark//.
_That website_ <https://www.stardust-initiative.com/> now
features Pasztor’s report and a set of “_principles_
<https://www.stardust-initiative.com/our-principles>,” though
not the code of conduct Pasztor envisioned. They are “dragging
their feet on that,” he said.
As news of the company trickled out, Stardust’s leaders grew
more confident in their methods. In September 2024, Yedvab
presented on Stardust’s approach to stratospheric researchers
at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s
chemical sciences laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. The lab’s
director, David Fahey, downplayed the importance of the talk.
“There’s a stratospheric community in the world and we know
all the long-term members. We’re an open shop,” he said.
“We’ll talk to anyone who comes.” Stardust is the only company
of its size and seriousness that has shown up, he said.
Stardust is the only company of its size and seriousness
working on geoengineering, period, he added. “Stardust really
stands out for the investment that they’re trying to make into
how you might achieve climate intervention,” he said. “They’re
realizing there’s a number of questions the world will need
answered if we are going to put the scale of material in the
stratosphere that they think we may need to.” (At least one
other U.S. company, _Make Sunsets_
<https://makesunsets.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoq-OxMf1QuwGMb0JBeOCnVcYBKQklClQ7EmdCiLwDHh13f2UpZj>,
has claimed to release sulfates in the atmosphere and has even
sold “cooling credits” to fund its work. But it has raised a
fraction of Stardust’s capital, and its unsanctioned outdoor
experiments set off such a backlash that Mexico _banned_
<https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/how-two-weather-balloons-led-mexico-ban-solar-geoengineering-2023-03-27/>
all
solar geoengineering experiments in response.)
Pasztor continued to work with Stardust throughout this year
despite the company’s foot-dragging. He left this summer when
he felt like he was becoming a spokesperson for a business
that he merely advised. Stardust has more recently worked with
Matthew Waxman, a Columbia law professor, on governance issues
through the company WestExec Advisors.
Today, Stardust employs a roughly 25-person team that includes
physicists, chemists, mechanical engineers, material
engineers, and climate experts. Many of them are drawn from
Yedvab and Spector’s previous work on Israeli R&D projects.
The company is getting closer to its goals. Yedvab told me
that it has developed a proprietary particle that meets its
safety and reflectivity requirements. Stardust is now seeking
a patent for the material, and it will not disclose the
chemical makeup until it receives intellectual property
protection. The company claims to be working with a handful of
academics around the world on peer-reviewed studies about the
particle and broader system, although it declined to provide a
list of these researchers on the record.
As Yedvab sees it, the system itself is the true innovation.
Stardust has engineered every part of its approach to work in
conjunction with every other part — a type of systems thinking
that Yedvab and Spector presumably brought from their previous
career in government R&D.
Spector described one representative problem: Tiny particles
tend to attract each other and clump together when floating in
the air, which would decrease the amount of time they spend in
the atmosphere, he said. Stardust has built custom machinery
to “deagglomerate” the particles, and it has made sure that
this dispersion technology is small and light enough to sit on
an aircraft flying at or near the stratosphere. (The
stratosphere begins at about 26,000 feet over the poles, but
52,000 feet above the equator.)
This integrated approach is part of why Stardust believes it
is much further along than any other research effort.
“Whatever group that would try to do this, you would need all
those types of [people] working together, because otherwise
you might have the best chemist, or make the best particle,
but it would not fly,” Spector said.
With the new funding, the company believes that its technology
could be ready to deploy as soon as the end of this decade. By
then, the company hopes to have a particle fabrication
facility, a mid-size fleet of aircraft (perhaps a fraction of
the size of FedEx’s), and an array of monitoring technology
and software ready to deploy.
Even then, its needs would be modest. That infrastructure —
and roughly 2 million tons of the unspecified particle — would
be all that was required to stop the climate from warming
further, Spector said. Each additional million tons a year
would reduce Earth’s temperature about half of a degree.
Yet having the technology does not mean that Stardust will
deploy it, Yedvab said. The company maintains that it won’t
move forward until governments invite it to. “We will only
participate in deployment which will be done under adequate
governance led by governments,” Yedvab told me. “When you're
dealing with such an issue, you should have very clear guiding
principles … There are certain ground rules that — I would say
in the lack of regulation and governance — we impose upon
ourselves.”
He said the company has spoken to American policy makers “on
both sides of the aisle” to encourage near-term regulation of
the technology. “Policymakers and regulators should get into
this game now, because in our view, it's only a matter of time
until someone will say, //Okay, I'm going and trying to do
it//,” Yedvab said. “And this could be very dangerous.”
There is a small and active community of academics,
scientists, and experts who have been thinking and studying
geoengineering for a long time. Stardust is not what almost
any of them would have wished a solar geoengineering company
to look like.
Researchers had assumed that the first workable SRM system
would come from a government, emerging at the end of a long
and deliberative public research process. Stardust, meanwhile,
is a for-profit company run by Israeli ex-nuclear physicists
that spent years in stealth mode, is seeking patent
protections for its proprietary particle, and eventually hopes
— with the help of the world’s governments — to disperse that
particle through the atmosphere indefinitely.
For these reasons, even experts who in other contexts support
aggressive research into deploying SRM are quite critical of
Stardust.
“The people involved seem like really serious, thoughtful
people,” David Keith, a professor and the founding faculty
director of the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative at the
University of Chicago, told me. “I think their claims about
making an inert particle — and their implicit assumption that
you can make a particle that is better than sulfates” are
“almost certain to be wrong.”
Keith, who is on the scientific advisory board of _Reflective_
<https://reflective.org/about/>, a San Francisco-based
nonprofit that aims to accelerate SRM research and technology
development, has frank doubts about Stardust’s scientific
rationale. Sulfates are almost certainly a better choice than
whatever Stardust has cooked up, he said, because we have
already spent decades studying how sulfates act. “There’s no
such particle that’s inert in the stratosphere,” he told me.
“Now maybe they’ve invented something they’ll get a Nobel
Prize for that violates that — but I don’t think so.”
He also rejects the premise that for-profit companies should
work on SRM. Keith, to be clear, does not hate capitalism: In
2009, he founded the company Carbon Engineering, which
developed carbon capture technology before the oil giant
Occidental Petroleum bought it for $1.1 billion in 2023. But
he has argued _since 2018_
<https://davidkeith.earth/why-i-am-proud-to-commercialize-direct-air-capture-while-i-oppose-any-commercial-work-on-solar-geoengineering/>
that
while carbon capture is properly the domain of for-profit
firms, solar engineering research should never be commercialized.
“Companies always, by definition, have to sell their product,”
he told me. “It’s just axiomatic that people tend to overstate
the benefits and undersell the risk.” Capitalistic firms excel
at driving down the cost of new technologies and producing
them at scale, he said. But “for stratospheric aerosol
injection, we don’t need it to be cheaper — it’s already
cheap,” he continued. “We need better confidence and trust and
better bounding of the unknown unknowns.”
Shuchi Talati, who founded and leads the Alliance for Just
Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, is also skeptical. She
still believes that countries could find a way to do solar
geoengineering for the public good, she told me, but it will
almost certainly not look like Stardust. The company is in
violation of virtually every norm that has driven the field so
far: It is not open about its research or its particle, it is
a for-profit company, and it is pursuing intellectual property
protections for its technology.
“I think transparency is in every single set of SRM
principles” developed since the technology was first
conceived, she said. “They obviously have flouted that in
their entirety.”
She doubted, too, that Stardust could actually develop a new
and totally biosafe chemical, given the amount of mass that
would have to be released in the stratosphere to counteract
climate change. “Nothing is biosafe” when you disperse it at
sufficient scale, she said. “Water in certain quantities is
not biosafe.”
The context in which the company operates suggests some other
concerns. Although SRM would likely make a poor weapon, at
least on short time scales, it is a powerful and world-shaping
technology nonetheless. In that way, it’s not so far from
nuclear weapons. And while the world has found at least one
way to govern //that //technology — the nonproliferation
regime — Israel has bucked it. It is one of only four
countries in the world to have never signed the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty. (The others are India, Pakistan, and
South Sudan.) Three years ago, the UN voted 152 to 5 that
Israel _must give up its weapons_
<https://www.jpost.com/international/article-720993> and sign
the treaty.
These concerns are not immaterial to Stardust, given Yedvab
and Spector’s careers working as physicists for the
government. In our interview, Yedvab stressed the company’s
American connections. “We are a company registered in the
U.S., working on a global problem,” he told me. “We come from
Israel, we cannot hide it, and we do not want to hide it.” But
the firm itself has “no ties with the Israeli government — not
with respect to funding, not with respect to any other aspect
of our work,” he said. “It’s the second chapter in our life,”
Spector said.
Stardust may not be connected to the Israeli government, but
some of its funders are. The venture capital firm AWZ, which
participated in its $15 million seed round, _touts_
<https://www.awzventures.com/about> its partnership with the
Israeli Ministry of Defense’s directorate of defense R&D, and
the fund’s strategic advisors include Tamir Pardo, the former
director of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. “We have
no connection to the Israeli government or defense
establishment beyond standard regulatory or financial
obligations applicable to any company operating in Israel,” a
spokesperson for Stardust reiterated in a statement when I
asked about the connection. “We are proud that AWZ, along with
all of our investors, agrees with our mission and believes
deeply in the need to address this crisis.”
One of Stardust’s stated principles is that deployment should
be done under “established governance, guided by governments
and authorized bodies.” But its documentation provides no
detail about who those governments might be or how many
governments amount to a quorum.
“The optimal case, in my view, is some kind of a multilateral
coalition,” Yedvab said. “We definitely believe that the U.S.
has a role there, and we expect and hope also the other
governments will take part in building this governance structure.”
Speaking with Pasztor, I observed that the United States and
Israel’s actions often deviate sharply from what the rest of
the world might want or inscribe in law. What if they decided
to conduct geoengineering themselves? “This gets into a pretty
hairy geopolitical discussion, but it has to be had,” Pasztor
told me. He had discussed similar issues with the company, he
said, adding that “at just about every meeting he had” with
the team, Stardust’s leaders hoped to “disassociate and
distance themselves” from the current Israeli government.
“Even when there were suggestions in my recommendations that
the first step is to work through ‘your government’ — their
thinking was, //Okay, we will do it with the Americans//,” he
said.
He also discussed with the team the risks of the United States
going it alone and pursuing stratospheric aerosol injection by
itself. That would produce an enormous backlash, Pasztor
warned, especially when the Trump administration “is doing
everything contrary to what one should do” to fight climate
change. “And then doing the U.S. and Israel together — given
the current double geopolitical context — that would be even
worse,” he said. (“Of course, they could get away with it,” he
added. “Who can stop the U.S. from doing it?”)
And that hints at perhaps the greatest risk of Stardust’s
existence: that it prevents progress on climate change simply
because it will discourage countries from cutting their fossil
fuel use. Solar geoengineering’s biggest risk has long seemed
to be this moral hazard — that as soon as you can dampen the
atmospheric effects of climate change, countries will stop
caring about greenhouse gas emissions. It’s certainly
something you can imagine the Trump administration doing, I
posed to Yedvab.
Yedvab acknowledged that it is a “valid argument.” But the
world is so off-track in meeting its goals, he said, that it
needs to prepare a Plan B. He asked me to imagine two
different scenarios, one where the world diligently develops
the technology and governance needed to deploy solar
geoengineering over the next 10 years, and another where it
wakes up in a decade and decides to crash toward solar
geoengineering. “Now think which scenario you prefer,” he said.
Perhaps Stardust will not achieve its goals. Its proprietary
particle may not work, or it could prove less effective than
sulfates. The company claims that it will disclose its
particle once it receives its patent — which could happen as
soon as next year, Yedvab and Spector said — and perhaps that
process will reveal some defect or other factor that means it
is not truly biosafe. The UN may also try to place a blanket
ban on geoengineering research, as some groups hope.
Yet Stardust’s mere existence — and the “free driver” problem
articulated by Barrett nearly two decades ago — suggests that
it will not be the last to try to develop geoengineering
technology. There is a great deal of interest in SRM in San
Francisco’s technology circles; Pastzor told me that he saw
Reflective as “not really different” from Stardust outside of
its nonprofit status. “They’re getting all the money from
similar types of funders,” he said. “There is stuff happening
and we need to deal with it.”
For those who have fretted about climate change, the continued
development of SRM technology poses something of a “put up or
shut up” moment. One of the ideas embedded in the concept of
“climate change” is that humanity has touched everywhere on
Earth, that nowhere is safe from human influence. But
subsequent environmental science has clarified that, in fact,
the Earth has not been free of human influence for millennia.
Definitely not since 1492, when the flora and fauna of the
Americas encountered those of Afro-Eurasia for the first time
— and probably not since human hunters wiped out the Ice Age’s
great mammal species roughly 10,000 years ago. The world has
over and over again been remade by human hands.
Stardust may not play the Prometheus here and bring this
particular capability into humanity’s hands. But I have never
been so certain that someone will try in our lifetimes. We
find ourselves, once again, in the middle of things.
*Source: Heatmap*
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "geoengineering" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
an email to [email protected].
To view this discussion visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/c0e6755b-52f7-48a7-9cff-c0e177dd6661n%40googlegroups.com
<https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/c0e6755b-52f7-48a7-9cff-c0e177dd6661n%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.
