Rogue Private Companies Trying To Stop Climate Change In Potentially Dangerous, Risky Ways

A company called Make Sunsets wants to pump 
sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to blunt
climate change. Sounds good, but a lot 
can go wrong with this idea. 

You can combat climate change, at least a little, for just $1.00.  The problem is, that $1 to fight climate change might backfire enough to make climate change seem like a trifle. 

The dollar would go to a private company called Make Sunsets. As the Washington Post explains:

"Your dollar will pay for founder Luke Iseman to drive a Winnebago RV into the hills half an hour outside Saratoga, California, to release a balloon loaded with sulfur dioxide, an air pollutant normally spewed by volcanic eruptions. He and his 1,000 paying customers hope the balloon will burst in the stratosphere, releasing particles that will block sunlight and cool the planet."

Of course, just one of those little balloons won't have any effect on climate change. Make Sunsets has released just over 240 pounds of sulfur dioxide this year. You need to release millions of tons of that chemical every year to change global temperatures. 

For instance, in 1991, the Mount Pinatubo volcano erupted in what was easily among the biggest eruptions in a century. It released 15 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere.  

That eruption dropped global temperatures by about 1 degree Fahrenheit for nearly two years. But those cooler temperatures were still above the 20th century average. 

Still, as the WaPo points out, private businesses are diving into the idea of blocking the sun through chemicals. "Make Sunsets has raised more than $1 million from investors and sold more than $100,000 worth of 'cooling credits' to customers this fall. A better-funded competitor, Stardust, has raised $75 million to develop a more sophisticated geo engineering method it says will be ready to launch by the end of the decade- although its founders vow they won't deploy their technology unless a government hires them to do so." 

These companies are jumping in because they say scientists and governments are too slow and plodding with possible solutions to climate change. So they want to speed it up. Reading between the lines, these companies want to make a pile of money and fast.  

There is reason why these scientists and governments are so "slow and plodding." 

The technologies these companies are playing with could have really bad unintended consequences, like altering global weather patterns in ways that could be even more dangerous than climate change. These tech ideas could increase air pollution and cancer rates.

 Here'a a pertinent quote in that Washington Post piece:

"'I do not trust the private sector to make good decisions for people,' said Shuchi Galati, founder of the nonprofit Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering. 'The whole move-fast-and-break-things ethos - I've see it and it hasn't gone particularly well for society."

Most governments don't have specific laws banning geoengineering. But remember those kinda wacky laws in some states, and a Marjorie Taylor Greene-sponsored piece of legislation that banned weather modification due to unfounded fears of chemtrails?  Those laws might just apply to these geoengineering firms. 

The Trump administration Environmental Protection Agency has already gone after Make Sunsets for the minuscule amount of sulfur dioxide the company has put into the air. Which is a bit rich, since the Trump people have rolled back regulations that were helping reduce fossil fuel emissions.  The most obvious way to fight climate change is getting rid of fossil fuel, but that would make the Trump people unhappy. So we can't have that. 

But even if every nation in the world enacted laws and regulations banning freelance methods of trying to blunt climate change, like pumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, that might not stop real trouble.  A few rogue  billionaires will probably try to get around nations' "stupid laws"  - possibly at humanity's expense. 

HOW IT GOES SOUTH

Luke Iseman, the founder of Make Sunsets, said he got the idea for his business from the science fiction novel "Termination Shock." The premise of the novel is that billionaires take it upon themselves to fight climate change. 

In the book, a Texas billionaire launches a geoengineering project that does save low lying areas from sea level rise, but also introduces a brutal, deadly drought elsewhere. Obviously, a lot more goes on that in the story, but the book's title refers to the concept that once a geoengineering project starts, abruptly stopping it later results in skyrocketing warming, which is called termination shock. 

Termination shock would have the world abruptly warm to the high levels you would have had if you didn't reduce fossil fuel usage, and never tried to block the sun with sulfur dioxide, or whatever you're trying to use to do that . 

Remember how within a couple years after Pinatubo blew up in 1991, climate change picked up where it left off? That was a couple years. The world without Pinatubo's sulfer dioxide wasn't that much warmer in 1993 than it was in 1990.  In the grand scheme of things, mankind didn't have to make many quick adjustments due to a new climate.

Now imagine if we cut off climate change today by spraying the stratosphere with sulfur dioxide and kept doing it until, say, 2060.  Suddenly, within a year, maybe 18 months after 2060, the world abruptly warms from something like we have now, which is bad enough, to something dangerously hotter. 

It's hard enough adapting to climate change at the pace it's going now. Imagine trying to deal with the sudden extreme heat, even more extreme storms and gawd knows what else if global temperature spikes incredibly sharply in a year or two. 

Then imagine the cascading food shortages, disasters and resulting civil unrest, mass migration and war this snap-of-the-fingers change might bring.  There's a recipe for a dystopian novel at best, an incredibly grim future at worst

The trouble with some (most?) billionaires is that they think they're the Enlightened Ones, who are smarter than everybody else. So they'll just do what they want because their narcissism makes them think they can save the world. Or at least add to their billions in cash they have piled up. 

 The minions the billionaires collect like dust bunnies under the sofa will do it.  (That's why Congress kowtows to the 1% so much nowadays. They want their take of the profits.

Here's the Washington Post quote from Iseman himself:

"If every country in the world bans this, and a billionaire comes to me and says, 'Here's a boat with a flag of convenience that's not going to enforce the ban...I want to take credit if people like it and have plausible deniability if they don't. Go. You know, I can think of no better way to spend the next several years."

The plausible deniability part of the quote really had my eyes rolling to the back of my head.  

What happens when the billionaire runs out of money, or more likely loses interest in the geoengineering project as fast as a dude with ADHD loses interest in any boring spreadsheet you put in front of him? . 

Billionaires almost never suffer the consequences of what they start. So when the climate really goes haywire when the said billionaire abandons his little sulfur dioxide scheme,   he'll be whisked to his safe private island, safe from the global chaos he's created. 

While the rest of us rubes pay the consequences.