Stardust is an American-Israeli start-up that, with $60 million in start-up capital, wants to take steps with stratospheric aerosol injection, the artificial dampening of sunlight on a global scale to slow down global warming.
A company that takes control of the climate. To understand how absurd that idea is, we must first look at how the climate actually works. Climate science is not that complicated at all. I will include the 2,409 pages of the most recent IPCC-report on the operation of the climate system can be summarized for you in 198 words:
There are only three buttons to turn if you want to influence the temperature on earth. If you increase the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth, the temperature will rise. If you make the earth darker, the temperature also increases. That knob is called albedo. Finally, there is the button of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These are transparent to sunlight, but retain the heat of the earth, which is heated by the sun. The more greenhouse gases, the warmer. The earth always turned those buttons itself. The coming and going of ice ages over the past million years was due to wobbles of the Earth’s orbit around the sun. As a result, the amount of incoming sunlight is not constant on timescales of tens of thousands of years. That is the driving force behind the ice ages of the last million years. Now, however, people have started turning the greenhouse gases like crazy by burning fossil fuels. In a geological spasm lasting a century and a half, the CO2 increased by 50 percent and the temperature almost one and a half degrees. The human contribution to that warming is about 110 percent – without that contribution the Earth would probably have cooled very slightly.
So much for the summary. If the rapid rise in temperatures is a problem (and it is) and the problem is caused by burning fossil fuels, you would say that the most obvious thing to do would be to stop using oil, coal and gas. Anyway, on paper it is also conceivable to continue using fossil fuels and undo the greenhouse knob by simultaneously turning the sun knob. With rockets or airplanes you can spray substances into the stratosphere above the clouds that reflect some of the sunlight. It is not a one-off, because these substances are chemically broken down. You must continue to inject continuously. It can be done with sulfur (which is at the expense of the ozone layer and causes acid rain), calcite (which clumps) or metal particles (effects unknown). What all scientific literature shows is that insecure is what the consequences of stratospheric aerosol injection are. It is not clear what the technology will do with precipitation patterns, monsoons, cloud cover and drought. But also not how living nature will react to a decrease in direct sunlight and the bleaching of the blue sky. Finally, there is the fear of large-scale influence on the climate with aerosols geopolitical tensions works in hand. What if China uses this technology to halve precipitation in Europe?
If you stop using aerosols, you will get a shock to the climate system
All aspects of such geoengineering have long been discussed within climate science. What are the technical challenges, what are the climate consequences, and what are the social, political and ethical dilemmas? But this discussion is gradually leading somewhere: there is still no international organization that has drawn up a framework and rules for geoengineering. There has been no social debate. But Stardust is already taking the shortcut and starting as a private start-up. What this will lead to became crystal clear to me when I read an interview last week with professor of international history Quinn Slobodian and tech journalist Ben Tarnoff.
Slobodian and Tarnoff coined the term muskism, a political-economic system in which the government is inextricably linked to large corporations. She even becomes completely dependent on it. Think of SpaceX and Starlink, they now control the largest share of the space and communications market and governments can no longer do without them. You can seamlessly paste this line of thought onto Stardust. If the world starts using Stardust’s services, we will be stuck with it until the fossil fuels are used up. If you stop before then, you will get a shock to the climate system, because the aerosols will wear off within two years and from that moment on the earth will warm up by a few degrees in a few years. At first glance, there is no revenue model for Stardust. Unless the world makes itself dependent on it. Then you can no longer do without it and prices can go up. It’s like cloud storage. First it’s free, then you can’t live without it anymore, and then you pay the top price. You can no longer spend the money you pay to Stardust on your CO energy supply2-to be released.
Stardust would be very good for the economy. It runs on pollution. With Stardust we will fight pollution with pollution, double economic growth! But without cynicism: I often hear that stopping fossil fuels is very radical. But I think it is a lot less radical than leaving an unlivable planet to the future in a few decades. Or, and this would be completely bizarre, giving control of the climate to a tech company.
