AI Summary
5 min readIn 1815, Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia, spewing enough sulfur into the stratosphere to cool the planet by roughly half a degree the following year. The summer of 1816 was so dark and cold in Europe that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein indoors. That natural experiment is the closest thing scientists have to a proof of concept for solar geoengineering. But the sulfur that volcanoes emit is toxic, eats the ozone layer, and causes acid rain. Stardust, a private company, is building a different kind of particle to do the same job without those side effects. CEO and co-founder Yonatan Yedvab argues that the world needs a safe option on the table before someone deploys a dangerous one.
How the technology works
The core idea of solar radiation management (SRM) is to create a thin reflective layer in the stratosphere that bounces a tiny fraction of incoming sunlight back to space. Less than one percent reflection is enough to stabilize or even lower global temperatures. The natural analog is a volcanic eruption: when Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, the sulfate particles it injected cooled the planet by about half a degree for a couple of years.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:08) **Introduction: The "Free Driver" Problem** - Shayle Kann frames solar geoengineering as the mirror image of the climate collective action problem: it's so cheap that one actor could do it alone.
- 2 (04:08) **How the Technology Works** - CEO Jenai Yedvab explains the concept of creating a stratospheric shielding layer to reflect less than 1% of incoming sunlight.
- 3 (08:55) **Effectiveness vs. Sulfate** - The new particles are roughly similar in cooling efficiency to sulfate, but with critical safety advantages.
- 4 (11:48) **Global Deployment: How Many Injection Sites?** - To achieve optimal global coverage and accurately cancel warming, multiple injection points are needed.
- 5 (13:07) **The Testing Advantage Over Sulfate** - A key differentiator: Stardust's particles allow for small-scale, stepwise testing, unlike sulfate.
- 6 (15:50) **Warning Signs: The Three Buckets of Side Effects** - Yedvab categorizes the major concerns that must be addressed for safety.
- 7 (24:24) **Costs: Cheap Enough to Change the Calculus** - The cost is remarkably low compared to other climate interventions.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
One of the biggest challenges with technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions is that they require mass adoption. Solar radiation management (SRM) has the opposite problem.
By Stardust Solutions’ estimate, dispersing three million tons of reflective particles into the stratosphere could cool the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius for the relatively small price of $30 billion; that's less than the cost of a single hyperscale data center.
Despite concerns about such an endeavor, the company is building a proprietary particle injection system with the goal of being deployment-ready this decade. While Stardust says they won’t deploy without the explicit authorization of multiple governments, questions nonetheless remain around the safety and ethics of SRM.
In this episode, Shayle sits down with Yanai Yedvab, CEO and co-founder of Stardust, to unpack how the technology works, its potential risks, and when to deploy it.
Shayle and Yanai discuss topics like:
- Why Stardust is eschewing sulfur dioxide in favor of naturally occurring, biodegradable amorphous silica and calcite particles
- How Stardust’s technology incorporates real-time and holistic testing
- Stardust’s commitment to only deploying under strict international regulation
- How the company balances the risk that solar geoengineering will reduce the economic incentive to decarbonize heavy industries with the imperative of an immediate climate solution
- Why Stardust structured itself as a private company rather than an academic or non-profit lab
- Catalyst: Making sense of solar engineering
- Catalyst: Serving data center load with carbon capture
Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
This episode of Catalyst is brought to you by ENGIE, the smarter energy supplier. ENGIE doesn't just provide the power to run your business — they supply the energy to move it forward, with reliable, flexible solutions built for what's next. Learn more at engieresources.com.
Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. Peak season puts every grid to the test — and the utilities that pass are the ones that built flexible capacity before they needed it. EnergyHub works with more than 170 utilities to coordinate 2.5 million devices and 3.4 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks
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