AI Summary
5 min readHow to Dim the Sun: Inside the World of Solar Geoengineering
On a rooftop in the San Francisco Bay Area, Amy Scott from Marketplace's How We Survive podcast found herself standing twenty-one feet off the ground, no guardrails, wearing a respirator and goggles, about to launch a weather balloon filled with sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. "This thing like sensation in my eyes is that from cycle," she said, as the toxic gas began to affect her even through the protective gear. The balloon was released, climbed to roughly 74,000 feet above a cemetery in Contra Costa County, popped, and released its payload of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. The goal: reflect a tiny amount of sunlight back into space and cool the planet by a vanishingly small degree.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:01) **Introduction: The Climate Crisis and a Radical Idea** - Host Kai introduces the episode from Marketplace's "How We Survive" podcast, which explores large-scale climate interventions like dimming the sun.
- 2 (00:30) **Launching a Balloon: The Make Sunsets Experiment** - Reporter Amy Scott joins startup founders Andrew Song and Luke Isman to launch a balloon filled with sulfur dioxide and hydrogen into the stratosphere.
- 3 (02:46) **Make Sunsets: The Business of Cooling Credits** - The startup sells "cooling credits" for as little as $1 per gram of sulfur dioxide released, claiming it offsets a ton of CO2.
- 4 (05:36) **The Founders: Motivation and Background** - Amy Scott interviews Andrew Song and Luke Isman in Andrew's RV.
- 5 (09:15) **Make Sunsets' Business and Scale** - The company has raised nearly $2 million in venture capital and sells cooling credits, primarily to "climate dads."
- 6 (11:50) **The State of Solar Geoengineering** - Amy Scott surveys the field, noting that most research is theoretical or confined to computer models.
- 7 (12:53) **Expert Perspective: David Keith** - Professor David Keith of the University of Chicago discusses the science and risks of stratospheric aerosol injection.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Today, we’re featuring an episode from the new season of “How We Survive.”
Could dimming the sun be the key to cooling things down before the climate crisis worsens? Some scientists say yes, that we can cool the earth by launching tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. It’s a type of solar geoengineering that was once seen as preposterous, meant to exist only in the pages of a sci-fi novel. But now, it’s a reality.
To find out for ourselves, we travel to Northern California where two entrepreneurs are launching sulfur-filled balloons from the top of stacked shipping containers. Later, we talk with scientists on both sides of this issue to find out if solar geoengineering could help prevent catastrophic tipping points or introduce a whole new slew of cascading consequences.
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