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Rogue geoengineering startup attempts to affect atmosphere despite warnings
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
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- polotics 4y agoThe quantity of sulfur released in this stunt was not such that it would affect the climate. This was a pure stunt, with the hope to kindle interest for purchase of "cooling credits". The main question at this point is despite the similarity, we can't call it "greenwashing", and "whitewashing" is kind of already taken. Maybe "graywashing"?
- zote 4y agoSulfur is yellow, why not go with that
- numbsafari 4y agoThey’re literally pissing in the pool we are all living in. This is a crime against humanity and these people should be jailed accordingly.
- nprateem 4y agoThe tragedy of the commons. Truly reprehensible.
- comboy 4y agoMore like pissing in the ocean.
- hef19898 4y agoYou forgot the "asking people to pay you for doing it" part.
- rojcyk 4y agoYou should read up about how much of toxic chemicals get released into the atmosphere during new year celebrations.
- jaggs 4y agoI think you're missing the point a little. Which is that for this to 'work' in any meaningful sense, it has to be scaled up to a planetary level of significant dispersion. This will almost certainly have consequences which we can't model, because of the scale. What does it mean to block out the sun across the whole planet? Photosynthesis on which we all rely to survive, needs sunlight. Even small changes can have dramatic effects on plant growth etc. It's a crazy idea, dreamed up by scientists who read too much science fiction.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoSurely some volcanoes have ejected a fair amount of sulfur into the environment? How was the local weather affected by them?
- kolinko 4y agoIf I remember correctly, there was a mini-ice aga in medieval times because of an erruption that was significant enough.
- numbsafari 4y agoAsk the dinosaurs.
- sofixa 4y agoGlobal weather has been impacted to such extents (resulting in multiple massive famines) that there's even a term for that - volcanic winter.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoSurely you jest; Only Man could affect global weather!
- jillesvangurp 4y agoAs is driving any ICE vehicle. People are very selective with their outrage. They'll rage against this and then buy a pointlessly large SUV because they like the sound it makes, or something. I have driven ICE cars of course and without guilt even. So, don't get me wrong here. Just pointing out that it's irrational to go fuming at one thing without doing it for the other thing. If you own or drive a car, you are a part of the problem. We all are.
- kolinko 4y agoThere is an outrage against suvs as well.
- AbrahamParangi 4y agoAt least with combustion engines we get something (the entire modern world) out of the deal and it essentially has majority support. This is a “I’m unilaterally rolling the dice with our future” type of situation. People have a different response because it’s a different situation!
- polotics 4y agoOf course! "Yellowashing" strikes just the right chord!
- starwatch 4y agoThis is part of the plot of my current holiday read: Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson (published 2021). Given that the startup was founded in Oct 2022 [1], I wonder if they were inspired by the book. [1]: https://makesunsets.com/pages/about https://makesunsets.com/pages/about
- andyjsong 4y agoWe were.
- gubneor 4y agoWhats it like being a rogue?
- hef19898 4y agoAccording to the CEOs words in the article, the better question how it is being a bind villain leading a cult. Not sure how releasing sulfur into the atmosphere can be legal so.
- voiper1 4y agoSounds more like he thinks he's chaotic good, not a blind villain.
- idontwantthis 4y agoI think he meant “Bond villain”. James Bond.
- kadoban 4y ago> Not sure how releasing sulfur into the atmosphere can be legal so. At a guess: nobody thought to make a law against it yet and/or nobody with power has yet tried to apply an existing law to it.
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- glasss 4y agoHere's the link to the MIT Tech Review post that this seems to mainly be referencing: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/24/1066041/a-startup-says-its-begun-releasing-particles-into-the-atmosphere-in-an-effort-to-tweak-the-climate/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/24/1066041/a-startu...
- andyjsong 4y agoCorrect, James Temple interviewed us directly, other publications are just regurgitating him.
- cimi_ 4y agoSince you're here, care to reply to the article? I'm curious how you are planning to validate that this works and doesn't have negative side-effects. > That’s in part because it’s highly controversial. Little is known about the real-world effect of such deliberate interventions at large scales, but they could have dangerous side effects. The impacts could also be worse in some regions than others, which could provoke geopolitical conflicts. [...] > By Iseman’s own description, the first two balloon launches were very rudimentary. He says they occurred in April somewhere in the state of Baja California, months before Make Sunsets was incorporated in October. Iseman says he pumped a few grams of sulfur dioxide into weather balloons and added what he estimated would be the right amount of helium to carry them into the stratosphere. > He expected they would burst under pressure at that altitude and release the particles. But it’s not clear whether that happened, where the balloons ended up, or what impact the particles had, because there was no monitoring equipment on board the balloons. Iseman also acknowledges that they did not seek any approvals from government authorities or scientific agencies, in Mexico or elsewhere, before the first two launches.
- hef19898 4y agoI wonder how much funding something like that would have gotten without the founder's connections to YC. Sounds really scalable, scientifically sound and easy to validate, not.
- jaggs 4y agoThere seems to be a current attempt to get this kind of dangerous nonsense accepted as 'normal'. No doubt the next step is to go for some public support from a 'celebrity' en route to a fully funded trial. Awful awful awful.
- hef19898 4y agoIn case selling credits doesn't work, they can sell crypto tokens or NFTs, can't they?
- andyjsong 4y agoActually, it's working with scientists that are open to supporting our efforts publically. We're speaking to several leading scientists at the moment supporting what we're trying to do, but they are afraid of the scorn they'll get from people like you and be excommunicated by their peers.
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- tsimionescu 4y ago> they are afraid of the scorn they'll get from people like you and be excommunicated by their peers Rightly so - this type of intentional pollution of our shared environment is simply not acceptable, even as a scientific study. You can't run a controlled experiment by releasing gases in the upper atmosphere, so it's very hard to understand what scientific value there could be to this anyway.
- Nevin1901 4y agoHe should have the freedom to try, but if this ends up damaging the atmosphere in any measurable way, both him his company should be on the hook. Unfortunately what I think will happen is this startup will release a ton of pollutants into the air, and nobody will be held responsible.
- Ancalagon 4y agoThe fuck? No he shouldnt. Not everything can be solved with fines and jail time. Imagine everything this does manages to push the earth into a 100 year ice age, and it is irreversible on any other time scale. How much do you think that anything this company could do to repair it would be worth?
- enraged_camel 4y ago>> The fuck? No he shouldnt. Not everything can be solved with fines and jail time. On the contrary, companies and individuals should absolutely be responsible for the consequences of their actions.
- MikeDelta 4y agoThey should, but I think parent means that companies should also be stopped from doing things before they damage the environment for generations... because all the fines in the world cannot fix that anymore.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoMaybe it's less about the fixing part, and more about the redistribution of funds into the reelection coffers?
- ailef 4y ago> Imagine everything this does manages to push the earth into a 100 year ice age Looks like the plot of Snowpiercer, minus the perpetually moving train part.
- moritonal 4y ago[flagged]
- tomjen3 4y agoWould you support this if it was an Afro American? Somebody has to do something about climate change. Our governments aren’t doing shit, if you got a better idea please go ahead.
- tsimionescu 4y agoFlailing wildly with dangerous ideas is much much more likely to hurt than it is to help.
- tomjen3 4y agoOnly if we do it on a truely massive scale, and Global warming is known to be dangerous. This might be. The difference should be obvious.
- tsimionescu 4y agoIf we don't do it on a massive scale, it won't help with global warming. Also, the risks of global warming are somewhat understood. The risks of this are not - it could help, or it could be much worse than even global warming. Like in medicine, the principle has to be First, do no harm. The current approach seems to be akin to coming up with a new substance that you think cures diabetes based only on molecular chemistry, and sneaking it into a diabetic's food - "diabetes is known to be dangerous. This substance might be".
- tomjen3 4y agoWhen you test new medicine you do that in small scale trials, then you find out if it is effective and then scale it up. How would you suggest this approach is tested without testing it on a small scale?
- MikeDelta 4y agoIs this company subject to environmental regulation regarding emission of 'pollutants' in the atmosphere?
- andyjsong 4y agoatmosphere yes, but we're deploying in the stratosphere (20km up) and the only other entities up there are the military, and they will work around you because they don't want you to know they're there when speaking with the folks at Loon [1] who made some really cool balloons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC
- bagels 4y agoYour response was kind of ambiguous. Are you trying to argue you're not subject to atmospheric pollution regulations because you are polluting the stratosphere (which is a part of the atmosphere) instead?
- alfl 4y agoBigger problem is the thousands of companies altering atmospheric chemistry with greenhouse gasses, not one tiny company trying to counteract them with sulfur.
- LatteLazy 4y agoExactly: You can dump chemicals into the air because you want to make a profit, but if you do it for social/environmental reasons suddenly you've "gone rogue"!?
- upsidesinclude 4y agoWhat is it about virtue signaling that prevents people from seeing their own stupidity? >“To go ahead with implementation at this stage is a very bad idea,” Pasztor
- LatteLazy 4y agoI think we need to move beyond the traditional model of how people think. Classical Liberalism and Economics both hold people out as rational, reasonably self interested, self controlled etc. But the truth is that there are a whole bunch of processes in human brains that do not follow this model. Not just raw emotions. But things like seeking to belong or exclude others. Virtue Signalling is another example of this. Behavioural economics is starting to try and quantify some of this. Hopefully in a generation or two we will have learned (both individually and socially) to deal with these things a bit better...
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago> What is it about virtue signaling that prevents people from seeing their own stupidity? Dunning Kruger, with a pinch of religious zealotry, to taste.
- aww_dang 4y agoTurtles all the way down. The social/environmental cover is a cash grab through bureaucratic means. He's gone rogue in that he isn't planning the climate via a supranational bureau of experts. >The company says it has raised $750,000 in funding from Boost VC and Pioneer Fund, among others, and that its early investors have also been purchasing cooling credits.
- XorNot 4y agoI find the alarmism in articles like this hilarious. We all here own cars spitting CO2 into the atmosphere like no tomorrow, directly affecting the climate in serious ways. Someone picks a gas to release to try and reverse this, and everyone panics and wants regulations, fines and jailtime? LOL.
- tomtomistaken 4y agoCars? One coal power plant is emitting million times as much (as 1 car).
- defrost 4y agoIn Australia a 500 megawatt black coal power plant emits the C02 amount of just under 700K average family cars whereas a brown coal power plant emits a little over 900K av. family cars. ( Not SUVs | 'trucks' etc ) Mind you, a 500 MW plant can service ~350K multi car homes; so the C02 output of that plant is within the ballpark (ie. less than a x10 factor) of the C02 output from the cars in the homes serviced by the plant. ie. They're each as much of an issue as the other and change would be good here.
- tomtomistaken 4y agoIn Australia? 500 MW? You just picked smallest, right? These are single entities blowing out crazy amounts of CO2. In my eyes, we should start replacing and shutting them down asap.
- defrost 4y agoI'm in Australia and have those figures handy. I picked a size that delivers approx the order of 1 million passenger cars worth of C02. I also wanted to contrast black V. brown coal and to offer a comparison to a large number of cars (allowing people to think of the emissions coming from a city of a few million homes and vehicles (sans industry, which is another facet again)). If you'd like to generate a table for other sizes then by all means go ahead. FWiW South Australia (the entire state) recently spent an entire contiguos week using only renewable energy (and exporting via grid to other states an excess), and Western Australia has a significant percentage of renewable energy production (total production higher than SA) as a fully independent grid | state, but still some need for base load production). Other Aus. states have larger populations and demands and still have a way to go.
- sideshowb 4y agoWe swallowed the spider to catch the fly It's fairly well established why we swallowed the fly Perhaps we'll die? I'd definitely like to see more research into this though!
- oytis 4y agoAccording to their website they emitted 20g of sulfur in the atmosphere. Probably not going to cause the ice age tomorrow.
- hef19898 4y agoSo, a PR stunt then?
- oytis 4y agoSome call it a minimal viable product :) I think the outrage might be a part of the plan, yes.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoNo, "publicity stunt" sounds more accurate.
- busssard 4y agointeresting that ycombinatior is part of the investment group
- jaggs 4y agoOh? Well that explains a LOT. That's why it's been repeatedly getting so much traction on Hacker News lately. Baseline commercialism is such a wonderful thing.
- XCabbage 4y agoThe critics don't exactly provide a persuasive case - neither here, nor in the previous open letter on the topic at https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/01/17/climate-scientists-ban-solar-geoengineering/ https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/01/17/climate-scientis.... Indeed they argue their case so badly that they actually make me strongly support experiments in solar geoengineering where previously I would've been unsure. They do a terrible job of arguing against this tech on the basis of risk. They suggest that it could be counterproductive, but the ONLY mechanism they even suggest for how this could be the case is that geoengineering could reduce the incentive to tackle climate change in other ways, such as by reducing CO2 emissions. But if geoengineering works and has no problematic side effects, then... so what? This is pure status quo bias; the argument would be just as valid (or rather, just as absurd) if we flipped it and said that all attempts to reduce carbon emissions are dangerous and immoral because they reduce the incentive for solar geoengineering. This mindset - where attempting to develop any new safeguard against a danger is presumed to be unethical on the basis that it could reduce the incentive to use other safeguards - is not how we think about any other kind of risk and I see no reason at all why climate change risks should be a special case. And it gets even more aggravating when they argue against doing even small-scale experiments with this tech on the basis that "The current state of science is not good enough". Again, unless you are articulating some kind of plausible downside to the experiment, this is a fully general argument against all science. It makes no sense to argue against research into a technology on the basis that we don't yet know whether the technology will work - that's what the research is for! I have only a layman's understanding of climate science, and my first instinct is to be scared of attempts at global-scale climate engineering going catastrophically wrong and destroying the world, but if all the world's climate scientists can't articulate anything that I would understand as a risk and instead seem to be terrified by the prospect that the tech will solve climate change so effectively and harmlessly that it makes their ideologically preferred set of social changes unnecessary, then that sounds fantastically reassuring and I wish everyone working on this tech the best of luck.
- radu_floricica 4y ago@andyjsong Just bought $100 worth of... well, basically support. The final "buy" is still processing - you guys have high load, or it's just a random glitch? edit: still hasn't taken my money. You may want to use another payment processor. For reference, my card is mastercard/revolut.
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- ramesh31 4y agoHey maybe we should make some laws against companies dumping gases into the atmosphere...
- neilv 4y agoThis doesn't seem like the stakes are the same as Airbnb or Uber, when people claimed they were "changing the world" by ignoring regulations.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoThe gig economy did not ignore regulations, it existed between them, until new regulations were made. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
- ArnoVW 4y agoLabor laws. Taxi medallions. Zoning laws. Hotel and taxi regulations. And I'm naming just a few that come to mind. This is not a morality issue, or a matter of clever legal interpretation. Outside of the US the courts have spoken. In all these cases Uber and Airbnb either broke those laws, or their business model required knowingly enabling people to break these laws. The fact that this is still up for debate in 2022 is indicative of the problems within modern democracy.
- kolinko 4y agoDepends on a country really. In Poland we had unlicensed driving of people that was legal before Uber came around. It’s just that nobody did a good decentralised app before Uber. Taxis were licensed and regulated, but that gave you a benefit of using taxi stops, taxi lanes and grabbing people off the streets. Also, customers - in theory - could expect quality.
- Gelitioerr 4y agoIt did in plenty of cases. It also created issues which required and still require lawmaker to adjust.
- ngoilapites 4y agoThere's NO regulation about it.
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- aww_dang 4y agoPersonally not a fan of climate doom. I am amused by this biz model. >“They’re violating the rights of communities to dictate their own future,” she says. As if the current model of supranational technocrats dictating acceptable levels of energy consumption doesn't usurp "communities" or the individual's right to dictate their own future. The enterprise is interesting because of the questions it raises. Yes, they want carbon credits and carbon trading because climate doom, but not this. >“What they’re claiming to actually accomplish with such a credit is the entirety of what’s uncertain right now about geoengineering,” Contrast this appeal to uncertainty to the certainty of the climate doomer's models. Contrast this appeal to uncertainty to the certainty that supranational institutions know what is best for the climate or can identify what the ideal climate would be.
- Havoc 4y agoThis reminds me of introducing a specie into an environment to combat a pest...and then you end up with two problems. If we really want to geoengineer this it has to be pulling to C02 out of the air, rather than hoping two different issues cancel out
- neilv 4y agoThis had fallen off HN front page already, before most of US woke up. It's technically interesting, and potentially of existential importance to humanity (whether as savior, or as reckless ecoterrorism/genocide). It's also linked to YC.
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago“We joke slash not joke that this is partly a company and partly a cult,” If you have something that's partly a company and partly a cult, it's mainly a cult.
- ngoilapites 4y agoCooling credits will sell well, and a ban will not happen after NSF poured trillions in similar research, that is the reality.