So You Want to Geo-Engineer the Earth

An essay.

Note: In an effective, responsible manner while properly complying with all regulatory agencies.

1. My Background

2. Geo-engineering the Earth with Balloons

3. Some Things That Stood Out To Me

4. Long-Term Concerns

5. Conclusions

My Background

I’ve been involved with the climate-tech space for some time now, whether in academia or various startups, and Stanford’s incredible climate-tech entrepreneurial sector is why I chose it for my undergrad. In order to “solve” climate change, we’re going to need to fix the fundamental economics of how we produce and run almost everything, so that being “net zero” is inside the tent of capitalism.

However, we are currently suffering the negative effects of climate change, seen through phenomena such as the abnormally strong Hurricane Milton. Thus, we should focus not only on structural long-term changes, but also shorter-term “quick fixes” to stop these negative effects as soon as possible.

“Ok, but how should we do that?”

One promising solution is to use balloons to release sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere, which I found out about by being involved with the Stanford Space Initiative’s Balloons team.

Here’s how this all works:

Geo-engineering Earth With Balloons

The short story:

Here’s a brief summary of Make Sunsets does (although you should also read their website, which is linked).

They use a biodegradable latex balloon filled with a mixture of either helium or hydrogen and then sulfur dioxide that gets sent into the stratosphere. This explodes, creating an aerosol that reflects light off of the Earth, cooling it if done at a large enough scale. People (and, more importantly, enterprises with large budgets) pay Make Sunsets cooling credits for doing this, which is how they make money.

Wait, isn’t releasing SO2 into the atmosphere bad?

Answer: Sort of. Too much concentrated SO2 can cause acid rain, but this isn’t the case even for averting climate change many times over, and in fact the abrupt reduction in SO2 emissions from shipping has made climate change much worse according to this Nature paper.

Some of the longer stories that can expound on my brief explanation:

How You Can Easily Delay Climate Change Today: SO2 Injection

Twitter Thread: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1794231057815867807

NPR: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/28/1198912483/solar-geoengineering-few-rules-big-risks?syclid=cs5fr09b06gs738jc120

ABC News: https://abcnews.go.com/US/controversial-methods-cool-earth-gain-traction-global-temperatures/story?id=109349797&syclid=cs5fr5gcb0gs739rihn0

Finally, you should check out Make Sunsets straight from the source (https://makesunsets.com/blogs/news), where they keep a monthly update of all of their progress and news.

Some Things That Stood Out To Me

If you are running or want to start a solar geo-engineering initiative, then you have to understand the fundamental economics of your initiative.

If you do not, then you will fail.

Here’s what you should be thinking about.

First: How big is your market?

The carbon offset/carbon credits market is a bit difficult to size due to 1) how new it is and 2) how fast it is growing, but the Harvard Business Review pegged it around 2 billion dollars in 2022 with the potential to grow to 100 billion dollars in 2030. I suspect that it could go higher than that but the point of this paragraph is to answer a two questions:

1. How many companies could this market support?

2. If you start such a company, how big could it get?

Both question one and question two are important for founders, engineers, and investors, and the answer appears to be (1) “many companies” and (2) “many billions of dollars, thus this is venture scalable.” Of course, there are going to be questions about moats and such, but that is where my second question comes into play.

Second: How are you going to quickly scale this initiative up?

'If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can't you do this in 6 months?' - Peter Thiel

We need to fix the climate crisis as fast as possible.

Thus, we need to scale up as fast as possible. (Which Make Sunsets covers in this post.)

They might need to scale up a billion times, and roughly every order of magnitude means something changes, so you have 9 big changes at a minimum that you have to redo everything with.

Obviously, following the Elon Musk five step “algorithm” process is going to be crucial, but there are already some immediate things that organizations could and are doing to these initiatives up as fast as possible.

Obviously, if you have existing mature supply chains that can do something (such as create model RC planes or biodegradable latex balloons), then you should take advantage of those rather than doing it yourself. Sam D’Amico of Impulse Labs has spoken about this before when it comes to consumer electronics.

Here are some other clever scaling hacks that I’ve seen others mention:

“Put the SO2 cylinder on a scale, measure the weight decrease while you are filling. So you can cut a step out of the process. Also you can use Y joints to have the Helium and SO2 connected in parallel, cutting another step to become more efficient. I think automating the process, by pre weighting the balloons and maybe have an RFID tag reference the weight, while controlling the filling according to the the data can make it faster and more efficient to deploy more balloons easier.” -SarahKChannel on S3

Switching to vehicles with ramps instead of manually moving gas cylinders off of the vehicles.

Switching to hydrogen rather than pure helium in order to cause as much stratospheric combustion as possible, although this should be properly weighed with safety, cost, efficacy, etc.

Third: Where are you going to get your sulfur dioxide from?

In small quantities, you would go to a store and buy gas tanks full of sulfur dioxide. However, as you scale, you’re going to need industrial quantities of sulfur dioxide. You can source this from sweetening sour gas during the refinement process, or other various industrial processes (such as copper extraction.)

Note: this is ironic since the refining of polluting oil is what could get turned into the solution that helps to save the planet.

Fourth: What are you going to do about telemetry?

You cannot effectively run this business without good telemetry, because customers want to know that their money is going towards balloons that are actually working.

It appears that Make Sunsets have settled on model RC planes in order to monitor the explosion of their balloons, but there are problems here because flying planes into the stratosphere is not an easy endeavor.

I do agree that the final telemetry solution is going to involve a robust supply chain (such as those for model RC planes), rather than custom solutions, since getting to scale is more important than maximizing your elegance.

Fifth: What are you going to do about clean-up?

The approach that Make Sunsets takes involves having a balloon explode over the Earth. This means that there is necessarily not only going to be some mess from that, but then a parachute with essential electronics that is going to be falling back to Earth. In my mind, the way to minimize having to spend labor on clean-up involves good telemetry to make the area to find the balloon as small as possible and then to launch as many large balloons as possible to minimize the impact:clean-up ratio. We are clearly not at the Pareto front here.

Sixth: What are you going to do about your transportation?

This is a more minor concern but if you are using vans or trucks in order to move your balloons to various regions, then ideally you would want those to be electric as to mitigate as many emissions as possible.

One could argue that a small balloon could offset all of the emissions caused by an entire fleet for a year, but this is a minor semantic point that would make it easier for you to be attacked rather than focusing on your mission.

Seventh: What are you going to do about media conversion rates?

Press and media are going to be important in order to drive cooling credit sales, but targeted, niche audiences full of very engaged members are going to be significantly more effective than trying to maximize as many “big name” media outlets covering you.

I believe that Make Sunsets said that this difference between niche versus mainstream was over fifty times better conversion wise.

This should thus inform your media and GTM strategies.

Finally, what are you going to do about your pricing?

So much of the success of initially controversial initiatives are going to rely on said organizations being excessively transparent and honest about what they are doing. The pricing on individual vs subscription cooling credits are something that should be iteratively updated and communicated to the company’s audience to ensure that it cannot be used as a weapon against said company, because that would be quite dumb in the grand scheme of things. I don’t have anything specific to say here other than that I have noticed the ocassional comment about this and would like to put out those fires as soon as possible.

Long-Term Concerns

Regulatory

Solar geo-engineering is (EDIT) not banned from Mexico, thanks to a comment from Andrew Song (Make Sunsets co-founder).

However, my original point still stands.

The United States and other countries do not have holistic, firm guidelines on solar geo-engineering and this could lead to a great deal of uncertainty about the future of solar geo-engineering companies.

The correct response is not to be rude or unnecessarily difficult to these agencies, but rather to instead cooperate as much as possible to ensure that this planet-saving technology can be adequately deployed with minimal conflict.

Scientific

We do not know what the long-term effects of solar geo-engineering via sulfate aerosols are.

There is work to advance our understanding of this, but I am quite skeptical that it will go anywhere meaningful until efforts like Make Sunsets become multi-billion dollar phenomenons.

At that point, these initiatives will either be funding the research themselves (this is what I suspect will end up happening) or there will be very well-funded, well-organized academic efforts to tackle these problems due to the clear need.

Social

While I am for solar geo-engineering in an effective and regulatory-friendly manner, many people are not as initially open-minded as I am to unusual ideas.

I suspect the hostility comes from a lack of outreach and understanding rather than specific reasons to dislike solar geo-engineering.

Thus, it should be a top priority for these companies to conduct massive transparent and positive media outreaches to ensure that these initiatives succeed or fail based on their technical rather than social merits.

Financial

Even if the regulatory, scientific, and social concerns end up being fine (which I think they will, but still), there is an ongoing question about the health of these companies in the very (multi-decadal) long-term.

This is similar to other carbon offset companies, since if we really do transition the structural incentives of our economy to become net-zero, then we really won’t need these carbon offset companies to continue to be massive organizations.

My perspective on this question is two-fold.

First, you can worry about this in-depth later on once we have fixed our climate problem.

However, I do think being upfront with employees and investors about this topic is important to maintain your reputation.

Note: I could be very wrong about the very long-term financial prospects of solar geo-engineering, but it is something that brings me concern.

Conclusions

First, you should support Make Sunsets by buying cooling credits here.

If you can, you should buy $30 USD incremental monthly subscriptions ($30*N, where N = any number you want) in order to increase their financial stability.

Second, more people should be doing initiatives like Make Sunsets.

I initially hesitated to endorse this position, however I believe that it would be much better to have the problem of “there are too many positive and constructive geo-engineers” than “there are not anywhere near enough positive and constructive geo-engineers.”

I am personally quite interested in potentially starting a geo-engineering company (although I am not married to the idea, since I am aware of the complex and difficult realities of starting a company), but I do know that I will be supporting all constructive and effective solutions.

Finally, you should spread the word about constructive geo-engineering initiatives.

The cooling credit sales for these initiatives are a direct function of how many people know about them.

This is a very easy thing to for you, the reader, to increase. Y

You don’t have to build any balloon engineering production lines or fill out any paperwork.

You can just share positive content online.

Let’s go save our planet!