What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Private Companies Are Doing Small-Scale Solar Engineering w/o Regulation
For as little as $1, you can dim the sun — just a tiny bit — to save the world from climate change. At least, that’s the promise sold by a California start-up called Make Sunsets. Your dollar will pay for founder Luke Iseman to drive a Winnebago RV into the hills half an hour outside Saratoga, California, to release a balloon loaded with sulfur dioxide, an air pollutant normally spewed by volcanic eruptions. He and his 1,000 paying customers hope the balloon will burst in the stratosphere, releasing particles that will block sunlight and cool the planet.
Iseman’s sun-blocking activities — which aren’t officially approved by any government on Earth, but aren’t illegal under California law — are an example of a controversial tactic called “solar geoengineering.” It has been the subject of many science fiction stories, conspiracy theories and at least one U.S. spy report warning that it could spark real-world wars. And now it’s becoming a private industry. Make Sunsets has raised more than $1 million from investors and sold more than $100,000 worth of “cooling credits” to customers this year. A better-funded competitor, Stardust, has raised $75 million to develop a more sophisticated geoengineering method it says will be ready to launch by the end of the decade — although its founders vow they won’t deploy their technology unless a government hires them to do so.
The companies have sparked debate about the role private firms should play in tinkering with the global climate. Proponents say start-ups can develop a potentially world-changing technology faster than plodding university scientists; in recent years, academics studying geoengineering have tried to do basic outdoor equipment tests in Sweden and California only to face pushback and cancel their plans. “They stop. They give up,” said Maex Ament, a venture capitalist and Stardust investor. “If I’m an entrepreneur at heart, no, there is no ‘I’ll give up. Next topic.’ I’ll solve this problem, without compromising safety. There’s a different mindset.”
Opponents say profit-seeking companies have no business developing a technology designed to affect everyone on Earth, which may have unintended consequences for global weather patterns and could kill people by raising air pollution and cancer rates. “I do not trust the private sector to make good decisions for people,” said Shuchi Talati, founder of the nonprofit Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering. “The whole move-fast-and-break-things ethos — I’ve seen it, and it hasn’t gone particularly well for society.”
EDIT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2025/12/03/stardust-make-sunsets-geoengineering-startups/
https://wapo.st/3MeKCkf
= new reply since forum marked as read
But the reason stuff like this pisses me off is also that it is an increasing predatory and parasitic push by these guys (the private sector) to lay stake unilaterally to a lot of essentially shared space most of us never thought to protect legally. Think of the Google Declarations.
Which means that it is another push in this direction: 1) increasing levels of nuisance light and sound pollution; more excuses to data mine for (as you correctly point out) worthless dreck; 2) replacement of genuine regulation via govt agencies filled with disinterested public servants without conflicts of interest (e.g.: the EPA, NOAA) with dubious, predatory, industry friendly trash. The kind of dreck I generally associate with people like the execrable Alex Pentland of the Epstein connected MIT Media Lab/Stanford’s sleazy HAI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_sensing
I agree with you that not much being done is anywhere near adequate for the planet. The kind of drivel peddled by the also MIT Media Lab connected Neri Oxman (wife of the infamous Bill Ackman) is the type of drivel those guys consider “green”.
But this increasing technofascist predation is a related but newer problem.
The nice thing with this at least is that there is a possibility at this juncture of a realigning back to old activist lines. At least this election has laid bare how corrupt, unprincipled and vile these guys are. I couldn’t stand the last 15 years when these guys were lionized as “woke” capitalists and their capture of academic research, medicine etc was seen as a good thing (all those various billionaire funded philanthropies). And any callout of all the sleazy shit these creeps pull used to be labeled conspiracy theory.
Conspiracy theory is MTG attacking Dr. Fauci or Francis Collins. It’s not people seeing Zuckerberg, Palantir, the Google and Microsoft creeps and their various tax shelters, defence contracting ventures as shady.
I am not surprised that this shady company is in CA. Though CA is blue, it has this underbelly of technolibertarian lunacy.
I am really looking forward to this book:
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/youre-not-going-to-mars-and-you-wont-live-forever-exploding-silicon-valleys-ideology/
And a fatuous and credulous or outright corrupt tech press keeps repeating their talking points -like their totally fraudulent “safety concerns” with guys of the sleazy Tristan Harris type now grifting anew.
Secondly just accepting their bogus bs about being brilliant when they seem like expert grifters more often.
Adam Becker nails it. So much of what they do (unlike the work of far less noisy scientists I read about like Ryan Williams or Avi Wigderson) is just mediocre like these LLMs and AI agents and a whole bunch of spooky, lame social engineering, but yeah these douchebags are going to build a super-intelligence. Yan LeCun is one of the few people in that milieu I trust to not just make stuff up.
Elizabeth Holmes’ error was in picking an area where bullshit is easier to detect than with drivel like AI.
The “plodding university scientist” plods in part because they can’t just make shit up and wouldn’t buy up the regulatory apparatus intended to check the accumulation of space junk as when Musk’s rockets explode yet again. Maybe if he was such a genius his rockets would not keep exploding..just sayin’..
I started off like you mainly concerned about the environment and at some point got sucked into these soap operas of these tech creeps as the expand into more and more space they have no bloody right to be in. They want to turn everything into some sort of lame mixed reality or everywhere web of ubiquitous computing or other bilge, all of which I am sure sucks.
I mean maybe that’s a bit broad, but well I still wouldn’t trust these bad actors to self regulate.
And actual activists (“haters”) if you will are nothing like the self promoting, attention seeking grifters who work with those creeps. That sleazy guy Tegmark’s grifting group being the type of bogus AI safety they shill.
The difficulty is figuring out how to engage in guerilla warfare against those creeps as getting sucked into their tumor like Blob is ensuring more spectacularly pointless drivel.
The worst part is losing your work and personal time to these bullshit industries. And their astroturf “studies” etc purporting to “understand” the effects of their own junk I outright scoff at. I saw one decent paper from Hai authored by some guy asked Ophir, but that’s about it.
There is no conspiracy. It’s lame banality of evil. Science works on trust and there is no reason to trust these creeps. I generally trust academic scientists and doctors, but not this crowd of tech and industry adjacent sleazebags.
Long rant..sorry..
Bit of a hobby horse 
.
