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Move Fast and Break the Planet
This startup’s geoengineering experiment is a very bad sign for the future
Over the holidays, you may have missed a small but potentially momentous news item. On Christmas Eve, a story popped up on MIT Technology Review about an obscure startup called Make Sunsets. The company was announcing that it had carried out some small experiments, releasing sulfur particles into the atmosphere via weather balloons.
This doesn’t necessarily sound like a potentially earth-shattering event, but it could be. As far as I can tell, Make Sunsets is the first entity to actually carry out geoengineering experiments in the real world.
If you’re not familiar with geoengineering, here’s a brief primer: it’s a last-ditch measure to control climate change by altering the composition of the atmosphere. The technique is meant to replicate the effects of volcanic eruptions, which spew sun-blocking particulates and sulfur into the sky. Really big eruptions can alter weather far from the volcano itself; the biggest ones can put enough material into the atmosphere to cool the world’s climate for a couple of years. The Tambora eruption of 1815, the biggest in modern memory, caused June snowstorms in North America, crop failures in many countries, and famines all over the world. Germans called 1816 and 1817 Die…
