“Make sunsets yourself” – that’s how you could loosely translate the name of the Californian start-up Make Sunsets. What sounds quite romantic actually has less of an emotional and more of a pragmatic background. Because the young company had brought sulfur dioxide particles into the stratosphere on its own last year with weather balloons. The idea: The particles should dampen solar radiation and thus reduce global warming. The whole thing falls into the field of “solar geoengineering”.
Tabubruch: Geoengineering
The idea itself is not new, but it has now received new topicality through the advance and implementation of Make Sunsets. According to the company, it initially only released a few grams of particles, but it does not want to leave it at that. With the noble goal of slowing down global warming and thus curbing the consequences of climate change, Make Sunsets wants to offer a business model: In the future, the team wants to sell “cooling credits”, comparable to CO22-Compensation Certificates.
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The start-up is thus breaking new ground, because the idea of geoengineering breaks a taboo. It has been highly controversial up to now whether the topic should or should be researched at all. Therefore, the guest of this podcast episode “Deep Dive” is Gernot Wagner. He was born in Austria and now teaches as a climate economist at the Columbia Business School in New York. He has been involved in geoengineering for a long time. For example, he co-organized a conference on this topic back in 2010 and also worked with David Keith, probably the most well-known geoengineering researcher in the world. His book “And if we just black out the sun?” was recently published. in German translation. In it, Gernot Wagner also gives a lot of thought to the moral implications of geoengineering. In an interview with TR editor Gregor Honsel, Wagner explains why he thinks geogineering is “complete madness” and yet continues to research it.
More on this in the whole episode – as an audio stream (RSS feed):
You can read more about the Make Sunsets start-up and the classification of the procedure in the new issue 3/23 of MIT Technology Review (can now be ordered from the heise shop) or with digital access in the article “Cooling like a volcano” at heise select.
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(jl)