It's anyone's guess how helpful this geoengineering startup really is.
Coasting on Fumes
A group of Silicon Valley guys are releasing potentially planet-cooling chemicals into the atmosphere — and are doing so from a nondescript Winnebago touring around Central California's coastline.
As the New York Times reports, the millennials behind a startup called Make Sunsets have raised $1 million in venture capital to send gigantic balloons filled with sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere.
They call it "stratospheric aerosol injections" or SAI, and believe that the chemicals, which are technically pollutants, will reflect sunlight out and away from the Earth below, resulting in demonstrable cooling of our climate.
Founded by Iseman and his fellow Y Combinator alum Andrew Song, the startup has gotten into the business of selling so-called "carbon credits" to companies looking to offset their emissions via the experimental technology that many believe will help mitigate climate change.
Scientists Say
The only problem? There are lots of academics and politicians alike who think what they're doing is bullshit at best and harmful at worst.
"They are a couple of tech bros who have no expertise in doing what they’re claiming to do," explained Sikina Jinnah, a University of California Santa Cruz environmental science professor who's studied climate geoengineering schemes like the one undertaken by the startup. "They’re not scientists and they’re making claims about cooling credits that nobody has validated."
With four pounds of sulfur dioxide released into the atmosphere in a single giant weather balloon, Make Sunsets fulfills 1,700 cooling credits that, as the NYT notes, the startup sold for a combined total of $2,200. According to a blog post penned by Iseman, their research led them to believe that each credit offsets one ton of carbon dioxide for a full year.
Michael Gerrard, a Columbia University legal scholar who founded the school's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, suggested in an interview with the NYT that despite their lofty claims, there's something fishy about Make Sunsets' logic.
"There doesn’t seem to be any transparency behind their calculations," said Gerrard, who like Jinnah has studied geoengineering. "I don’t want to overplay my scientific knowledge, but what little I have makes me deeply suspicious."
Between there being no regulatory body or standardization overseeing these credits and there being little transparency as to what their own calculations include, it's impossible to know how legit the startup's claims of carbon offsets really are.
To Iseman, however, those criticisms are beside the point.
"The fact that we’re doing it makes it more likely that others will do it," the 41-year-old entrepreneur concluded.
More on climate hackers: Scientist Defends Plan to Release Huge Amounts of Sulfur Into the Stratosphere
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