BLOTTING OUT THE SUN? WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

Oh, yes, anthropogenic climate change isn’t completely a fraud. The climate does change, and our activities do affect that. The question sensible people ask is this: Is our impact worth changing our modern, comfortable lifestyles over? The answer sensible people arrive at is “no.”

But that doesn’t stop the scolds from cooking up bad ideas, like scattering stuff in the upper atmosphere to partially block out the sun. We’ve seen this proposed before, but now there’s a company that’s actually talking about doing it.

They’re calling this “Project Stardust.”

Janos Pasztor was conflicted. Sitting in his home office in a village just outside Geneva, he stared into the screen of his computer, where a bizarre Zoom call was taking place. It was Jan. 31, 2024. The chief executive of an Israeli-U.S. startup, to whom Pasztor had only just been introduced, was telling him the company had developed a special reflective particle and the technology to release millions of tons of it high into the atmosphere. The intended effect: to dim the light of the sun across the world and throw global warming into reverse. The CEO wanted Pasztor, a former senior United Nations climate official, to help. The company called itself Stardust Solutions.

Pasztor, a deliberate and self-assured Hungarian with thick, arched eyebrows that give him the appearance of a mildly perturbed owl, was stunned by the seriousness of Stardust’s operation. He had long been expecting that some company would try this. But the emergence of a well-financed, highly credentialed group represented a shocking acceleration for a technology still largely confined to research papers, backyard debates and science fiction novels.

Science fiction novels are where this stupid idea should stay — as a precautionary tale, only.

Flashback to 2023: Why Billionaires are Obsessed With Blocking Out the Sun.

At the Munich Security Conference last week, George Soros got onstage to talk about the existential risk that climate change poses to human civilization, as well as what appeared to be the 92-year-old Hungarian-American billionaire’s preferred method of addressing it: brightening the clouds over the Arctic to reflect the sun’s energy away from the melting ice caps. But questions aside as to whether Soros—ludicrously maligned in conspiracy-minded right-wing circles—is the best advocate for solar geoengineering, he’s not the only billionaire who’s recently become interested in bouncing the sun’s rays back into space. Among the world’s ultra-rich, plans to swat back the sun’s rays like they’re capital gains taxes (to, as it were, apply a generous helping of sunblock to the earth’s atmosphere) have seemingly been all the rage.

Note that this is an idea so out there, even Obama, at the peak of his Hopenchange, “We Are All Socialists Now,” “Sort of God” first year, didn’t deign to implement it, despite his “science” “czar” bringing up the topic in a 2009 AP interview: