New Delhi: A US-Israeli startup raised $75 million to make the Earth cooler using solar geoengineering. The company has created particles which, once released into the atmosphere, can act like tiny mirrors and reflect the sun’s rays back into space.
From March to May this year, the startup, Stardust Solutions, published several technical research papers in collaboration with major universities like Columbia University, Tel Aviv University, UC San Diego, IMT Nord Europe, to explain what it aims to do. It is now one of the best-funded companies trying to fight climate change using solar radiation management (SRM).
However, such geoengineering is a much debated topic. Several researchers highlight that manipulating the atmosphere could have serious consequences.
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What is Stardust?
Stardust Solutions is a US-Israeli venture founded in 2023 by Eli Waxman, the head of the department of particle physics and astrophysics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Yanai Yedvab, who has served as the deputy chief scientist at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, and Amyad Spector, a former nuclear physicist at Israel’s Negev Nuclear Research Center. The company now has about 25 employees including chemists, aerospace engineers, physicists, and nanotechnology experts.
The company not only develops the particle that could reflect sunlight, but also studies how the particle will be dispersed into the atmosphere and how it will be monitored if it turns harmful to the Earth.
At its core, the technology is based on stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). Unlike other ways of addressing global warming which focus on reducing greenhouse gases or removing existing carbon from the atmosphere, SAI tries to cool the Earth by reflecting back a small fraction of sunlight—as small as 1 per cent. Stardust plans to create particles with silica. It claims that the material would remain chemically stable and naturally return to the Earth’s surface over time.
“Sunlight Reflection Technology (SRT) applies a natural atmospheric process by introducing safe particles into the very high atmosphere to reflect a small portion of sunlight, helping stabilize rising temperatures in a safe, controlled, and reversible way,” reads a statement on the company website.
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Rushed timelines?
According to an earlier pitch deck, the company said that it plans to carry out a “large-scale demonstration” around 2030 and proceed to a “global full-scale deployment” by 2035.
However, several researchers have spoken out against geoengineering as well as SRT. The technology is young and researchers are convinced that Stardust’s timeline seems rushed and such human control on the climate could be dangerous.
Some scientists have warned that artificially cooling the Earth would have different impacts across the globe. Once dispersed into the atmosphere the particles could spread haphazardly due to the winds, which could then significantly shift regional weather patterns. This would disrupt local harvests and the price of staple foods in global markets.
“What if Russia wants it a couple of degrees warmer, and India a couple of degrees cooler? Should global climate be reset to preindustrial temperature or kept constant at today’s reading? Would it be possible to tailor the climate of each region of the planet independently without affecting the others? If we proceed with geoengineering, will we provoke future climate wars?” asked Alan Robock, a professor at Rutgers University, in a 2008 essay published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Yedvab has clarified that the decision to deploy such a system would depend on governments across the world. He has also added that even testing this technology outdoors would still need the permission and supervision of the government. While the company is open to waiting for government approval, experts are unsure whether its investors would be as patient.
Over 630 academics and 2,000 organisations, from 65 countries, have signed an open letter calling for a “non-use agreement on solar geoengineering”.
“A speculative and highly risky tech-promise like solar geoengineering is a politically and ecologically dangerous distraction from what we actually need to do to address climate change: reduce entrenched inequalities and align our politics to help realise a just transition globally,” said professor Aarti Gupta on the Solar Geoengineering Non-Use Agreement website.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)