Good Morning
Headline roundup:
Update from my closest Chevron - as you may’ve noticed too, gas prices have gone up every day this week. Time to switch to electric??
Australia declares state of emergency over severe East Coast floods
Ted Radio Hour Presents: An SOS From the Ocean, featuring Dr. Ayana Johnson
Top Deals of the Week
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8f38794e-e9c8-40ac-b5c5-6a537dba742f_1600x905.png)
Volocopter, a startup developing a fleet of eVTOL taxi aircraft, raised a $170M Series E at a $1.87B valuation led by WP Investment (TC)
Finless Foods, a five-year-old Emeryville, Ca.-based cell-cultured seafood company at work on plant-based "tuna", just raised $34 million in funding led by Hanwha Solutions. The company has now raised $48 million altogether. (Y)
Mi Terro, a startup turning spent grain leftover from beer production into plastic packaging, raised a $1.5M round at a $10M valuation led by Astanor (TC)
Clean Crop Technologies, a startup using electricity to decarbonize the way we grow food, raised a $6M Series A led by ReGen Ventures, Trailhead Capital, and MassMutual Catalyst Fund (PRN)
Green Theory
The Dimmest Idea for the Sun
In 1991, Mt. Pinatubo erupted, and a cloud of volcanic ash spread across the globe, dimming the sun. For anyone who’s seen the shining center of our solar system burning orange through a haze of wildfire smoke or choking smog, it’s unsettling to witness our life-sustaining interplanetary benefactor so warped. The eruption blocked the sun by about 10% across the next year, and cooled the earth by 1°C. With global warming taking center stage in the climate crisis, no wonder these findings re-ignited the decades-long exploration into solar geoengineering.
While scientists have proposed various human interventions to reduce solar radiation and thereby cool the planet, stratospheric aerosol injection (mimicking a volcano) remains the most studied and modeled, with others lagging behind.
Battle for the Curtain Rod
We’re trying to keep global temperatures from rising 1.5-2°C above pre-industrial levels, but not just for the sake of chilling things out. Critically, temporary cooling from such interventions will not reduce emissions or necessarily harden our resistance to a changing climate. Since cheap solutions that buy time for entrenched polluters generate tremendous buzz, some fear that solar geoengineering will simply delay and distract from efforts to solve the causes of climate change (a “moral hazard”).
Further, critics decry non-warming impacts such as irreversible ocean acidification, which could be overlooked while we watch planes disperse reflective particles overhead. Nonetheless, proponents keep calling for more research, or suggesting that inaction on solar geoengineering may be more dangerous than blasting our atmosphere with another extra special gas.
Some Don’t Like It Hot
Heat waves kill more than 600 people in the US every year, and other countries fare far worse. As the frequency and intensity of extreme weather grows, it makes sense why unilateral action to cool the planet appeals to certain global actors. Especially given the low upfront investment and short-term reward of the intervention, deadly heat waves during election cycles may prompt opportunistic politicians to offer solar geoengineering as salvation.
Tragically, the collective action challenge (game theory nerds, go wild) that plagues international emissions reductions threatens the asymmetrical incentives for solar geoengineering, as well. Since some nations stand to benefit from cooling, and others will likely oppose the impacts of a dimmer sun, a war of geoengineering and counterengineering could ensue, with unclear outcomes, but almost certainly skyrocketing novel emissions.
Staying on the Sunny Side
The sun provides for all life, in one way or another. The shock to the globe from a drop in solar access and temperature, understandably, brings its own damages. For one, power from solar energy would be constrained, limiting the effectiveness of some of our leading drawdown solutions (see “Photovoltaic” solutions, among others). Importantly, too, what happens when the aerosols disperse and settle lower down, and the temporary band-aid is ripped? The emissions that continue to saturate the atmosphere would lie in wait. Absent quick cooperative action to transform our fossil-fuel economy, the impending radiation increase would necessitate either further geoengineering or intense and dramatic warming, the likes of which we have never seen.
Organizations such as the Union of Concerned Scientists call for independent governance and oppose unilateral solar geoengineering. Similar mechanisms for oversight, among other key contingent variables, would protect from a “termination shock,” according to institutional advocates. At the same time, when Google can release these mosquitoes without oversight, it remains unclear what would stop countries, companies–or even individuals–from taking matters into their own hands, and moving independently.
Whether one finds interventions to block the sun awe-inspiring, awful, or both: concern around its risks represents far less cynicism than imagining a world where we’ve ignored the bounty of robust climate technologies available today, and force our hands to act “as gods” and draw the curtain a little tighter.
The Closer
https://www.alpha.facebook.com/1033292620205410/posts/1866118540256143/?d=n&mibextid=%22BB%22T8P6bm
Haven’t tried posting a Facebook link here before, so we’ll see if this works - but this content was too good not to take that risk.