Theories of change

Hi,

Starting today, I’ll kick off a few more newsletters on geoengineering for the rest of the year (which only has 11 weeks left in it)! The ‘common knowledge’ around geoengineering is changing rapidly; in general, geoengineering is much more part of the discourse today than it was even 1-2 years ago. Today, we’ll discuss the broad implications of that. Soon, I’ll put together and send a deep dive into the wide range of geoengineering approaches that are out there in general.

OPINION

A month ago, I had the opportunity to watch a company I’ve written about previously, Make Sunsets, launch their largest yet (at the time) deployment in the field. Make Sunsets sends sulfur dioxide—which can create a short-term cooling effect in the Earth’s atmosphere under the right circumstances—into the atmosphere. On the day I got to watch, the team launched 3.095 kilograms of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. It made for a pretty big balloon.

Many companies have a straightforward theory of change. The same goes for Make Sunsets; one of their theories of change isn’t all that complicated, even if the science behind it can stir quite a lot of controversy. It’s well documented that sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere and other aerosols can have a net cooling effect, whether you ask the IPCC or other parties. 

Other times, theories of change can be more intangible or difficult to pin down. They can, as Make Sunsets’ primary mission exemplifies, also push the boundary of what the climate / climate tech ‘movements’ broadly have considered themselves to be about. And one company’s theory of change can force or at minimum, ‘suggest’ evolutions in other parties’ theories of change.

Evolving theories of change

As part of a second-order theory of change, Make Sunsets has been very successful at getting press. It has been covered in major outlets, ranging from The Economist to the New York Times, often multiple times. Yes, they want to help cool the planet, which is novel theory of change #1. In addition, the team seems laser focused on pushing academic and regulatory institutions to accelerate efforts to study geoengineering. 

Here’s what Andrew Song, co-founder of Make Sunsets shared with respect to this set-up:

Whether academics and regulators are moving, what Make Sunsets has been perhaps most successful at so far is catalyzing more collective consciousness around geoengineering. Which matters, because the time between now and when we may want to enhance “scalability work” for solar radiation management isn’t necessarily long. You can do scalability work without using a technology at scale; we do it all the time (consider the multi-trillion dollar nuclear weapon apparatus the U.S. maintains but has never used).

And the consciousness shift matters to support the scalability work. It could just as easily have been the case that solar radiation management and other geoengineering approaches remained absent from public discourse for years. It could just as easily have been the case that this study and discussion remained confined to ivory towers and small labs at universities. Instead, in part because of Make Sunsets, the geoengineering debate has entered the mainstream. So much so that notable non-climate-focused entrepreneurs, like Palmer Luckey, discuss it actively:

To be sure, I think Palmer Luckey is deeply misinformed in his thinking in this tweet, which goes on for more paragraphs beyond what I show above. But the fact that Palmer Luckey, the CEO of a weapons manufacturer, is talking about this, represents a significant ‘meta’ shift in the common knowledge surrounding geoengineering. It’s firmly part of the discourse now.

Don’t stop. Don’t wait.

To be sure, many people are critical of Make Sunsets’ approaches. There are 700+ comments on the business in the most recent New York Times profile. Here are illustrative examples:

• "Please don't do it! You don't know the consequences. You need to ask every country a representative (sic) on this planet before making such things that influence everyone."

• "I don't know if my eyes can roll enough into the back of my head to convey with enough condescension my thoughts on this."

• "Silicon Valley investors have never cared much about unintended side effects that mostly happen to other people. Move fast and break planets, and all that."

A handful are more supportive:

• "Concern in this article: What might happen when you put a few pounds of sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere. Not a concern in this article: What's definitely going to happen from pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide onto (sic) the atmosphere."

There's a lot to digest here. I'll pick up on a few threads. For one, the scale of Make Sunsets efforts today is miniscule; impacts on the atmosphere will be close to negligible for now, especially when, as the last comment points out, compared to the 'billions of tons' of carbon dioxide we've emitted into the atmosphere, not to mention the sulfur dioxide emissions from other sources that trump Make Sunsets' deployments by orders of magnitude. Again, what I see Make Sunsets trying to accomplish technically is feasibility and scalability work. 

Similarly, the comment around "[asking] every country representative on this planet before making such things that influence everyone" is an area I push back on. If companies had to do that in advance of every potentially environmentally impactful decision, the entire global economy would grind to a halt, and quickly. Seeking every stakeholder's buy-in on everything one could and should try to do to mitigate and adapt to climate change now and in the coming generations would yield an inescapable morass of stasis. We need much more agile 'task forces' for that type of consensus-building and risk mitigation.

At the core of all the tension lies a rather simple question: Should efforts to mitigate climate change wait for scientific consensus on how best to do so? The refrain from some of the academic and scientific community has long been anchored in the words of oceanographer Silvia Earle:

Similarly, in The Sea Around Us, some 70-plus years ago, Rachel Carson wrote about dumping radioactive waste into oceans:

Proceeding only in equipoise with what our knowledge justifies sounds like a laudable, sensical goal. But it's a luxury we can’t afford. Because it's an approach we've never really espoused; we’ve routinely ignored it for centuries, which is part and parcel of why we are in the predicament we are in climatically today in the first place. Through ignorance, Icarian attitudes of imperviousness, short-sightedness, greed, and stupidity, we have ransacked our planet and indiscriminately inundated it with waste rather than ever waiting to judiciously understand its finer complexities. We emitted vast amounts of emissions from burning fossil fuels into the atmosphere well before we had an inkling of what that might really portend. Now, some mull launching a new deep sea mining industry with an ironically 'shallow' appreciation of the ecosystems that could most disturb. The cycle repeats.

So, yes. In the past, proceeding more slowly, more judiciously, would have been a good idea. But we didn’t. Now, we’ve passed a tipping point in climate change and global warming—not the scientific tipping points we sometimes discuss that could unleash reinforcing feedback loops that drive more warming (at least not yet)—but one that likely forces us to proceed with less caution in our mitigation and adaptation efforts than we could have previously. 

Because warming and its impacts are here. Now. Today, as an onslaught of hurricanes and flooding, not just in the U.S. but globally over past weeks, makes clear, we may need to develop technological capacity all while expressly acknowledging we don’t know what their second-order impacts are. Not ideal, but here we are.

The net-net

Am I saying we should throw all caution to the wind? Surely not in all cases. 

I don’t support deep sea mining as I understand it (which is to say, to a very limited extent). But, even as our understanding of the Earth’s climate system progresses by leaps and bounds, we won’t be able to wait to understand everything we might wish to understand about the ocean, the atmosphere, or any particular habitat, project, or technology before scaling new capacities we may need to slow the rate at which existing processes cause harm.

We will likely need R&D in countless tech areas, whether solar radiation management, atmospheric methane removal, or other geoengineering approaches. If that work is progressing too slowly, I don’t mind private sector actors making noise and taking matters into their own hands, especially when done on a small scale. The requisite regulatory apparatus, alongside climate science, will have to play catch-up. That’s the paradigm we’ve been in for centuries and I don’t see it changing soon. 

Can we hack our planet back together after having hacked away at its foundations—like the ocean, home to microbes that produce more oxygen than tropical rainforests, which is now changing rapidly in response to global warming as well as direct pollutants like plastic—for centuries? I don’t know. A more holistic reimagination of human life on Earth with sustainability as its core tenet would be ideal. But the ideal is often the enemy of incremental improvements. And we can’t get stuck in that mode.

Bye,

— Nick