Inside the most sophisticated plan for solar geoengineering

Speaker A: Latitude Media, covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.

Speaker B: I'm Shail Khan. I invest in early stage companies at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome to Catalyst. So the biggest issue with the whole suite of technologies that are needed to reduce or remove global greenhouse gas emissions is that they're kind of a collective action problem. Essentially, everybody has to act or it barely works. Solar radiation management or solar geoengineering is kind of the mirror image of that. By one estimate, dispersing about 3 million tons of reflective particles into the stratosphere could cool the planet by 1 1/2 degrees Celsius for around $30 billion. 1 1/2 degrees Celsius is a ton. And to put that in terms that we use a lot, that is less than the cost of a single hyperscale data center these days. But that number is exactly why a lot of pretty serious people are alarmed about the whole concept. If cooling the entire planet costs what one hyperscale campus costs, this stops being something that only a, uh, coalition of governments could possibly attempt. In theory, one country could do it alone, or one company, or one billionaire, or dare I say trillionaire. The economist Scott Barrett called climate change a free rider problem. Everyone has to wait for somebody else to pay. Solar geoengineering, he said, is a free driver problem. Only takes one. The cheapness isn't a footnote. It's the whole governance question, to say nothing of all the technical questions. Does it work? And the side effect questions, what effects does it cause? Which is what makes my guest today unusual. Stardust is a private company building a proprietary particle in the system to put it into the stratosphere. Aiming to be ready this decade. They say they will not deploy without governments. Plural. And the question is whether a technology this powerful and really this cheap should be built inside a company at all. And if so, what are the guardrails we should put around? Yanay Yadvab is the CEO and co founder of Stardust. How the tech works, what it might cause, and who gets to decide that's coming up next.

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Speaker B: Yanai welcome.

Speaker D: Thanks. Excited to be here.

Speaker B: All right, let's start with a walkthrough of the technology itself. What are you actually planning to do and how's it going to work?

Speaker D: Okay, so, uh, first of all, let's start by saying, Shel, this is not a new concept. Right? I know the TIO had several episodes discussing it. We didn't invent the concept. So maybe taking one step back, I'll walk through the concept very quickly and then what we believe is unique about our technology and our approach. So the idea essentially is to create a shielding layer. I often like to think about it, the ozone layer, which is protecting earth and composed of ozone molecules and protecting us from malicious sun rays. To add one additional layer which we claim that will be composed by status particles and will protect us from overheating by reflecting a tiny portion of incoming Sunlight. Less than 1% is enough to essentially stabilize temperature, and you can even take temperature down a little bit. This is the fundamental concept. And when we came across it the first time, it was like four years ago. Uh, first of all, we were very curious at that time. The option that people were discussing was sulfuric acid. The reason is that this is what volcanoes emit. Whenever there is a volcanic eruption which is powerful enough, it creates a similar effect. Naturally, these tiny particles go above the weather layer, create the shielding layer in this way, uh, a stabilized temperature. I think the first question that we're asking ourselves is can we do better? Because sulfuric acid comes where it is known to do the effect we want to do, but it comes with a very long list of unintended consequences. It's toxic it induces acid rain. It impacts the other layer also. The uncertainties are very high. We were asking ourselves, maybe there is a better approach. I think that the way we looked at it is, I would say to look it from the end backward. We were asking ourselves a question back then, which we didn't know the answer. But let's say we will be successful in developing this technology. What will be questions that people like you, that policymakers, uh, that the general public will come and ask us. How can we make sure that this is safe? What happens when these particles, uh, eventually fall on the ground? How sure are we that we're not solving one problem, but then bringing two or three other problems that weren't where to begin with to the table?

Speaker B: Okay, so where did you land? What's better than sulfur?

Speaker D: Yeah, so we believe there is a better solution than sulfur. And essentially we came up, we designed two kinds of particles, which. One of them is composed of amorphous silica, just to give you a sense. Amorphous silica of the type that we're using, is used in toothpaste, is food additive, is naturally occurring. The other one is a composite particle composed of core of amorphous silica surrounded by a shell of calcite. Calcite is material that you can find in limestone, in eggshells. Uh, the idea was to develop particles that are composed of materials that are naturally occurring, that are known to be safe. A few additional features that they have is that they are much better than sulfur in making sure that you don't negatively impact the ozone layer. They are much more inert. They, uh, are biodegradable. Which means that once these particles fall on the ground, essentially they recycle back into the natural cycle, becoming again, structure material for these natural creatures. Because one of the things you want to make sure is that you don't end up with bioaccumulation after 50 years, understanding that these things piled up and you have no good way to get rid of it. We believe that having something that naturally biodegrades is very important.

Speaker B: What do we know about effectiveness? Um, obviously we won't know until you do it at scale entirely. But in principle, relative to sulfur, should you be able to get the same amount of reflection with more particles, less particles? How should we think about that?

Speaker D: So the short answer is that this is pretty similar. Our particle, to be very, very straightforward, is not much better than sulfate with respect to the effectiveness and not much worse than so. So up to it, say, a few tens of percent, which is not, uh, it's kind of similar. One feature which is different in terms of the optical properties is that one of these particles, which we call this core shell particle, is much better in the sense that it does not hit the stratosphere. One of the features that you have with sulfate is that while it cools air, it hits the stratosphere. Because to say it in a simple manner, it acts itself is an absorbing material to the infrared radiation that is outgoing from Earth. The reason we came with the more, I'd say sophisticated coarser particle is to avoid this phenomenon which enables you, if needed, to go to higher level of cooling. We believe that for, I would say to provide cooling which is comparable to the eating of the last 50 years are simpler particle, uh, the one which is composed of amorphous silica by itself is enough. But if you need to go higher, the second more complex particle is favorable.

Speaker B: Okay, so you mentioned that, um, the reason everybody has been pursuing sulfur is because we have this natural analog which is that volcanoes erupt and they put, uh, sulfur in the stratosphere. It has cooled the planet multiple times. There are a bunch of eruptions in history that have been measured. Mount Pinatubo 35 years ago, Mount Tambora in 1815 in Indonesia, which famously resulted in Mary Shelley writing Bride of Frankenstein the following year on a summer vacation that was gloomy in Europe. Um, but one thing I've always wondered about it is when I've heard about the stories of those volcanoes erupting and the effects that they've caused. Um, the effects seem to be regional. They can be pretty big. Obviously, uh, you can see an effect that crosses from one region of the world to another. But in practice for you, if you want to create this global cooling effect, do you need to be injecting at, ah, a series of locations simultaneously around the world to get the global blanket? Is that actually how it would work in practice?

Speaker D: So, yes, you're right. The short answer is that it's preferable to if at some point we do deployment, and again, we'll probably talk later on who decides on deployment, who perform deployment. But you'll probably want to do it from, I would say more than one location. Exactly for the point that you're making to get a more optimal coverage. In fact, ideally, Shell, you'd like to cancel as accurately as you can the warming effect of greenhouse gases. Because if you're doing this, you are, I would say, restoring past conditions. And this is a very good way to either eliminate or mitigate some of the unintended consequences. So bottom line, yeah, you'd like, you don't need many places or many uh, points of uh, injections. You'd probably like a few in the uh, northern hemisphere, a few in the southern hemisphere. I would say two or three on each hemisphere and maybe one around the equator should be enough. There is another point which I think is worth mentioning which has to do with it. One of the problems with sulfates, apart from what we've been discussing, is the fact that you cannot do testing at small scale of sulfates. The reason for this, and this is something sometimes people overlook, is the very high background that you have currently at uh, the stratosphere. You have few hundred thousand tons of sulfates and it's fluctuating. Which means if you think about it for a second, that the smallest scale experiment you can do is more or less 1 million ton, which is not an experiment, it's deployment. I think one of the things which is unique about our uh, technology is the fact that you can start very low and do this ramp up process similar to how you do clinical trials with new, I would say life saving drugs or vaccines where you start with a very small ensemble. You test for safety, you have very clear success criteria, only when you meet them you go higher and you do it stepways. So I think that this is something which is critical because if you're thinking about realistically going to whomever decision maker there will be and asking a, permission to start with putting million tons of anything, let alone toxic material will be a very high bar. Saying we want to start low, gain confidence by collecting data, uh, and doing it stepwise seem to us is a much more reasonable approach.

Speaker B: That's related to. I guess my next question which is I think we should head on. The reason that SRM has been controversial is that there's a whole host of potential and somewhat unknown side effects that people are concerned about. I'm sure there are other reasons it's controversial too, but that seems like the one that to me is, is legitimate. And those side effects can range from impacts on vegetation to impacts on carbon stores that we already have. Might you see some kind of a rebound effect to toxicity, to weather and livestock? I mean any number of things you can imagine if you're, if you're doing this at scale are concerning. Which of those do you view as the, the, the biggest deal, which are the ones that we really do need to watch out for that you're the most concerned with. And, and relatedly how are you planning to address and avoid those as you consider deployment? We'll get back to what it would take to actually deploy. But what should we be worried about?

Speaker D: The short answer is that all of them. I think that only if you're able to eliminate or significantly mitigate all these side effects that you've mentioned and few others, this should be worth the consideration of policymakers. I'll elaborate with your permission a little bit. We just released one of the we released a series of eight papers. The first one had to do exactly with the question you're asking. What is the set of requirements or what is the set of concerns you need to address in order to be able to establish the safety of this technology? Going to your list, I think it falls in three buckets. The first one you've mentioned toxicity, I would say more generally impacts on human health and the biosphere. There are a bunch of them. The good news about them is that we have well established criteria for other use cases and protocol how to establish safety. So you don't need to invent new criteria. You can use the existing one. The second one is I would say impact on the chemistry or the composition of the stratosphere. You don't want to deplete the ozone layer. You don't want to end up with a stratosphere that is composed of other gases than you started with and few other considerations. The third one, as you've mentioned, is climatic impacts. You've mentioned some of the impacts on crops, changes in precipitation patterns and other. We argue that in order for this technology to be seriously evaluated by policymakers, you need to make sure that you check all these boxes in terms of where we are in this process. So as for the first bucket of human health, I would say that when you're looking at existing regulation for other use cases, it will need to be. I would say maybe there will be changes to this use case, but it's a good starting point to see if this is considered a safe material. So the short answer is that yes, we are meeting this criteria. And as I was saying, these similar particles are used in a variety of use cases, from toothpaste to food additives and occur naturally. And we went through the process formally as to the other part of essentially when you're looking at the composition of the atmosphere you'd like ideally an inert particle, sulfate, by the way, is very uninert. Right. It's very reactive. It changes with time. I would say that lab tests that we've done show that our particle is at a very high level of unit, but definitely better than any other alternative that was provided. So Far again there is more testing to be done. I would say on all aspects. But definitely here you want to go from lab test to doing tests in the field. But we feel that we are on a promising path with respect to climatic impacts. There you cannot do lab testing because as you said this required large scale testing. I think that the method that we are proposing is combined of I would say three pillars. One is this clinical trial approach saying you start orders of magnitude below the level that brings any climatic or environmental effect. This is one. The other thing is the ability to monitor the particles in terms of how they move around and what are the effect they're creating. We have developed a unique tagging technology which enable us to track in real time each batch of particles as they move across the globe. Think about it. Conceptually, Shell is similar to a constellation of satellites where we have this global dashboard and you can see how its satellite is moving around. Essentially we have this ability, we have a unique fingerprint for each batch of particles. You've mentioned that there will be different uh, injection, uh, locations. So each one of them will have a unique fingerprint or QR code that you can actually uh, track as they move across the globe. And the ability also to track the radiation balance and few other to monitor it. The third aspect is that we believe that we will be able to tailor the shielding layer much better than what you can do with sulfates. So the bottom line when we are discussing, we are still in the process, the testing is not done yet. We've just released a series of papers which essentially goes through all this process and provide uh, all the information that we have so far for people to understand where we are in this process. And the idea is to allow the scientific community to review them, to do external validation, which we think is great. But the bottom line is that we believe that for the first time you have a foundation for what may be a safe and controllable option for solar Geo. This is the reason we started Stardust. Again. Still a lot of work to do and I would say ideally in two or three years you'll have also three or four other entities, either universities or companies or hybrid that will develop their own option. Because you want to make sure that whenever governments will come to the point they'll need to seriously consider options to stabilize temperature. They have more than one option that they have safe options.

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Speaker B: We'll get back in a moment to governments and who makes decisions and the governance of this whole thing. Um, but just before we do that, I want to talk about costs. What is your estimate as to how much it will cost to get how much of a cooling effect?

Speaker D: Yeah, so in terms of giving orders of magnitude or estimates, and we have a very detailed breakdown for every million tons of particles that will be dispersed, the cost will be roughly $10 billion and you'll get half a degree of cooling. This is like a figure of merit of how much, uh, ah, this will cost. Uh, by the way, we are not claiming that our technology is the cheapest. We are not competing for cost. We believe that you may get with sulfur, I would say a little bit cheaper price. We argue that it's much more important that technology is exactly as you are saying will be safe and with very low side Effects, it's much more important. And whether it costs $10 billion or 8 or $7 billion, I mean there's

Speaker B: an argument that you could be an order of magnitude more expensive and it wouldn't really matter. Right. Just in the context of if we are going to need to solve climate change, any other intervention, whether it's decarbonizing, whether it's carbon removal, if you're trying to get a half a degree of Celsius of cooling effect, it's going to be at least an order of magnitude more than that. Right. So and I mean to be fair, that is annual. Right? Like you would have to do that annually because the particles will fall.

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. This is annual. Right, Right. Essentially. Just to give you another, first of all, I couldn't agree more. You know, essentially at current level, to stop war, to stabilize temperature, to stop warming at the current level, and again the level is changing all the time, but essentially you'll need or less, I would say 2m million tons of our

Speaker B: particles just to give you $20 billion plus or minus.

Speaker D: Yeah, right. And again you want to say you want more cooling, but again this would be for government. But this gives you the orders of magnitude.

Speaker B: It's like a small business.

Speaker D: I agree with you. Cost is not the prime concern here.

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, so then let's talk about governance. This is the, the double edged sword of solar geoengineering is that it is so cheap in principle, which means that there is some risk, uh, that anyone could do it. Any government, any very wealthy individual, uh, possibly. You know, the challenge with this is you have this tragedy of the commons thing, um, how do you think the governance should proceed? Who should dictate whether you are able to bother? Um, test. And as you said, you're going to try to test in a manner that is responsible and starts at small scale, et cetera. But, so who should be setting your path, first of all? And second of all, who should be determining whether we inject at the million ton scale at some point?

Speaker D: Yeah, the short answer for both is governments in plural. I think that all decision making, uh, exactly as you're saying, both with respect to the R and D and testing phase and, and with respect to deployment should be done by governments. Uh, I don't believe there is any other way this could work. We would definitely not participate in any endeavor that won't be conducted under, I would say clear and strict regulation and adequate governance by governments. This is stated at uh, our website. I keep saying it every interview. Our investors are aligned with this. This Is a very like. As much as it is important to us to develop a safe technology, it is important to us to make sure that this will be done the right way. By the way, I think it's also the prudent way to run this company. Uh, but also on the value perspective, I think this is the right way to do. I want to mention something short with respect to the beginning of your question saying it's very cheap. Anyone? Not anyone, but uh, many players can do it. I'd say there are many ways you can deploy this technology the wrong way. We started Stardust because we believed that governments need good options. If you want to start a dispersing toxic material in the sky, you don't need status, you don't need all the sophistication, you don't need governance. I believe that having a safe option essentially lowers the risk that people will go the wrong way because there is an alternative. Or to say it otherwise, if we didn't have options, I would say that the likelihood that someone would go the right way, wrong way would be much higher.

Speaker B: From a, uh, you said a plur, plural governments. That seems obviously correct to me as well. Is there an obvious governing body? Is this a UN sub body or something like that? Does something new need to be spun up? Like what, what are we actually talking about?

Speaker D: So a couple of comments. One is, I'm not sure what should be this, this, this governing body. I will say also that we are technology enablers. It's our role to educate policymakers to push them to build this regulatory framework. But we should be very careful not to try to shape it one way or the other because this will be something which will be bad for any number of reasons. I would say again, we're speaking to policymakers in the us, in Europe, in our region, in other places of the world. But eventually I'll say shel, for this to work, it should be an all ends effort. And our role is to develop the best technology we can to provide the toolkit to provide information. Other smart people or smarter people need to figure this out. I will say that there are good precedents that you can look up to. One of the precedents which I think is very relevant is the way the world dealt with another global environmental problem which was in the ozone layer back in the late 80s Montreal Protocol.

Speaker B: I was just thinking about that as well.

Speaker D: Which by the way, uh, was the US led process. Not everyone knows it. It was essentially a nexus of US Academy, obviously discovering the problem and researching it. US industry developing the substitute it was Dupont in that case, and the US Government, which within three or four years was able to consolidate this multilateral coalition, which eventually, as you were saying, signed the Montreal Protocol, which on one hand banned the use of these malicious refrigerator gas, but at the same time put criteria to your question about governance for what should be an adequate substitute.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that is the obvious analog. Unfortunately, that also has been the obvious analog for all of the other climate change efforts that we've seen. Like the Kyoto Protocol was sort of like the next generation Montreal Protocol as well. And I think that one, though it hasn't been entirely unsuccessful, clearly hasn't done the trick. Hence the need to have the conversation about solar geoengineering in the first place. But that does seem right to me. If you get recognition, broad recognition of the need, then something like that has to be the answer.

Speaker D: And to be, again, not trying to dictate anything. But I would assume that it will start from, I would say, individual governments starting to look into this technology, starting to evaluate technologies, and then hopefully, similar to what happened back in the late 80s, something will come out in terms of, uh, consolidation. But, uh, I believe that, I would guess that in the near future you'll start seeing different governments starting to ask themselves, okay, so what are the pros and the cons of this technology? We should get better in terms of understanding, as I was saying, also start thinking seriously, how do we regulate, first of all the R and D and the testing, and then think about the next stages.

Speaker B: How do you address the concern that I know some people have, which is if we start to seriously pursue solar geoengineering, even from an R and D perspective, and it becomes increasingly clear that it is possible and that the costs are roughly what we think that they will be, that it creates sort of a disincentive to take the other actions to decarbonize that are necessary. Why would we figure out a new way to make steel or cement if we can just get a half a degree of cooling for $10 billion? How do you frame that?

Speaker D: First of all, I think it's a very valid concern to state it out, uh, loud and clear. I will add to it. This is the moral hazard. If we do this, the incentive to do other things goes down. I will add to this. There is also a moral imperative. The moral imperative. They want to balance both concepts. But the moral imperative essentially says, how do I make sure that if governments need to evaluate options, say in five or 10 years, they have good options on the table? You need to balance these Two, this is the real world. You need to deal with the moral asset. And I'm not saying it's an easy problem. I know that people are working about ideas, providing technology only to governments who are actually following emission reduction goals or uh, other options of combining the two technologies one way or the other in a bucket. But I would say you always need to, it's always a game of alternatives. You need to balance this moral hazard, which is a serious concern, with the moral imperative, making sure that when our kids are at our age, they have a word which is more or less as good as the one we got from our parents. I would argue that having no option is not a good balance for this. You need to have options. You want to make sure that you are not stuck in a position that in 10 years from now people are saying why no one worked, um, on giving us option. And at the same time I believe that governments and regulators and NGOs, as he was saying, this is an all ends effort. It's not a need to find ways to balance also the risks of moral asset.

Speaker B: All right, final question for you. One that I'm sure you've gotten many times. Why is this a company or why should this be a company? Um, you could imagine pursuing the exact same path you're pursuing right now via uh, a university or a nonprofit or a government lab or something like that. Why do it as a private commercial enterprise?

Speaker D: So first of all, when people started working on this concept, they started doing basic research in Academy. This is how it always worked. This is how it works in medicine, this is how it worked in genome sequencing. Everything start with basic research in academy. However, when you're moving past this stage to the point that you need to actually build system and develop technologies. Again, all these precedents are relevant with, huh, life saving drugs, with genome sequencing, with space. Then you combine Academy and private sector. The reason for this is that there are two things private sector is doing better. One is the ability to pool resources. The other one is the ability to incentivize top talent to work on this problem. And uh, to me it's like asking why the COVID vaccine was developed by Moderna and Biontech. Uh, it started with basic research. It always start with basic research. But when you're working on a very multidisciplinary project and you need to build technology, the way it usually works is that the party which is developing the technology are companies. And again, there is a major role definitely for Academy for non for profit, to do advocacy, to do education and eventually for governments. All of them need to work together. But developing technology? Not bad. Developing technology is something that usually companies do.

Speaker B: Yanai this was fascinating. Thank you so much for the time.

Speaker D: Thanks a lot. Really enjoyed it.

Speaker B: Yanai Yad VAV is the CEO and co founder of Stardust. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. This episode is produced by Max Savage Levinson mixing in theme song by Sean Marquand. Ann Bailey edits the video version of the show. Stephen Lacy is our Executive Editor. I'm Shayl Khan and this is Catalyst.

Speaker A: Mhm.