It was not the underprivileged who took the initiative. It was one Luke Iseman, merchant of hardware and software, founder of multiple companies, former director of a “tech incubator,” builder of art installations for the Burning Man festival. Iseman had read Neal Stephenson’s cli-fi novel Termination Shock, in which a rogue Texas billionaire motivated by financial self-interest and an outsized savior complex embarks on a mission to geoengineer the climate. In the book, he handpicks a small group of wealthy cities and countries to back his project, but the whole enterprise comes undone when uninvited big players start meddling with it and geopolitics makes its entry. “I don’t deny that things have gotten a little out of hand,” the billionaire remarks while in hiding from a coordinated drone attack on Pina2bo, his geoengineering facility in the Chihuahuan Desert. “But you gotta start somewhere.” Iseman came away from the novel convinced that here was a good idea he needed to spend his time and energy on. “I was like, “I think I’m missing something. It can’t be this easy,” he explained the revelation to Time. “Turns out it is.”
Iseman looped in his longtime friend and business partner Andrew Song, and in 2022, the two young Californian entrepreneurs started an outfit charmingly named Make Sunsets—just how charmingly, we shall soon see. They sold what they called “cooling credits.” Their website demanded no more than ten dollars. For every purchase, Make Sunsets would blow one gram of sulphur dioxide into a weather balloon, add enough helium to make it levitate, and let it ascend peacefully into the stratosphere. Under the increasing pressure at such altitudes, the balloon would burst and the sulphur disperse. The tiny particles would intercept some of the sun rays. The rays would bounce back into space. Every gram of sulphur would thus counteract the warming from one metric ton of CO2, or so the duo claimed. “Think of it as applying sunscreen for our planet!” their website exclaimed. That particular metaphor originated with ChatGPT, after Song asked it how “he might explain geoengineering to a 5-year-old.”
Make Sunsets staged all the typical performances of overshoot ideology: a premise that emissions are out of control, and we have no project for bringing them under control, and so we must try ventures other than mitigation. “What we have done has not worked. And we need to try many more broad approaches,” Iseman edified a reporter who came to witness one of the balloon launches. While emissions cuts were necessary—granted—it would be a “tough ask for many organizations and individuals.” Such pessimism now extended to removals; like renewables, they “hold promise” but would “take time we don’t have.” Prolonged use of fossil fuels was par for the course, because “most humans will chose [sic] the cheapest and convenient option.” Or more brutally: “There’s no realistic path over the next 50 years in which we decarbonize without literally letting over a billion people die by removing their ability to eat and power things.” By comparison, lofting sulphur into the atmosphere would be “an effective solution”—“cost-effective. Inexpensive.” This, of course, was music to the ears of a particular tribe. One customer of cooling credits thanked the company for creating “a small way I can help with a seemly [sic] very large problem! For what it’s worth $200 to offset 20 tons of CO2 is a great win!” This particular client was a CEO himself, namely of a company running a digital platform on which people could safely store their most private and valuable secrets.
Through these familiar mannerisms, overshoot ideology came packaged in a peculiarly Californian business ethos in which unhinged entrepreneurialism, expressed in a rebellion against rules and expertise, was elevated to a cultural form. Neither Iseman nor Song had any scientific training to speak of, but self-confidence and marketing acumen to spare. As profiled in several major newspapers and magazines, they gave off something of a Beavis and Butthead vibe. They assembled their balloons with components from Home Depot and Walmart. They cooked up their first brews of sulphur dioxide all by themselves, learning from YouTube videos, burning sulphur-based fungicides in pressure cookers in hotel rooms or on disposable charcoal grills in public parking lots. They regularly gassed themselves and onlookers in clouds of sulphur dioxide (an irritant gas, dangerous in high concentrations). They eagerly showed off these experiments to the media, seemingly reveling in the provocative and slipshod nature of the whole thing.
Iseman and Song operated in a legal gray zone and seemed to thrive there. Their first tests took place south of the border, unbeknownst to the Mexican government—until it was alerted and, chagrined by this breach of national sovereignty, announced it would ban geoengineering tests altogether. Make Sunsets then moved back to the US, where experiments of this sort required only a formal notification to—not approval from—authorities. This murkiness was of a piece with the spirit of the venture. On their own admission, Iseman and Song had no idea what happened to their first balloons, because there was no monitoring equipment to follow their fates. Whatever might have transpired, the sulphur particles would have drifted down to Earth after a stay that could not, as we shall soon see, have lasted for very long. It was physically impossible for them to counteract CO2 of even the smallest amount. The soot would be blown out of the atmosphere before Iseman and Song could say poop. If ever there were bullshit carbon credits carted off to the market, these were the ones.
Iseman, as it happened, was no stranger to shit. His earlier ventures included creating an unlicensed shipping container community in the Bay Area, in which the inhabitants composted human excrement on site, until the neighbors started complaining about the mess and the municipality forced them to close down. He often spent time on a houseboat in London, where, in the absence of a toilet, he resorted to burying his waste in public parks.
The prophetic style of this particular duo was also more populist and prankish than anything found in the removal space. In 2024, Make Sunsets launched a number of new products on its website. One consisted of ninety-nine “limited edition” pieces cut out from the first balloon filled with sulphur and dispatched into the atmosphere from US soil; if you bought one for $99, you would “own a piece of history”—prophecy as merch. (This product was an apparent reference to the famous German anti-war pop song “99 Luftballons,” in which a general sends up fighter jets to shoot down ninety-nine innocent balloons and as a result unleashes a cataclysmic world war.) Then there was Big Bertha, a complete kit for sending sulphur into the stratosphere, including a weather balloon, a satellite tracker, a starter bag of sulphur: “We think everyone should be able to Cool Earth.” For those who did not have $500 to dole out on the complete kit, there was a cheaper alternative. A mere twenty bucks would buy you the Tiny Party Pack, a bag of latex balloons and some calcium carbonate (another reflexive agent). This was “unlikely to make it to the stratosphere, but you’re doing it for fun and everyone loves balloons.” Iseman and Song themselves demonstrated the party balloon trick to children at various events, hoping to inspire a new generation of geoengineers. “We joke slash not joke that this is partly a company and partly a cult,” the former let slip.
Any serious analysis of this stuff would risk coming across as redundantly heavy and humorless, but it really should be considered a sign of bourgeois degeneracy: This was climate politics holding a selfie stick. It was climate politics—efforts, that is, to address a rather significant actual problem—as clownery. In all its flagrant incapacity and incontinence, capitalism reflected back onto itself the character of someone trying to deal with the problem as a way to go viral on Instagram, or at least get a few clicks. Climate politics here self- avowedly operated in the register of amusement, and amusement should, we know from Adorno and Horkheimer, be taken deadly seriously: It “always reveals the influence of business, the sales talk, the quack’s spiel. But the original affinity of business and amusement is shown in the latter’s specific significance: to defend society. To be pleased means to say Yes.” To be in on the joke of Make Sunsets means learning “to forget suffering even where it is shown” and flee “from the last remaining thought of resistance.”
The vulgarity of Iseman and Song was too much for the true friends of geoengineering; every scientist with some self-respect took an embarrassed distance from it. That did not prevent Make Sunsets from collecting funds from the usual Silicon Valley corners, surplus capital always ready to take a bait. Nor did it stop the company from selling—as of March 2025—124,600 of its first-rate specimens of bullshit credits and sending 144 sulphur-filled balloons into the stratosphere. Nor did it erase the historical significance of the episode. It was Iseman and Song who conducted the first real-world experiments in geoengineering—a trial balloon to the letter. The idea now entered the atmosphere as particles, if only evanescently. Unless the story of geoengineering stops in 2025, we will have to look back upon Iseman and Song as trailblazers. They set a precedent. “This is an emergency,” Iseman insisted when queried on the desirability of what he was doing. “I’m not going to sit around and not take action because the responsible adults think there might be geopolitical consequences.” A prophet and a clown, he possessed a certain wisdom. “If, with no strings attached, some oil company gave me 10 billion dollars and said, ‘quietly do deployment to half a degree Celsius,’ I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t do it.”
2022 was not only the year of the greatest profits ever made by primitive fossil capital. It was also, coincidentally—no sponsorship from oil companies detected; the imperative still structural in nature—the year of the first experiments in geoengineering. It was in April 2022 that Iseman chose Mexico for the inaugural release. Then in September, men (in geoengineering as in carbon removal, it is always the men) with actual scientific credentials undertook the second recorded experiment, on the other side of the Atlantic, in the green and pleasant lands of Buckinghamshire. Led by one Andrew Lockley, the team hung a basketball-sized balloon loaded with sulphur dioxide under a bigger balloon, towed it into the stratosphere and released it to a carefully tracked destiny: The smaller item popped. The payload was verifiably dispersed at an altitude of twenty-four kilometers. The researchers christened the project Stratospheric Aerosol Transport and Nucleation, or SATAN. It was not immediately clear if this was another bad joke, an incongruously transparent parapraxis, or some other category of speech act; Buckinghamshire did not generate the same spectacle as California. SATAN announced its name only once and then withdrew into silence (as of this writing). No credits were sold. But before 2022 came to an end, the two historical cores of fossil capital, the United Kingdom and the United States, had thereby each produced an experiment in geoengineering.
Neither was as consequential as the next. On February 14, 2024, the genocide in Gaza was in full swing. On this day, the Wall Street Journal, long priding itself for its access to the secrets of Middle Eastern politics, reported on a third experiment underway. “In Israel, a startup called Stardust Solutions has begun testing a system to disperse a cloud of tiny reflective particles about 60,000 feet in altitude,” still within the lower reaches of the stratosphere. Here no childish balloons were brought into play. In the words of the reporter, “they are doing aerial testing of an idea called solar radiation management, also known as stratospheric aerosol injection, by basically flying really high in an airplane, releasing reflective particles”—a first under the sun. If the Wall Street Journal got it right, somewhere in the skies above historical Palestine, just as thousands of children and women and men were slaughtered on the ground, as they slept in their tents or queued up for flour or ran through the dusty alleys of their camps, an aircraft rose to eject soot in an exercise in geoengineering. That would have been quite the baptism.
Stardust, however, operated in a manner exactly opposite to that of Make Sunsets: behind a tight curtain of secrecy. The company would not “disclose the composition of the proprietary particles” to the Journal. It posted nothing on Instagram. But some morsels of information could be pulled out. The CEO of Stardust was one Yanai Yedvab, formerly the deputy chief scientist of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, the organ responsible for the nuclear activities of that state, famously including a semi-secret depot of A-bombs. Yedvab’s old boss at the commission was a cofounder. Stardust was talkative enough to say that the solution it brought to the world is “the only one that can lower global temperatures within a few years,” in addition to being “a thousand times more cost-effective than any alternative.” It claimed to be developing the technology in anticipation of demand from governments. Its capital came from an entity called Awz Ventures. Awz Ventures was based in a tower on Menachem Begin Street in Tel Aviv (with a second office in Toronto). It ran a business accelerator to fund incipient technologies and support recipients’ “journey from concept to product to market”; it had a special ace up its sleeve. The “unparalleled deal flow stems from our partners and advisors’ ties to the Israeli security technology ecosystem”—an ecosystem of a kind, centered on the Ministry of Defense and encompassing “Mossad, Shin Bet, and elite technology units like 8200,” the latter worthy of note for its activities on the ground in Gaza. Shortly after the onset of the genocide, the founder of Awz Ventures, Yaron Ashkenazi, described his company as
providing Israel—and the world—with the technological tools to stop these evil terrorists in their tracks. . . . At Awz Ventures, we are discovering and creating the next generation of technologies that can help Israel and the righteous side of the world. We are partnering with security and intelligence agencies and developing, from inception, companies to help solve the problems for which we don’t yet have solutions—which will protect democracies and nations.
Three sons of these partners headed the accelerator that funded Stardust. One was Ashkenazi himself: He had spent ten years running the security detail of the prime minister of the occupation. One had served as the top boss of its police force. One had directed the prime minister’s office for technological innovation; after October 7, he also threw himself into another outfit, called the Israel Defense Fund. The purpose of this fund was to patch up the walls through which the Palestinian resistance smashed on that day. “Although Israel has one of the most advanced militaries in the world and is separated from Gaza by a highly sophisticated technological barrier, it was not enough” to withstand the attack; and so it was necessary to “address technological gaps in border security, command and control, and urban warfare.” If Toufan al-Aqsa represented the worst control emergency in the history of the Zionist enterprise, some of the more generally applicable lessons might have been brought to the climate front. Relations of domination are defended through the deployment of technological force for the suppression of their own symptoms. Among the advisors of Awz Ventures’ accelerator was the former commander of the elite Unit 8200 of the IDF. It was his successor who conceived of the automated machines for processing enormous amounts of data about Palestinian civilians—the engine of the “mass assassination factory” working at maximum capacity in Gaza to undo October 7, while the airplanes of Stardust circled somewhere above.
But Stardust was far from an exclusively Israeli affair. The team of Awz Ventures also included one former director of the CIA, one former director of MI5, one former associate deputy director of the FBI and one former prime minister of Canada, among other luminaries. Stardust itself employed twenty chemists, physicists, aviation experts, and other scientists. It pulled off a major coup in early May 2024, when it recruited Janos Pasztor as “an independent consultant.” This man had a claim to being the world’s leading expert on one particular aspect of geoengineering: how it ought to be governed. Few had thought as much or spoken as prominently on precisely the governance question; “the real challenges pertain to ethics,” Pasztor would write in Science. Overshoot ideology drove geoengineering to the top of the agenda. Problems then arose. “Who would control the global thermostat? Who would decide whether or not one or more actors could attempt a large-scale outdoor experiment to reflect sunlight back into space, based on whose authority or legitimacy, using whose data, and under what conditions?” Soon after writing these words, when the genocide was underway, Pasztor resolved to join Stardust. He claimed to have overcome his initial “reluctance” to do so “given the ongoing war in Gaza” because of the “urgency and importance” of the work this company was doing.
On September 10, 2024, the self-styled conscience of geoengineering released a report about the activities of his employers. This would have happened just as the sun rose on three enormous craters in the sand of al-Mawasi, the “humanitarian zone” in which hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians had been crammed. Overnight, fighter jets struck the camp and set tents on fire with sleeping families inside them—entire families that disappeared into the sand, together with their mattresses and blankets, in the latest in the endless series of massacres, this one killing around forty. Pasztor was unruffled. He confirmed that Stardust had indeed conducted “unannounced low- altitude flights.” The company had “designed, manufactured and tested an engineered particle” by means of unspecified aircraft. He considered it a success story: “Stardust has made significant progress in addressing the primary technical challenges” of stratospheric aerosol injection; and there was more to come. Soon his colleagues would upgrade “the prototype airborne dispersion system to an operational level” and validate their capabilities “in high-altitude aerial monitoring experiments.” In the entity from which Stardust took off, only one institution could possibly supply the jets required for such tests: the Israeli Air Force.
Pasztor could still see nothing wrong. He justified the endeavor with the usual circumlocutions. “Global emissions continue to rise”; overshoot is on track to hit almost 3°C; “the current geopolitical/geo-economic situation is not conducive to substantially altering these trends for the better,” and so one must go with the flow. A private company like Stardust would be well placed to “research and develop aerosols” and “the necessary aircraft” and “the spraying mechanisms; perhaps even to implement the whole process of deployment on delegation from governments,” although Pasztor maintained that the investors—in this case, Awz Ventures—envisioned profits from a technology that would ultimately have to be acquired by some friendly state. He thereby wrote the baptismal certificate. The font was set up by the genocidal regime. Thus the idea of geoengineering was first brought into the material world.
If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!