A few weeks ago, TIME Magazine staff writer Alejandro de la Garza found himself on the floor of a hotel room in Nevada with two guys trying to cook sulfur dioxide out of a tin can.
Luke Iseman and Andrew Song are the co-founders of Make Sunsets, a startup claiming to be implementing solar geoengineering by launching weather balloons filled with SO2 into the stratosphere.
Their first experimental launch in the Mexican state of Baja resulted in a swift regulatory response from the Mexican government. But when they ran another test launch a few weeks ago just outside of Reno, Nevada, Luke invited Alejandro to meet them.
This week, we speak with Alejandro about his TIME profile of the risky startup. Plus, we talk with geoengineering experts, Dr. Holly Buck and Dr. Kevin Surprise.
“Any single person you talk to in solar geoengineering research, whether they’re bullish or against it, they all think that what makes Sunsets doing is a bad idea,” explains Alejandro.
Make Sunsets represents a turning point for the field of geoengineering, when rogue actors are pushing it from academic debate into the real world. Is the company’s recent balloon launch an act of performance art – or an open door to an uncontrolled climate experiment?
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Full Transcript:
Stephen Lacey
A few weeks ago, Time Magazine staff writer Alejandro de la Garza found himself on the floor of a hotel room in Nevada with two guys trying to cook sulfur dioxide out of a tin can.
Make Sunsets speakers
We’re pretty confident that sulfur lit on fire in the presence of adequate air reacts with oxygen to make sulfur dioxide. So now we’re going to try a literal tin can, sulfur dioxide in there on fire. Then we’re going to connect this to the vacuum running through a vacuum chamber and dry ice to try to precipitate some out.
Stephen Lacey
These two guys are Luke Iseman and Andrew Song. They’re the cofounders of make sunsets a startup claiming to be implementing solar geoengineering by launching weather balloons filled with sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Their first experimental launch in the Mexican state of Baja resulted in a swift regulatory response from the Mexican government. But undeterred, they were ready to run another test. And a few weeks ago, they launched some more balloons just outside of Reno, Nevada, and Luke invited Alejandro to meet them.
Alejandro de la Garza
The first I saw of him was walking into this hotel room in Reno and they have these respirators and his his partner, Andrew, hands me a industrial respirator one of these like you know P100 M3 respirators and says you’re going to need this. And they have all these tubes and a cooler and all this, you know, scattered equipment over this hotel room.
Stephen Lacey
They were experimenting with a new method to produce sulfur dioxide right in front of Alejandro. It involves burning fungicide in a tin can and then sucking the smoke through some tubing and cooling it with dry ice to turn it into liquid SO2. Again, this is in a hotel room.
Make Sunsets speakers
What are you seeing in there? Little bit of water-looking stuff that’s clear liquid. I’m pretty sure it’s sulfur dioxide. So those little drops there? Yeah. Okay. It was supposed to be clear? Yeah.
Alejandro de la Garza
They I think referred to it as looking like they were cooking meth, a couple of times.
Stephen Lacey
Did at any point when you went into that hotel room, and it looked like some weird drug manufacturing operation, were you like, what am I doing here?
Alejandro de la Garza
Yeah, I think I was trying not to put them on edge. And I was also trying to suss out whether I was going to die from inhaling the stuff.
Stephen Lacey
They assured you it was like taking a bong hit. Is that right?
Make Sunsets speakers
Like if you’ve ever done a massive bong hit, a bong hit is worse than what you’re going to inhale, in terms of the pain, Okay.
Stephen Lacey
But there was a problem, Luke and Andrew weren’t collecting enough sulfur dioxide in their pressure cooker. So they reverted to their original method. They went to a local Walmart to buy a grill and then headed to a park.
Alejandro de la Garza
It was like a dog park on the outskirts of Reno. So they have this charcoal grill, and they dump a bunch of this fungicide in the charcoal grill and light it on fire and then have a shop vac and they’re vacuuming the smoke from this burning fungicide into these garbage bags and then tying them off and putting them in the this camper that Andrew has.
Make Sunsets speakers
“Now, please don’t please don’t let that go… I want you to fold that in…”
Alejandro de la Garza
And then taking those garbage bags out and trying to squeeze them through a vacuum cleaner hose into these weather balloons.
Make Sunsets speakers
“We’re gonna be way over full on that. Maybe what it becomes is you lift your hand up more…”
Alejandria Tomas
And they took it out into the field and filled it up with helium and tied it off and let it go.
Stephen Lacey
And so there were like people walking around when this is happening.
Alejandro de la Garza
Yeah, there was you know families, kids, dogs walking around. There were these drifting clouds of sulfur smoke that would sting your eyes if you walked through it, drifting through the parking lot. I was under the impression that we were gonna go out in the desert somewhere to do this launch. I didn’t think we were just gonna drive 10 minutes and go do it in this park.
Make Sunsets speakers
It felt a little weird letting go that balloon man. Yeah, yeah. So we got clearance by the FAA, like we should note that. Okay, so it was a legal launch. Yeah.
Stephen Lacey
Despite the swift regulatory response their initial experiments got in Mexico and the fear of spy balloons still fresh in America, there was no regulatory backlash to their recent launch near Reno.
Alejandro de la Garza
The amount of sulfur dioxide that they’re releasing, I mean, for the record is tiny. There’s no federal regulation that prohibits someone from putting some of that burned sulfur in a balloon and letting it go. So for now, they can do what they want.
Stephen Lacey
Make Sunsets represents a turning point for the field of geoengineering, when rogue actors are pushing it from academic debate out into the real world.
Alejandro de la Garza
Any single person you talk to in solar and geoengineering research, whether they’re the most bullish on it or the strongest against it, they all think that what Make Sunsets it’s doing is a bad idea.
Stephen Lacey
This is the Carbon Copy. I’m Steven Lacey. This week, a geoengineering provocation: is Make Sunsets’ balloon launch and active performance art, or an open door to an uncontrolled climate experiment, or both? So geoengineering refers to a very wide spectrum of approaches to influencing the climate in order to slow global temperature rise. Carbon dioxide removal, stuff like direct air capture, is one less controversial form. Solar geoengineering, on the other hand, is the third rail of climate discourse. Solar geoengineering is a pretty radical and potentially dangerous proposal that relies on altering the atmosphere to temporarily block the sun. One proposed method is known as stratospheric aerosol injection, intentionally emitting aerosols like sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. Make Sunsets calls this “sunscreen for the earth.” While these aerosols have a temporary cooling effect, a geoengineering program would need to be continuously maintained over decades, while carbon and methane emissions are reduced. It could have a whole host of negative consequences that scientists can’t even predict as the atmosphere shifts, ranging from acid rain to impacts on the ozone layer to detrimental shifts and local environments. It’s incredibly risky, like playing planetary roulette. It’s why no one has done it. It’s what makes the people behind make sunsets so brazen. And it’s what attracted Alejandro de la Garza to the story of these guys cooking up sulfur dioxide in a hotel room. Who in the world are Luke Iseman and Andrew Song?
Alejandro de la Garza
Andrew says he’s the “suit” of the company. He specializes in early-stage startup sales, as I understand it, trying to get revenue for early stage startups. Luke Iseman is a serial entrepreneur, he worked at Y Combinator for a while as their head of hardware, director of hardware. So he has a lot of street cred in the DIY startup VC community. Luke gives the impression of someone you want to be friends with, or just you know, he’s very charismatic.
Stephen Lacey
It feels like Andrew’s got a bit of the “move fast and break things” attitude. And Luke has a bit of a punk rock vibe to him. Does that is that feel accurate to your interpretation at all?
Alejandro de la Garza
I think that’s basically right. I think Andrew is move fast break things, very much the typical Silicon Valley line, and Luke is just strictly breaking things. I mean, he makes things do and then they break, and then he makes other things and they also break and then he makes the third thing. I mean, that’s sort of his deal. He’s the “build it, figure it out as we go fly the plane while we’re, you know, building it” kind of guy.
Stephen Lacey
At no point did I hear the words atmospheric scientist in that description
Alejandro de la Garza
He is not an atmospheric scientist.
Stephen Lacey
So, I met Andrew, in October at a conference. I knew nothing about the company. I had never heard of them before. And he was very open about what they were doing. I had a good conversation with him. But I walked away from the conversation being like, wow, nothing is gonna stop these people. What was what’s your reaction to their personalities and what’s driving them?
Alejandro de la Garza
I’m sure Andrew probably told you at the time, they want to save the world. Like that’s their plan. And they’re not going to let anyone tell them that it’s a bad idea.
Stephen Lacey
Make sunsets business model rests on this idea of a cooling credit. Now, it’s like a carbon credit these tradable certificates for carbon emissions created on the idea that those emissions will be cleaned up elsewhere. Maybe by planting trees, restoring an ecosystem, etc. Make Sunsets goes a step further than that, claiming to sell credits that will cool the planet directly through solar geoengineering.
Alejandro de la Garza
So for $10 you can buy a promise from Make Sunsets it’s that they’re going to inject one gram of silver dioxide into the stratosphere and also that one gram of sulfur dioxide, they say, will offset the emissions of one ton of carbon dioxide for a period of one year. So basically, you’re cancelling out one tonne of carbon dioxide emissions for one year, for $10. That’s the pitch.
Stephen Lacey
To be clear this claim is in no way scientifically backed or verified. Here’s Dr. Kevin Surprise a scholar of geoengineering at Mount Holyoke College,
Dr. Surprise
I’m still not entirely sure where they got those numbers from, they really at this point don’t have any way to measure whether or not they’re actually releasing the proper amount of sulfur, or if it’s making it into the stratosphere. And it’s, you know, these just round easy numbers of correlation from one to one gram to one ton, just seem really dubious and more of a marketing scheme than anything backed up scientifically.
Stephen Lacey
There is a ton of debate within the geoengineering field about methods and morals. Out of all the unknowns and disagreement about geoengineering, researchers do agree about one thing: what Make Sunsets is doing is a bad idea
Alejandro de la Garza
For some of the folks who were, you know, more pro-geoengineering that might have to do some somewhat with the fact that Make Sunsets maybe they think is making them look bad, or making the field look amateurish. But regardless, none of them like it.
Stephen Lacey
We spoke with a couple of experts who agreed with Alejandro’s characterization. Here’s Mount Holyoke College’s Kevin Surprise again.
Dr. Surprise
And so the brazen attempt to attract investors and attract customers through selling cooling credits with this dubious scientific link that we talked about earlier, is one of the worst manifestations of how this technology might come about. This is a great example of the ways in which the scientists who are researching this stuff are, are well meaning and well intentioned, and are attempting to be very careful. But even with those safeguards that they’re trying to impose on themselves, they are not going to have control over how this technology actually operates in the real world.
Stephen Lacey
We also spoke with Dr. Holly Buck, a geoengineering expert at the University of Buffalo. Her biggest fear is that the project will delegitimize the entire field of geoengineering.
Dr. Buck
I mean, the main danger is that it inhibits the very real research that we need, because people are too alarmed from the whole topic, or they just write it off. And then the scientists I hope would be doing a good work on this can’t continue their work. And that would be a loss for all of us because climate change is really bad, the impacts are really bad. We should know more about this idea, even if it’s just to rule it out.
Stephen Lacey
The small amounts of sulfur dioxide that makes sunsets is releasing now won’t have a measurable impact on the climate. But geoengineering at scale could have a whole host of negative consequences, some of which scientists don’t even know about yet. There’s a bunch of different ways it could go wrong. The first is just the moral hazard of even considering the option at all. Again, here’s Kevin Surprise.
Dr. Surprise
The risks of moving this forward, even at the research and experimentation level, are many. They are the potential for solar geoengineering to become a techno fix that is latched on to by particular economic and political actors to delay mitigation and energy transitions, the fossil fuel industry, and in so doing that becomes the a crutch that particular interests will will lean on to avoid cutting emissions.
Stephen Lacey
Then there’s the environmental and climate effects of sulfur dioxide pollution itself, which Alejandro explored and his story.
Alejandro de la Garza
For one thing, no one exactly knows, because we’ve never done this, but it has the potential to be very hairy. We’re talking about reducing the amount of sunlight that hits the Earth’s surface. And what climate scientists have told me is it’s not a switch where we turn it and we get back an atmosphere that we had in the year 1900 or the year 1800. We have a new atmosphere with a new climate. And we don’t know exactly what that climate looks like. There’s the potential for places that were wet to become dry; places that were dry to become wet. It’s going to really scramble things in a way that we don’t fully understand. And unlike in a situation where global emissions, you know, this situation we’re already entering where carbon dioxide emissions are creating these knock-on effects. In this case, it’s a purposeful action. So there’s also this heightened risk of even more geopolitical tension and conflict. Because you could have one country that is pro solar geoengineering, and maybe their effects from it are looking pretty good. Whereas maybe India is getting royally screwed, and they want the other country to stop, then what happens?
Stephen Lacey
Then, of course, there’s the consideration that solar geoengineering doesn’t actually mitigate global warming, it just masks it. Once you start, you can’t stop, or else all those warming impacts will just come roaring back. Holly Buck explains.
Dr. Buck
If you did a real research program that would mask warming for a while, we have air pollution in the troposphere that’s currently masking quite a bit of warming – by some calculations, you know, half a degree, perhaps even more, there’s some uncertainty around that – but as we continue to clean up our air pollution, which we absolutely need to do for human health reasons, that warming is going to come for us. And so there are these questions about, you know, should you maybe mask warming by putting particles into the stratosphere where they stay aloft for longer periods of time, perhaps a year compared to a couple of days in the troposphere? And the answer to those questions, I think, is we really don’t know what the impacts would be because we haven’t done very much research on this at all.
Stephen Lacey
Dr. Buck says that a real effort to research geoengineering would have to be international and publicly funded, basically the opposite of a project like Make Sunsets?
Dr. Buck
Well, it’s inevitable if you have the kind of leadership void we have on climate right now that self-appointed Silicon Valley types are going to step into that void and either do performances or perhaps someday something more organized and serious. And I think it’s a very clear indication of why we need a robust international publicly funded research effort in this space to at least fill the void in research, but we also need a coordinated governance effort for the more basic leadership void when it comes to decision making. I don’t really see this effort as relating to geoengineering, actually, like, it’s basically performance. You could call it performance art, I don’t know if it meets the threshold of art. But it’s more of like a performance that is meant to be a provocation or a conversation starter, rather than an actual geoengineering event. So it’s important that people understand that it’s not actual geoengineering research. It’s, you know, a stunt, which maybe some good conversations can come from a stunt. I’m not really sure. I don’t think that’s been the case yet. But we’ll see.
Stephen Lacey
The slow deliberate approach that Holly and Kevin described is what annoys people like Luke and Andrew, and in many ways, Make Sunsets does have a lot in common with performance art as a way to push the conversation.
Alejandro de la Garza
I spent about two and a half hours in the car with Luke driving and I talked with him for a while about his mentality and where he sees himself. And it turns out that he sees himself as having a lot in common with the young people who are throwing soup at paintings in Europe. And he sees what he’s doing as like a startup themed radical climate provocation that he also thinks might make money.
Make Sunsets speakers
I’ve worked with PhDs before in previous roles, and, you know, I get what they do, they’re very challenged as far as they can Look very far into the future but at the end of the day when the rubber meets the road they need someone like me to actually take the risk. The scientists that created the Saturn V rocket didn’t go into space. It was some some monkey first right? We’re the monkey; we’re not even an astronaut.
Stephen Lacey
Throwing a few grams of SO2 in the atmosphere is not going to do anything for geoengineering. But it certainly suddenly takes these academic papers and this field that is mostly in the literature, and leaps it out into the real world. Do you think this will have a material impact on the geoengineering field?
Alejandro de la Garza
I don’t think they would necessarily call it an an art piece, but it certainly gets attention in the same way that that a piece of provocative protest does. I think it does have an effect. As small as it is, this is the first attempt. And, you know, reports just came out that a researcher in the UK has what amounts to another rogue geoengineering experiment this time, with a lot more instrumentation and perhaps you know, maybe they’re gonna get some kind of scientific findings from what he’s doing. But what Luke and Andrew did will always be the first one. Some kind of critical mass has been reached where two years ago, a strongly worded letter from indigenous groups and Greenpeace and other environmental organizations was enough to dissuade the researchers at the time from doing this kind of thing. In that case, he was doing some outdoor geoengineering experiments over Sweden. Now we have a combination of people and conditions where that doesn’t matter anymore. Like they’re going to do it anyway. So I think it’s a marker of the moment we’re in.
Stephen Lacey
Absolutely wild story, Alejandro. Thanks for telling it, and we appreciate you coming on to talk to us about it.
Alejandro de la Garza
Thanks for having me.
Stephen Lacey
Alejandro de La Garza is a staff writer at Time Magazine. We have a link to his story profiling Make Sunsets in the show notes. The field tape you heard and the story was collected by Alejandro, so thanks for that. And you also heard from Dr. Kevin Surprise of Mount Holyoke University and Dr. Holly Buck of the University of Buffalo. This episode was produced and written by Alexandria Herr. It is Alexandria is last episode. She is moving on to go work for Rewiring America. We’re gonna miss you, Alexandria. Thanks for all the great work you did on this show. Sean Marquand is our engineer. Original music came from Echo Finch and Blue Dot Sessions.
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