#SayNoToSolarGeo! Blocking the Sun Is NOT a Climate Solution!

Officially, there’s an international moratorium on attempts to block the sun, as well as a U.N. Environmental Modification Convention, but rogue “Greenfinger” billionaires like Bill Gates have continued their dangerous experiments. 

Since the Vietnam War’s Project Popeye scandal, the U.S. government has positioned the Pentagon’s weather modification work and DARPA funding as countering the potential “security threat” geoengineering posed.

Recently there’s been a shift. The U.S. has begun to normalize solar geoengineering as a “climate solution.” In 2021, the National Academies of Sciences issued a report calling for a $200 million 5-year investment in solar geoengineering research, and in 2023 President Biden released a solar radiation modification (SRM) framework, claiming that “SRM offers the possibility of cooling as the planet significantly on a timescale of a few years.” 

Around the same time, the European Union floated “a potential international framework” for solar geoengineering. 

Meanwhile, climate-profiteering corporations are lobbying for solar geoengineering to be included in the offset market being negotiated under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

What is solar geoengineering?

According to Dr. Chukwumerije Okereke, director of the Center for Climate Change and Development at Alex Ekwueme Federal University in Nigeria, in his New York Times essay, “My Continent Is Not Your Giant Climate Laboratory”:

The solar engineering technology attracting the most attention would use balloons or aircraft to spray large quantities of aerosols — tiny particles of, for example, sulfur dioxide or engineered nanoparticles — into the stratosphere to dim the sunlight. It’s called solar radiation management and it’s highly speculative. …

Other proposed techniques include covering deserts with plastic; genetically engineering plants to have brighter, more reflective leaves; creating or making clouds whiter; and deploying millions of mirrors in space. The point of all of them is to counter warming by reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the planet and reflecting it back to the stratosphere. …

These technologies would also theoretically need to be deployed essentially forever to keep warming at bay. Stopping would unleash the suppressed warming of the carbon dioxide still accumulating in the atmosphere in a temperature spike known as “termination shock.” One study found that the temperature change after ending solar radiation management could be up to four times as large as what’s being caused by climate change itself.

More than 450 academics from 61 countries around the world have signed an open letter calling for an International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering. They have five demands:

1. No public funding.
2. No outdoor experiments.
3. No patents.
4. No deployment.
5. No support in international institutions.

Over 100 international civil society organizations have denounced geoengineering and demanded an immediate stop to all open-air experiments in the Hands Off Mother Earth (HOME) Manifesto. Concerns they list include:

• Solar geoengineering as a weapon of war.
• Funding from the fossil fuel industry, which would like to use solar geoengineering as an excuse to continue with oil, gas and coal burning.
• Computer modeling that predicts solar geoengineering would change the behavior of the Asian and African monsoons, diverting the water that billions of people need to drink and to grow their food.

Solar geoengineering is a false solution that is delaying necessary reductions in energy consumption and distracting from the only tried-and-true way to draw down carbon.

Cuts should start at the Pentagon. The U.S. Department of Defense is the single largest institutional fossil fuel user in the world and emits more greenhouse gases than 140 nations combined.

Regenerative organic agriculture is the only tried-and-true way to remove excess greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere. It is a holistic approach with many benefits, including cleaner water, more-nutritious food, happier animals, healthier people and thriving local economies. Healthy soil soaks up and retains water, making crops more resilient to droughts and floods. Going organic ends reliance on pesticides, herbicides and synthetic fertilizers, and spares people the incalculable suffering these toxins cause.

By contrast, solar geoengineering does nothing about greenhouse gas pollution and has no environmental, health or economic benefits (aside from to the fossil fuel industry). Even if it did work to reduce global temperatures, which is unproven, it would do nothing to restore depleted sources of water for drinking and irrigation.

Solar geoengineering itself is a source of harmful pollution. Aerosolized toxins used in solar geoengineering include:

• Coal fly ash, which contains toxic levels of arsenic, lead, mercury, selenium, aluminum, barium, boron, and chlorine. The idea of using waste from the burning of coal or oil for solar geoengineering was first pitched by scientists funded by Citgo and Philips Petroleum who published “Weather Modification by Carbon Dust Absorption of Solar Energy” in 1976.
• Sulfuric acid, a carcinogen that can trigger a range of reactions from acute exposure, depending on the concentration. Cough and irritation occur at concentrations less than 8 ppm. At greater than 100 ppm, death can result.
• Hydrogen sulfide, which causes neurological symptoms such as fatigue, loss of appetite, headache, irritability, poor memory and dizziness at exposures greater than 28 milligrams per cubic meter, respiratory distress at exposures greater than 560 mg/m3 and death at exposures greater than 700 mg/m3.
• Carbonyl sulfide, which can result in profuse salivation, headache, vertigo, amnesia, confusion, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, cardiac arrhythmia, weakness, muscle cramps and unconsciousness at sublethal exposure and sudden collapse, convulsions, and death from respiratory paralysis at concentrations greater than 1000 ppm.
• Black carbon, which is a possible carcinogen that can cause cough, sputum production, bronchitis, pneumoconiosis, and decrease in lung function, as well as tiredness, chest pain, headache, respiratory irritation and discoloration of eyelids and conjunctivae.
• Aluminum, which has some evidence of carcinogenicity and can cause wheezing, dyspnea, and impaired lung function, pulmonary fibrosis, dilation and hypertrophy of the right side of the heart, decreased red blood cell hemoglobin, finger clubbing, lymphocytic alveolitis and blastic transformation of peripheral blood lymphocytes.
• Barium titanate, which is associated with respiratory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, musculoskeletal, metabolic and neurologic effects.

Few policy makers in the U.S. have tried to wrap their heads around this issue, but a group of Rhode Island state legislators have drafted a bill, the Atmosphere Protection Act. That bill is packed with information and reading it is like drinking from a firehose, but it’s a great start at the public education and action needed on this important issue.

TAKE ACTION: Tell your state legislators to say no to solar geoengineering!

Related Posts