Páll Gunnarsson is the founder of the Reykjavík Institute, an Icelandic policy organization focused on climate tipping point response. Before founding the institute, he spent over a year working on AMOC advocacy as an independent activist, a track that began when he realized no one in the Icelandic governance system was actually focused on the threat. He came to climate work after a career in software engineering.

Key topics

• (00:00) Enforced vulnerability and the moral argument against the moral hazard framing of climate interventions

• (02:35) Iceland’s National Security Council process and Páll’s New York Climate Week trip in late 2025

• (10:30) Why Iceland intuits AMOC risk: the Gulf Stream as cultural common knowledge and a governance system attuned to natural hazard preparedness

• (15:00) Iceland’s new government and the youngest cabinet acting fastest

• (22:30) The pattern Páll keeps finding himself repeating: assume someone is working on the problem, discover no one is, decide to do it yourself

• (37:00) Parallel timelines: why intervention capability research can’t wait for climate science to settle

• (44:00) Backs against the river: the moral hazard inside the moral hazard argument, and the case against using the vulnerable as motivation

• (50:19) Why multilateral SRM governance might be abandoned in favor of a coalition of the willing, and what’s coming at the September OceanEye pledging event in the EU

Notable quotes

“It’s actually fine if we overreact, but let’s react.” — Páll on Icelandic risk culture

“I have a need to be globally useful. And if I’m not working along those lines, then I become very uncomfortable.” — Páll on motivation

“It’s ethically problematic to say that we need the most vulnerable people to continue to be vulnerable in order to drive sufficient decarbonization ambition.” — Páll on the moral hazard argument

Links and resources

• Reykjavík Institute

• Páll Gunnarsson on LinkedIn

• The Iceland Minister for Environment, Energy and Climate / Johan Rockström op-ed (Iceland and Sweden, January 2026)

• Nordic Council of Ministers report: A Nordic Perspective on AMOC Tipping (February 2026)

• Páll’s SRM360 op-ed on enforced vulnerability

• EU OceanEye initiative (~€50M fund, announced March 2026; pledging event September 2026)

• Solar Geoengineering Research Governance Platform (SGRG)

This conversation is part of what I am trying to do at Inevitable & Obvious: track what is actually happening in climate stabilization at the policy and research level, not just the discourse level. Páll’s work is one of the clearer cases of a single national process opening real political space for the rest of the field, and we will be following the September OceanEye pledging event closely. Subscribe here for the full conversation, weekly episodes, and the writing that goes with them.

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This was the building where, on Tuesday, we hosted the first major public event dedicated to climate stabilization.

The event was called Stabilize Earth, organized with our friends at Devonian Systems as part of SF Climate Week. Over 350 people registered, and somewhere between 250 and 300 were in the room throughout the day. They were journalists, foundation leaders, policy people, climate tech founders, scientists, researchers, venture capitalists, and people looking to break into this space for the first time.

I've been arguing for months that climate stabilization deserves to be treated as a distinct field, the fourth pillar of climate response alongside mitigation, adaptation, and carbon removal. What's been thrilling in recent weeks is watching that framing take hold across the ecosystem independently, with organizations and researchers arriving at the same language on their own. Stabilize Earth was a chance to make it official.

I’ve been here before. In early 2018, before the IPCC had formally acknowledged that carbon removal was required, we held a conference called Reversapalooza. We stood up and said: carbon removal is needed, it’s possible, and here’s how we start building a field around it. At the time, “carbon removal” barely existed as a category. We didn’t have any sort of community of practice, let alone dedicated funding, or groups of people working in a way that could be called an “industry.” We helped change that.

Tuesday felt like the start of the same thing, but for a different and even more urgent set of challenges. The climate interventions field today faces many of the same obstacles carbon removal faced eight years ago: taboo, insufficient funding, the need for massive R&D, and an overwhelming sense of urgency. The night before the event, at a dinner for speakers, I said: I don’t know if you’ve all considered yourselves part of the same field, but I’m here to tell you that you are. You’re all working on things that stabilize Earth systems so we have a fighting chance with the slower solutions. So let’s draw a circle around this and acknowledge it.

The day opened with Phil Duffy, chief scientist at Spark Climate Solutions and the former climate science advisor to President Biden, who co-authored the 2023 White House report on solar radiation management. He was followed by Joshua Elliott, chief scientist at Renaissance Philanthropy, who laid out the state of tipping point risks and the energy imbalance problem with total clarity.

From there the day moved through panels, lightning talks, and conversations that covered an enormous range of work: from methane capture and destruction to rewilding the Arctic, to SAI and cloud thinning and weather modification, and of course, scalable carbon removal. The interventions panel, moderated by my partner in this work, Ben Lachman, brought together Dakota Gruener of Reflective, Ross Centers from the Planetary Sunshade Institute, Sasha Post from Outlier Projects, and Charlotte DeWald from the Arctic Stabilization Initiative, which essentially used this event to launch itself publicly.

We had lightning talks from Frost Methane Labs, Undercurrent, Spark Climate Solutions (on both atmospheric methane destruction and livestock enteric methane), Supercool Earth, Make Sunsets, Ocean Visions, OceanTherm, the Alaska Future Ecology Institute, Bright Ice Initiative, and more. Rob Jackson, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, presented on the state of greenhouse gas concentrations. On the carbon removal side, we heard from Isometric, CUR8, Mast Reforestation, GainForest, Rainbow Registry, and Devonian itself. Ryan Orbuch from Lowercarbon Capital, Ira Ehrenpreis from DBL Partners, and Johanna Wolfson from Azolla Ventures represented the investor perspective. And we closed the day with a fireside chat with Neal Stephenson, the author of Termination Shock, who joined virtually to discuss the cultural and imaginative dimensions of climate interventions.

But my favorite part of the day was seeing how excited everyone was in their lunch conversations. The tables were packed and the conversations were loud, with the room just buzzing. People from all sorts of backgrounds and experiences were talking with others who were experts in various domains of stabilization. I had the palpable sense that people had been waiting for this room to exist.

I recognize that feeling because I felt it at Reversapalooza. It’s the feeling of people discovering they’re not alone, and that the thing they’ve been working on in relative isolation is part of something larger that’s starting to take shape.

I said in my closing remarks that I see two priorities for the climate stabilization field right now. First, we need to grow the field itself, which means more people, more organizations, more coordination, and more visibility. Second, we need dramatically more philanthropic capital flowing into this space. We’re currently operating on the scale of tens of millions of dollars. We need hundreds of millions, and eventually governments need to be directing billions toward large-scale climate interventions.

We recorded the entire day, and I’ll be sharing videos as soon as they’re back from editing. In the meantime, you can see the full agenda and speaker lineup at stabilize.earth.

This was the first Stabilize Earth, and it won’t be the last. The field is just getting started, and I will have a lot more to say about what I’ve been working on behind the scenes to support it very soon.

I hope to see you at the next one!

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Coincidentally, on the same day that the DSG article went live, Heatmap News reported that Microsoft is pausing future carbon removal purchases. If you’re a CDR veteran like me, then your LinkedIn feed since then has been nonstop wall-to-wall think pieces about what this means for the CDR industry. And I get why! Microsoft was responsible for 90% of all CDR purchases worldwide last year. But I thought I’d share a different angle on this. Because the timing of these two articles tells you something about what carbon removal’s actual problem is, and it isn’t a lack of governance.

In 2018, my co-founders and I at Nori held a conference called Reversapalooza. The whole purpose was to convince people that pulling carbon out of the atmosphere was possible and necessary, that decarbonization alone was like slamming the brakes on a car hurtling toward a cliff when in fact you also need to turn the car around in time. We had to make that case because almost nobody in climate wanted to hear it. Carbon removal was widely seen as a dangerous distraction, a moral hazard that would let emitters off the hook. Getting investors and researchers and policymakers to take it seriously required years of work from a small community of people who believed the math was already pointing at the inescapable need to remove atmospheric greenhouse gases.

So when I read the governance-deficit version of CDR’s history, I’m reading something that doesn’t match what I lived through across nearly a decade of building this industry. And because that narrative is now shaping how people think about cooling interventions, I want to share what it looked like to me from the inside.

The legitimate governance concerns

First I want to acknowledge that I do see two fairly legitimate governance concerns in CDR’s history. The first is the Russ George ocean iron fertilization (OIF) incident in 2012, which raised real questions about oversight for open-system interventions in complex environments like the ocean. When dealing with such complex systems, there very likely needs to be more robust governance around that, or at the very least serious consideration of what the consequences would be if something goes wrong. In this case, the consequences were much more political than ecological, but the damage to the field was real.

The second is the moral hazard concern about assuming future carbon removal in climate models. Baking CDR into 1.5°C pathways before the technology existed at scale does create a risk that present-day emissions budgets are built on promises nobody can keep. Given that we are effectively in 1.5 overshoot now, that is plausible, and I take that challenge seriously.

But the governance-deficit reading of what happened after 2018 gets the story backwards in ways that matter for the conclusions being drawn.

What the IPCC moment actually was

From inside the nascent carbon removal community, the IPCC’s 2018 special report on 1.5°C looked very different than the governance-deficit narrative describes. Before that report, carbon removal was treated almost exclusively as moral hazard, a dangerous distraction from the “real work” of cutting emissions. Researchers who worked on it faced professional risk. Entrepreneurs who tried to build companies around it couldn’t get investors to take them seriously. The field existed, but barely, and under a cloud of suspicion.

The IPCC report changed that by establishing, through the most authoritative scientific process we have, that limiting warming to 1.5°C would require removing carbon from the atmosphere at scale. That conclusion went through the full gauntlet of IPCC review, and it told investors, governments, and entrepreneurs that carbon removal was a legitimate problem to work on.

Without that legitimization, the carbon removal industry as we know it wouldn’t exist. There would be no wave of venture investment, no corporate advance market commitments like Frontier, no Microsoft pledge to go carbon negative, no federal programs funding direct air capture hubs, and no ecosystem of startups and researchers and standards bodies learning in real time how to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and prove that they did it. We’d still just have ongoing academic discussions about whether we should be allowed to try.

Robert Höglund recently reframed CDR’s current phase as being about “proving and learning” rather than rapid scale. I truly wish we had rapidly scaled the industry around the fastest and cheapest methods of removal, but that’s not what happened. And since we don’t have any clear plan on how to pay for the trillion tonnes of CO2 that need to be removed, that framing is probably the most honest description of where we are: build the industry know-how and capability now so that as financial mechanisms hopefully develop over time, we’re ready to grow when the moment comes. The value of the CDR industry right now can’t be measured primarily in tonnes removed. It has to be measured in the knowledge being generated. We continue to learn which methods work best, how to measure what we’ve removed, what financing mechanisms can sustain the work, how to engage communities, and how to drive down costs.

If the implication of the governance-deficit narrative is that this process of proving and learning should have waited for more governance infrastructure before being allowed to develop, then I’d ask what, specifically, we should have been waiting for. We can’t skip that learning phase. We can’t wait until 2040 and then decide to build an industry from scratch. It will take time to march down cost curves and uncover the unknown hurdles that invariably arise when moving from the lab to the field. Every year of development compounds, and every year of delay is a year we don’t get back.

What actually happened inside CDR

The crux of the governance-deficit narrative rests on an implication that private actors outpaced oversight, leading to verification problems and erosion of trust. It invokes the structural incentive pressures of voluntary frameworks in which verifiers are paid by project developers, and suggests this produced the appearance of oversight rather than real accountability.

Those concerns are real, but in the carbon avoidance offset market, not in carbon removal. The scandals that most people associate with carbon credits (e.g. the Verra/REDD+ collapse, the South Pole implosion, and the ProPublica investigation into phantom credits from forest protection projects) were all about carbon avoidance, where you’re trying to prove that emissions would have occurred in a counterfactual scenario. That’s where the overcrediting happened, because the counterfactuals were inherently unfalsifiable and the incentives to be generous were strong.

Carbon removal credits represent a fundamentally different kind of claim. When Climeworks captures CO2 from ambient air and injects it into basalt in Iceland, the CO2 captured can be measured by a physical process. When a biochar company pyrolyzes biomass and applies the char to soil, the carbon content is testable. The measurement challenges in CDR are real (e.g. enhanced rock weathering relies partly on modeling, ocean alkalinity enhancement also relies on modeling and involves complex systems) but the failure mode is uncertainty, not fraud. I’m not aware of a single documented case of a carbon removal company fabricating or deliberately inflating its removal claims. The closest anyone has found is a methodological disagreement about how Climeworks amortizes embodied emissions in its credit accounting, and a 2009 biochar investment fraud that had nothing to do with CDR claims themselves. And methodological disagreement is actually healthy for iterating towards a better overall monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) ecosystem.

The culture inside the carbon removal industry has been the opposite of what the governance-deficit narrative implies. When we were designing Nori’s verification system, we spent months wrestling with the verifier incentive problem, which is the exact concern raised in DSG’s article. We wanted buyers to fund verification, because they’re the ones who benefit from knowing a credit is real. In practice, we couldn’t make that work for our initial market. We were doing soil carbon with farmers in the US, and verification costs ran $4,000 to $5,000 per project. We used a third-party system built on a US government-funded public model called DayCent for the actual measurement (I’m not running Nori anymore, so I don’t have a lawyer in my ear saying “it’s not measurement, it’s estimation!”), with simple audits on top. Our long-term vision, which we described in Nori’s white paper (found here), was to make verification as transparent and replicable as possible, essentially open-source, so that anyone could inspect and duplicate the process the way scientific results are supposed to be reproducible.

We weren’t unique in this. The entire CDR industry has been obsessively focused on proving that its removals are real. If anything, the industry has over-indexed on measurement precision in ways that structurally limit growth and chew up valuable human and financial capital. But fraud, corner-cutting, and deliberately inflated claims? That hasn’t been the CDR industry’s failure mode.

And the timeline doesn’t add up, because the Russ George incident happened in 2012, long before the CDR industry really started to grow. I didn’t enter the space until 2015, and Nori was founded in 2017. The IPCC report came out in 2018. These were different eras and largely different communities. The CDR industry, as far as I could tell, wasn’t even really aware of the Russ George ocean iron experiment, and we focused on building rigorous verification systems anyway, because if your removal claims don’t hold up, your business is dead. We genuinely wanted to solve climate change, which means you need real removals, not paper ones. And the practical realities of working with farmers and buyers and regulators forced rigor on us anyway. The governance-deficit narrative implies a reckless industry that ignored warning signs. What actually happened is that the work itself produced the rigor.

The governance-deficit narrative treats ocean iron fertilization as representative of carbon removal broadly, but OIF is a specific approach with specific risks around ecological disruption, unpredictable nutrient cycling, and uncertain permanence in a complex ocean system. Those risks legitimately warrant careful research governance before large-scale deployment, and they resemble the kinds of risks that a deployment of stratospheric aerosol injection would carry. But the bulk of the CDR industry works in domains where the risks are fundamentally different. Direct air capture doesn’t disrupt ecosystems, nor does enhanced rock weathering trigger cascading biological effects. Soil carbon sequestration doesn’t carry planetary-scale risks. The governance challenges for these approaches rest on measurement accuracy, science, and market design, not on intervening in complex natural systems with unpredictable consequences. Generalizing from OIF to all of carbon removal, and then from all of carbon removal to SAI, compresses distinctions that actually matter.

The real problem

Microsoft has been, by every measure, the carbon removal industry’s anchor buyer, responsible for 90% of all purchases last year, with 45 million tonnes contracted in total. The next-largest buyer, the Frontier coalition led by Stripe, has purchased 1.8 million tonnes. When a single company accounts for that much of an entire market’s demand, you don’t have a market so much as a dependency, and the company on which everything depends just stepped back.

I wrote about this structural fragility a year ago in “Carbon Removal’s Wrong Turn.” The industry designed itself as a monopsony (i.e. a market dominated by a single buyer class) and then built an elaborate supply-side infrastructure of standards, registries, and verification protocols to serve that buyer class. Corporate sustainability departments with limited budgets and high risk aversion became the target customer. The result was a system that prioritized credit quality and measurement precision over atmospheric impact and scaling, because that’s what those buyers needed to protect their reputations.

Carbon removal doesn’t lack governance. If anything, it is drowning in it. Registries like Puro and Isometric certify projects as having actually removed CO2 and issue the credits. Ratings agencies like Sylvera, BeZero, and Calyx Global provide ratings on both projects and measurement methodologies. For a while in the first half of the 2020s, it felt like everyone in climate tech wanted to start an MRV company. The industry has built more accountability infrastructure than almost any nascent sector I can think of, and the result hasn’t been trust and order. It’s been confusion and fragmentation that makes it even harder for new buyers to enter the market, because nobody can tell which standard to trust or which rating to believe.

And the costs to support this measurement and verification ecosystem are high on both sides! CDR providers have to fill out lengthy, detailed applications for every ratings agency and registry they want to work with, and though the content is essentially the same, every organization uses a different format, so companies end up burning enormous amounts of time on what is basically bureaucratic red tape instead of removing carbon. On the buyer side, offtake contracts have grown extraordinarily complex as every conceivable risk factor and reversal scenario gets incorporated into the legal frameworks, creating yet another barrier to participation for anyone who isn’t a major tech company with dedicated legal teams.

People inside the industry have been wrestling with these structural problems from the very beginning. At Nori, we tried to sidestep some of this complexity by only selling ex-post credits—carbon dioxide that had already been removed—backed by a warranty, rather than trying to build the entire apparatus of forward contracting and risk allocation that made other models so cumbersome. Other teams took different approaches. The governance challenges this narrative describes weren’t being ignored by an industry racing ahead recklessly. They were being actively worked on by founders and researchers navigating an impossibly difficult environment, building companies through a pandemic, inflation and interest rate increases, regulatory whiplash, and a market that isn’t really a market, while simultaneously trying to invent the measurement, verification, and market infrastructure that the field needed to function.

Meanwhile, the actual question of who pays for gigatonne-scale carbon removal beyond a handful of tech companies’ sustainability budgets has never been answered. That’s the problem we saw when we started Nori. We tried to build the financial infrastructure that made it as easy as possible for people to pay for carbon removal, initially through crypto-based mechanisms that could create broader market participation. Regulatory and practical barriers kept us from executing that vision, but we understood from the beginning that the supply side without the demand side was going to produce exactly the crisis the industry is now experiencing.

None of this is to say that the people building standards and verification infrastructure were wrong to do so. My whole argument here is that it’s a good thing that the CDR industry cared about getting verification right! The problem for the industry, though, is structural, not individual, and it’s not about missing governance. The system oriented itself around a tiny buyer class and optimized for their needs, and the result is an industry that's incredibly good at proving what it removes but isn’t sure about where to go from here.

What this means for the conversation ahead

I share the concern about private actors moving ahead of governance in the sunlight reflection space. I’ve written about the structural problems of venture-backed companies developing proprietary intellectual property for planetary-scale interventions, and I pushed back on the notion of acting now without accounting for bigger risks in a recent podcast conversation with Luke Iseman of Make Sunsets. I want robust governance for cooling technologies. I want it to be fair and inclusive and oriented toward managing real risks.

But I also want governance that prepares us for decisions we will need to make, not governance that substitutes for making them. And I want something CDR has not yet built: the operational capacity to actually scale up when the time comes.

Governance frameworks for something like stratospheric aerosol injection aren’t just about deciding whether and when to deploy. They need to address how we build international monitoring infrastructure, how we coordinate deployment logistics across nations, and how we will manage a program that will need to run for decades or centuries. The governance question and the operational question are inseparable. If funders and policymakers look at CDR and conclude that the main lesson is to build governance infrastructure before doing anything else, they risk repeating exactly what CDR did, building elaborate process while leaving the harder questions of financing, operational capacity, and practical readiness unanswered. The climate stabilization field doesn’t need to repeat that pattern, spending years building governance process while the operational capacity to actually do the work goes unbuilt. We need both to happen simultaneously.

This and every other article I publish is free because I want these ideas to reach as many people as possible. Paid subscriptions are how I keep doing this work independently. They allow me to follow the research on climate interventions and meet the researchers, practitioners, founders, and policymakers shaping how this landscape evolves.

Paid members get access to our community chat, where we discuss the latest developments in climate interventions and make sense of them together. I’m sharing all the really interesting videos, papers, stories, and other links I’m coming across in there. If you’ve found value in this newsletter, I’d appreciate your support.

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In this conversation, he walks through what those private meetings actually sounded like, why a landmark UN event was killed by COVID days before launch, how a Pakistani minister's first question revealed what actually drives national policy, and why the biggest gap right now isn't research or technology but the societal conversations that still aren't happening.

Chapter Timestamps

• [00:00] Opening: “We can’t talk about this publicly” — what Janos heard behind closed doors

• [02:21] What was C2G, and what does “governance” actually mean?

• [06:59] Breaking down SRM governance into manageable pieces — research, decision-making, and the question of what happens if the answer is no

• [11:44] The case against unilateral deployment — counter-geoengineering and the IPCC’s warning

• [19:13] “What planet are you coming from?” — how reception shifted from bewilderment to engagement

• [23:51] The Belgium UN event that COVID killed, and what it would have meant

• [29:19] Why politicians are afraid to go beyond the 1.5°C frame

• [35:02] How countries actually develop positions — the multi-layered feedback loops behind government policy

• [41:47] “What do Pakistani scientists say?” — the global south, Degrees Initiative, and building local capacity

• [47:57] What C2G learned about trust, impartiality, and opening doors

• [53:12] The biggest gap right now: societal conversations that aren’t happening

• [56:33] What keeps Janos awake — geopolitics, bandwidth, and the timing problem

• [1:01:42] If C2G were active today, what would it do differently?

Links and Resources

• Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative (C2G): c2g2.net

If this kind of inside view conversation where we talk about how governance actually works, what's happening behind closed doors, and what isn't, then subscribe at inevitableandobvious.com. Every episode brings you into a direct conversation with the people navigating the hardest questions in climate intervention. Next up: we're continuing to build this picture of the emerging ecosystem with more voices you won't hear anywhere else.

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A week or so ago my mom, who lives in Phoenix, told me the forecasted high temperature was 105 degrees, while it was still technically winter. I grew up there, and that absolutely smashes the record for the earliest hundred-degree day the city has ever seen. When I describe the the latest book on climate risks that I’m reading to my girlfriend, I can see the discomfort settle across her face in real-time. From AMOC weakening in the next decade or two, to coral reefs already crossing tipping points, to the cascading feedbacks that could start slipping beyond our ability to respond, this is indeed kind of overwhelming to think about! It all melts into this fog of compounding bad news where everything destabilizing blurs together and it becomes hard to feel anything other than paralyzed.

I’ve written a lot about that dread and the specific risks behind it. I’ve argued that carbon removal won’t scale fast enough, that a narrative vacuum around cooling interventions is being filled by conspiracy theorists, and that we need a climate stabilization framework to make sense of the full range of interventions that could keep Earth systems from crossing points of no return. If you’re new to this newsletter, those links will catch you up.

What I want to add to that picture is that I think the climate stabilization field’s approach to public engagement is missing a dimension. The work I’ve been doing on permission space is real and important, especially among the funders and policymakers who control the resources this work needs. But permission is not sufficient on its own. We also have an imagination problem, and I don’t think enough of us are taking it seriously.

When people in this field talk publicly about climate interventions, the most positive it ever gets is “this is a grim necessity." The most optimistic framing available is something like: these tools are terrifying, but if we’re careful and we build the right governance, they might be less terrifying than the alternative. I’ve more or less said the same thing myself, and it’s at least correct on the facts. But I’ve started to think it’s insufficient for what we actually need, which is sustained democratic support for some of the most expensive and ambitious engineering projects in human history. We need the kind of support that doesn’t evaporate the first time a political coalition shifts or a budget fight gets ugly.

It’s a bit cliche, but I want to draw a comparison to the Apollo program. Some people might assume the Moon landings were carried along by a wave of popular enthusiasm, but that’s a myth. The Harris Poll surveyed Americans throughout the 1960s, and a majority never thought Apollo was worth the cost. In 1967, 54% said the four billion dollar price tag wasn’t justified. 57% would have rather spent the money on water desalinization. When asked in the same year whether they’d support the program if the Russians weren’t in space, 61% said no. Apollo ran on Cold War geopolitics, not democratic enthusiasm.

And yet the cultural penetration of the space age was real and enormous. Ninety-three percent of American households watched the Apollo 11 landing. Fashion designers like André Courrèges, Paco Rabanne and Rudi Gernreich built entire fashion lines around space-age aesthetics. Star Trek, The Jetsons, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and all sorts of science fiction that imagined humanity reaching for the stars were all published then. People thought space was cool even while telling pollsters they’d rather spend the money on something else. The imagination and the poll numbers operated somewhat independently of each other.

What does that mean for climate interventions? It means we can’t rely on a geopolitical forcing function like the Cold War to carry the politics. There is no Soviet Union in this race. Which means the cultural imagination piece might matter even more than it did for Apollo, because without that captivation, without people being able to see a future they actually want to live in, the political will for sustained, expensive, multi-decade engineering programs is going to be incredibly fragile. And yes, I understand how ridiculous it sounds to talk about sustained international cooperation and multi-decade political commitment in this particular political moment. And yet we still have to figure out how to do it, because the physics doesn’t care about our election cycles.

I believe that the things we are going to have to build to stabilize this planet are some of the most extraordinary engineering challenges in human history, and almost nobody is talking about them that way.

I mean, just look at glacier and ice sheet stabilization. I’ve written about the blurry line between adaptation and geoengineering before, and ice is where that distinction breaks down most obviously. The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, which glaciologists call the Doomsday Glacier because its collapse could eventually raise sea levels by over two feet on its own(!), is grounded on bedrock below sea level in a configuration that makes it inherently unstable as warm water eats away at the grounding line. Proposals to intervene involve building structures on the seafloor in some of the most hostile conditions on Earth. We’re talking about working at depth, in near-freezing water, under ice shelves, deploying a massive underwater civil engineering project to redirect warm ocean currents in the most environmentally harsh location on the planet. And this kind of thing isn’t purely hypothetical anymore, at least in the Arctic north. Groups like Real Ice are building autonomous underwater drones designed to help refreeze Arctic sea ice, and Arctic Reflections is running experiments pumping seawater onto existing ice to thicken it. These are early-stage efforts, but they’re real hardware being tested in real conditions. The engineering challenges are immense and they’re also, honestly, really cool.

Or let’s look at coral reef protection. The Australian Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program is already testing marine cloud brightening as a shading mechanism for the Great Barrier Reef, trying to figure out whether you can generate enough localized cooling to reduce bleaching stress during heat events. Other researchers at Undercurrent are experimenting with nanobubble cooling. Groups are designing physical shading structures. This is an entirely new category of ecosystem engineering, and it’s happening now because the reefs can’t wait for emissions reductions to save them, the thermal stress is already here. Scaling any of these approaches means inventing monitoring systems and deployment methods and feedback loops that don’t exist yet, combining atmospheric science and marine biology and engineering into something nobody has a name for.

And then there are the ideas that were literally science fiction. These are space-based sunshades, reflectors positioned in orbit to deflect a fraction of incoming sunlight before it reaches the atmosphere. Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov wrote about solar sails and orbital construction, not because they were imagining climate interventions (nobody was worried about warming in the 1950s) but because they understood that humanity’s relationship with space would eventually become an engineering relationship, not just an exploratory one. The Planetary Sunshade Foundation is working on this today. And one of the things that makes it so fascinating is the mass problem: you very likely can’t launch enough material from Earth to build reflectors at the scale that would matter (too expensive), which means you’d need to harvest aluminum and silicon from the Moon and manufacture components in space. As someone who has read most of Clarke and Heinlein and who devoured The Expanse series, I find it genuinely remarkable that some version of the industrial space economy those authors imagined might become necessary in my lifetime not as exploration or commerce but as planetary self-defense.

And for anyone reading this who thinks that sounds ludicrous and impossibly far from where we are today: we went from basic machine learning algorithms to a serious global debate about whether we’ve achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI) in roughly a decade. Things move fast. Exponential technological growth is not a metaphor anymore, it’s the actual trajectory we’re on, and the exponential part is really starting to kick in.

I should explain why I look at all of this and feel what I feel, because I realize that looking at a list of planetary emergencies and getting excited is not the default response. I grew up building computers with my dad, spent my teenage years reading Heinlein and Clarke and Crichton and watching Star Trek and Stargate SG-1. I built a Hackintosh (a desktop PC running a hacked version of Mac OS X) when I was sixteen and felt like I’d unlocked something fundamental about what was possible if you were willing to just figure things out. I’m an engineer at heart. When I look at the portfolio of interventions we’re going to need to stabilize the climate system, I feel something I wouldn’t expect to feel after years of staring at increasingly alarming data: I feel excited. The problems are enormous and the things we're going to have to build to address them are correspondingly wild. I think it matters that some of us feel that way and say so.

The field right now is so worried about triggering moral hazard objections that it has overcorrected into a posture where the only acceptable register is solemnity and reluctance. I even find myself doing this too. And the crazy thing is, most of us working in this space don't actually think the moral hazard concern is a strong enough reason not to pursue the research. The risks of inaction are far worse than the risks of someone misusing cooling as an excuse to keep polluting. But we still talk about it like we're apologizing for being in the room. The result is that we've collectively made it very difficult to generate enthusiasm about the work, and in doing so we've cut ourselves off from one of the most powerful forces available for building the kind of broad, durable public support that these projects are actually going to require.

And this is not techno-optimism in the lazy sense. It drives me a little bit crazy when people like Sam Altman wave their hands about how artificial superintelligence will solve climate change. Bits are not atoms. You cannot prompt-engineer your way to a glacier stabilization system. We have to actually build these things, in the real world, with real materials and real institutions and real international cooperation. The physical infrastructure for climate stabilization is going to require the kind of sustained collective effort that software startups have never had to contemplate. To paraphrase Stewart Brand, we are the planetary stewards now, whether we feel ready for it or not, and we can’t hand that responsibility off to an AI model and go get coffee.

But I am saying that we are capable of building enormously complicated things when we decide to, and that the challenges of climate stabilization represent an opportunity to rebuild something we’ve lost. People want to trust their institutions. People want to believe that large-scale collective action is possible. The cynicism of the current moment is real, but underneath it there’s a hunger for something worth doing together, something that matters, something where the engineering and the governance and the international coordination are all hard problems that we get to solve because solving them literally saves lives. When I get asked “how do you keep working on this?” the honest answer is that I love solving problems, and I can’t imagine a bigger or more interesting set of problems than figuring out how humanity stabilizes its own climate system. That includes the social and political challenges too. How do we build governance for planetary-scale interventions? How do we get institutional buy-in across countries with fundamentally different interests? Those are fascinating problems. Hard, yes. But fascinating!

We’re the generation that gets to attempt these things. I don’t know yet whether we’ll succeed, but I know that treating the attempt only as a grim obligation, and never allowing ourselves or anyone else to notice that it’s also one of the most extraordinary collective endeavors humans have ever undertaken, seems like a mistake we can’t afford. More of us should be willing to say, out loud, that this work is amazing, and the world is going to need to hear that if we’re actually going to build any of it.

This and every other article I publish is free because I want these ideas to reach as many people as possible. Paid subscriptions are how I keep doing this work independently. They allow me to follow the research on climate interventions and meet the researchers, practitioners, founders, and policymakers shaping how this landscape evolves.

Paid members get access to our community chat, where we discuss the latest developments in climate interventions and make sense of them together. I’m sharing all the really interesting videos, papers, stories, and other links I’m coming across in there. If you’ve found value in this newsletter, I’d appreciate your support.

Subscribe now

Make Sunsets is maybe the most polarizing company in climate interventions right now, and I wanted to have Luke on the show so we could learn more about how they think and what their goals are. We discussed the question that if we assuming cooling the planet is necessary (and we both believe it is), does that justify acting without institutional permission? We get into the energy math on carbon removal, the governance question, and a wealthy customer who may be planning to personally fund enough deployment to measurably cool the planet.

Chapter Timestamps

• 01:22 — What Make Sunsets actually does and how cooling credits work

• 05:07 — The energy math against carbon removal: why CDR needs 20x global energy production

• 07:00 — Luke’s vision for 2100: nuclear energy, 10x global prosperity, and table stakes

• 10:50 — “We’ve been geoengineering since the industrial revolution”

• 15:11 — Theory of change, the wealthy customer revelation, and “are you going to stop me?”

• 19:40 — Deployment risks: monsoon disruption, weaponization, and the Pentagon’s response

• 25:27 — Luke’s critique of governance approaches being taken today

• 30:29 — The smallpox analogy: does innovation precede or follow institutions?

• 38:36 — What success looks like for Make Sunsets in 10 years (0.1°C measurable cooling)

• 47:39 — The Mexico ban that wasn’t, and why getting the facts right matters

• 53:19 — What the field needs: “bold action” vs. “analysis and meetings”

• 55:07 — Paul’s post-interview reflection: where he agrees and where he doesn’t

Notable Quotes

1. “Are you going to stop me? And unless someone is going to do that... the cat’s out of the bag. Anyone can do this.” — Luke Iseman

2. “Unless you are breaking the law to build nuclear reactors, I don’t want to hear about CDR from anyone proposing it as a serious climate solution.” — Luke Iseman

3. “People are obsessed with developing governance for something for which there’s no demand. You govern things for which there is demand.” — Luke Iseman, quoting a friend

4. “I have a lot more respect now for the institutions that govern things that can help make decisions, the social license and legitimacy that comes from working through much more traditional systems.” — Paul Gambill (post-interview)

5. “Every day that we wait to do solar geoengineering is needless lives lost, species extincted, and tipping points flirted with.” — Luke Iseman

Links and Resources

• Make Sunsets: Luke’s company, where you can buy cooling credits

• Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson: the novel that inspired Luke to start Make Sunsets

• “Why Countries Aren’t Ready for Climate Interventions Yet” (Inevitable & Obvious)

This and every episode I publish is free because I want these conversations to reach as many people as possible. Paid subscriptions are how I keep doing this work independently. They allow me to follow the research on climate interventions and meet the researchers, practitioners, founders, and policymakers shaping how this landscape evolves. Paid members get access to our community chat, where we discuss the latest developments in climate interventions and make sense of them together. If you found this conversation valuable, I’d appreciate your support.

Subscribe now

Summary

Stratospheric aerosol injection might be one of the only interventions that could reduce global warming on the timescales that actually matter, but we don’t yet know enough to say if it’s completely worth the potential tradeoffs, and we’re not on track to find out in time. Dakota Gruener is the founder and CEO of Reflective, an independent nonprofit trying to change that by radically accelerating the research. In this conversation, we talk about what it would take to actually evaluate SAI:

• The tools Reflective has built to map the unknowns

• The case for something like clinical trials for the atmosphere

• Why Dakota thinks the worst outcome isn’t deployment but decisions being forced before the science is ready.

Chapter Timestamps

0:00 – Cold open: what happens when people first learn about climate intervention

0:15 – Introduction and why Dakota was the first guest

1:15 – What is Reflective? Dakota’s path from vaccines to climate

4:26 – SAI research: fast enough to matter

5:31 – What would the decision room actually look like?

7:00 – We don’t even have a shared map of the questions

8:41 – Why AI is accelerating and climate intervention isn’t

11:23 – Responding to critics: should this research be happening?

13:00 – The moral hazard argument and what focus groups actually show

15:25 – The SAI Simulator: what it does and who it’s for

17:32 – Live demo: walking through the simulator

22:09 – Risks are scenario-dependent, not inherent

23:48 – How journalists, policymakers, and researchers are using the tools

25:43 – Digital infrastructure barriers and Global South access

28:10 – The Degrees Forum in Cape Town: researchers whooping and hollering

29:39 – The Uncertainty Database: building a shared map for SAI research

33:16 – The scenario: outdoor experiments, slow ramp-up, 2035 timeline

37:16 – Aerosol size distribution: the factor-of-two problem

40:58 – Who is the Uncertainty Database for? Researchers and funders

43:12 – How much does funding shape the research agenda?

45:53 – Bottlenecks: money, outdoor experiments, and the dangerous middle

49:02 – Clinical trials for the atmosphere: stage-gated research

50:45 – The slippery slope and faith in institutions

53:12 – What’s coming next at Reflective: ML emulators and the cloud hub

Links and Resources

• Reflective — reflective.org

• Reflective SAI Simulator — simulator.reflective.org

• Reflective Uncertainty Database — uncertainties.reflective.org

This and every episode I publish is free because I want these conversations to reach as many people as possible. Paid subscriptions are how I keep doing this work independently. They allow me to follow the research on climate interventions and meet the researchers, practitioners, founders, and policymakers shaping how this landscape evolves. Paid members get access to our community chat, where we discuss the latest developments in climate interventions and make sense of them together. If you found this conversation valuable, I'd appreciate your support.

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I was reading Molly McKew’s Great Power Substack yesterday morning—her series on what she calls “wars of incidental liberation”—and I started weeping at my kitchen table.

McKew was writing about American power, the wars in Iran and Venezuela, and how this administration has debased the country's greatest achievement: the 20th-century codification of human rights and freedom in international law. But the part that broke me was her writing about what's been lost more broadly. I want to quote her at length because she said it so perfectly:

While there are plenty of times in history when our language of liberation to justify foreign intervention fell short of its goals or was really just reflexive geopolitics, the embrace of the cynicism — “At least Trump is honest that it’s all bullshit and we never cared at all” — is a reflection of our eroding belief in the founding ideas of our republic. It is a reflection of the exceptionally poor leadership that currently fills the ranks of public and private posts on America, in elected and appointed office, in institutions of education and civic life, in posts of moral, financial, corporate, and scientific authority. No one can be bothered to convince anyone of anything. Polls are designed to capture the laziest and most detached definition of citizen responsibility, and our leaders rely on them to absolve themselves of doing anything hard. The metrics by which we judge our lives are wrong, and the money is rewarded to those who stand for nothing and are the least willing to give any consideration to the people around them.

The generosity of spirit that once defined our nation — generosity of shared freedom, generosity of opportunity, generosity of possibility, generosity of common aspiration — is tangibly absent now, a dream that was so desperate and sweet that you did not want to wake from it and reach out your sleepy fingers to brush the wisps as they dispel.

I talk about this absence of any real leadership anywhere in our society all the time with friends. There is this palpable sense that corruption and grift and incompetence are rewarded while genuine conviction is punished. But McKew put it so beautifully that it cut through all my intellectual defenses and just hit me in the chest. And it resonated with me on why working on climate stabilization feels so urgent and so difficult at the same time: the kind of leadership we need—the kind that makes an affirmative case for doing something ambitious and hard—is exactly the kind that our culture has stopped producing.

Martin Gurri published a book in 2014 called The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority, whose central argument keeps proving itself right. The digital age, he argued, has given rise to populist movements that are extraordinarily good at tearing things down but almost entirely incapable of building anything in their place. Gurri calls this negation—the capacity for destruction and opposition without any corresponding capacity for construction. The information environment practically guarantees it. Outrage is the native language of social media, and tearing something down in 280 characters will always be easier than building a coalition around a complicated, uncertain idea. So the culture gets very good at one thing and loses the capacity for the other.

What I notice is that even the writers and thinkers I admire who push back against this, who advocate for building and creation and ambition, often do so with a layer of snark or irony or darkness over everything. There’s almost no space in our current cultural moment to take a courageous stand with sincerity, without the protective coating of cynicism. Being earnest about something you believe in makes you a target. Being above it all keeps you safe. So even the builders hedge, and the muscle for making a genuine, exposed, generous case for something keeps weakening from disuse.

That’s what McKew was doing in that passage, and that’s why it made me tear up. She was being sincere about ideals in a media landscape that rewards cynicism. She was making an affirmative case for what America should mean, with real emotional investment, knowing it would be easier and safer to just be angry. Encountering that felt like finding water in a desert.

I’ve always loved history, and I think this is part of the reason. I’m drawn to Lincoln during the Civil War, Washington during the Revolution, and Eisenhower managing the impossible complexity of D-Day and the Allied command. These are leaders who operated in circumstances where good outcomes looked unlikely and who chose to make the case for something larger than themselves anyway. What they shared was a willingness to articulate a vision of what could be and then do the grinding, unglamorous work of convincing others it was worth pursuing.

The speech that defined the American civil rights movement wasn’t a negation. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t get up and catalogue injustices, though we know he had the material. MLK’s “I have a dream” speech made the affirmative case for what America could become, and it was so powerful that it reorganized the entire moral landscape of the country. He did this while facing a level of hostility that makes our current discourse look gentle, and he still led with vision rather than grievance. That’s what generosity of spirit looks like when it’s applied to the hardest problems. It’s the belief that your fellow citizens are capable of being moved, and that a case made with conviction can actually change what’s possible, even when everything around you suggests otherwise.

I rewatch Band of Brothers most years around D-Day, the HBO miniseries based on Stephen Ambrose’s history of Easy Company, who fought from Normandy to the end of the war. What strikes me every time is the sheer weight of what was required to win that war and the kinds of things that ordinary people had to do and endure, day after day, to get through it. I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation, on the total competence porn of Captain Picard and his crew solving thorny problems through intelligence and integrity. I’ve seen The Lord of the Rings I don’t even know how many times, and one of the many scenes that always gets me is Sam’s speech to Frodo in Osgiliath, when everything is falling apart and there’s no reason to keep going and Sam tries to explain why they can’t give up. “Because there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”

I know these are fictions, or in the case of Band of Brothers a dramatization of real history, but they reveal what we ought to value. And in every case, the thing that resonates is the affirmative vision of something that is worth building, worth protecting, and worth the cost.

The reason I’m writing about all of this in a newsletter about climate interventions is that this is the central problem. All of this <flails hands about> requires the thing that’s disappearing.

Climate stabilization—the project of humanity actively intervening to preserve livable conditions while we scale decarbonization and carbon removal—is maybe the most ambitious affirmative project ever contemplated. It requires trust in institutions when trust is cratered. It demands coordinated global action in an era of fragmenting alliances. And most of all it needs leaders willing to make a public case for something uncertain and unprecedented, when the entire information environment that Gurri describes punishes exactly that.

The broader climate movement has long been stuck in its own version of the negation problem. We have had decades of opposition saying stop drilling, ban this, and phase out that. To be clear, I agree with all of it. I very much want to see fossil fuels phased out. But I’ve long known that I don’t identify as an environmentalist, and I think one of the reasons is that environmentalism as currently practiced is primarily organized around opposition. It’s a movement defined by what it’s against. Nobody will ever storm a beach for “sustainability.” The word is a placeholder, not a vision.

I want to be for something.

What I’m for is the idea that humanity can rise to this moment. That we’re capable of the kind of coordinated, intelligent, ambitious action that the climate crisis requires. This goes so far beyond just stopping the harm. We must reduce emissions, remove carbon dioxide, and also stabilize conditions while those slower solutions scale. That’s a technical framework, sure, but more than that it’s an affirmative vision of human capability, a statement about what we believe people can do together.

When I look at the history I love, the moments of greatest moral achievement came not from opposition alone but from people articulating what could be and then building toward it even when the odds were terrible. The Second World War required a level of society-wide mobilization that had never been attempted, and something extraordinary came out of it: the codification of universal human rights and the construction of international institutions designed to prevent it from happening again. A generation looked at the worst thing humanity had ever done and decided to build something better from the wreckage. That’s what McKew is mourning the loss of. And it’s what climate change requires of our generation, if we can find a way to answer.

I hold two things simultaneously and I know they’re in tension. I believe in targeted, strategic work, by which I mean finding the right people, making the case where it has the highest leverage, and unlocking resources through focused effort rather than trying to go viral. That’s the realistic path in a world where mass persuasion is broken, and it’s the approach I take in my actual day-to-day work. At the same time, I feel the loss of something that strategic influence can never replace: the public act of leadership as generosity, and of treating whole populations as worthy of being brought along rather than worked around.

Climate stabilization will eventually need both. Strategic work can unlock research funding and build institutional capacity. But you can’t deploy interventions that affect the entire planet’s climate system on the strength of insider buy-in alone. At some point, we need public leaders willing to make the case—the real, full, emotionally honest case—that humanity should choose to actively stabilize its climate, and that this project deserves the ambition and collective effort it will require. Many people will be needed to describe the vision.

We’re not there yet though. I don’t think the space is ready for that, and I don’t pretend to have a formula for getting there. But reading McKew reminded me that the capacity for generosity of spirit is dormant, not dead. People still respond to it when they encounter it. I responded to it. The instinct to be moved by a genuine case for something bigger than yourself, to want to join up and contribute, hasn’t been bred out of us. It’s just been starved by an environment that feeds on negation instead.

What climate stabilization needs—what the world needs, honestly—is more people willing to starve the negation and practice the alternative. We need more people making the affirmative case for something, clearly, with conviction, without retreating behind irony or hedging into pure opposition. No one person’s argument is going to turn the tide, but the muscle only comes back through use, and the problems we face won’t wait for us to get comfortable first.

This and every other article I publish is free because I want these ideas to reach as many people as possible. Paid subscriptions are how I keep doing this work independently. They allow me to follow the research on climate interventions and meet the researchers, practitioners, founders, and policymakers shaping how this landscape evolves.

Paid members get access to our community chat, where we discuss the latest developments in climate interventions and make sense of them together. I’m sharing all the really interesting videos, papers, stories, and other links I’m coming across in there. If you’ve found value in this newsletter, I’d appreciate your support.

Subscribe now

Fleming’s book is mostly about rain-making. For about two centuries, a succession of charlatans and true believers promised local governments they could make it rain, collected their fees, and produced no evidence they’d done anything at all. Fleming traces this history with obvious relish and considerable irritation, and he builds toward a thesis: people who claim they can control the weather have almost always been wrong, often fraudulently so, and we should be deeply suspicious of anyone making similar claims today.

The rain-makers aren’t what stuck with me, though. Chapter seven is where Fleming gets to the proposals that changed how an entire scientific field thinks about intervention. And reading them, you start to understand his suspicion, because for most of the twentieth century, serious people with real credentials proposed doing absolutely unhinged things to the planet’s climate.

Hermann Sörgel wanted to dam the Strait of Gibraltar and lower the Mediterranean Sea, opening millions of acres for European settlement while irrigating Africa by damming the Congo. Soviet engineers proposed a dam fifty miles long across the Bering Strait that would block cold water coming out of the Arctic Ocean and into the Pacific, while letting warmer Atlantic water flow in and melt the ice caps (though this one might have been just for propaganda purposes—which actually supports my broader point). Someone wanted to cut holes in the ozone layer so astronomers could get better telescope observations. And the US military actually went through with one of these proposals. Project West Ford launched hundreds of millions of tiny copper antenna needles into orbit to create an artificial ionosphere for communications. Some of those needles are still up there.

The people proposing these ideas weren’t necessarily cranks. Harry Wexler was Chief of the Scientific Services Division at the U.S. Weather Bureau, and a central figure in early satellite meteorology, including work with TIROS‑1, the first weather satellite. He championed and helped secure U.S. Weather Bureau support for the atmospheric CO₂ measurements at Mauna Loa and the South Pole that became the Keeling Curve, and was one of the most accomplished meteorologists of the 20th century. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he outlined schemes to raise global temperature by detonating ten hydrogen bombs over Arctic sea ice, to cool the planet by launching a ring of dust particles into equatorial orbit, and to destroy the stratospheric ozone layer using catalytic agents such as chlorine or bromine. That last idea was actually prescient. He was describing catalytic reactions by chlorine and bromine that could destroy the ozone layer more than a decade before the seminal work by Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina, and Sherwood Rowland that ultimately earned them the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He died of a heart attack at 51 that summer, before he could publish his detailed ozone‑destruction calculations.

And then there’s the 1965 President’s Science Advisory Committee report, Restoring the Quality of Our Environment, which may be the most revealing document of all. The committee understood that CO₂ was accumulating in the atmosphere and would warm the planet. Their concrete response was to propose spreading reflective particles over the ocean to bounce sunlight back into space. Reducing fossil fuel use wasn't part of the conversation. Modifying the climate to suit our preferences was the obvious first move and not a “reluctant” last resort.

Fleming reads all of this and sees hubris all the way down. And for most of this history, I come away convinced that he’s right. What all these proposals shared was a posture of mastery. It was humanity reshaping the climate because it could, because someone thought it would be useful, and because the Arctic would be more “productive” without all that ice. There’s a famous C.S. Lewis quote about this:

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

They're both making the same point. Taking enormous risks with the entire planet out of an arrogance of mastery is wrong, and I agree with them.

The encoding of an objection

Now, these are all interesting in terms of historical anecdotes, but these proposals are actually more than just bad ideas, because academic fields don’t just remember bad ideas. They encode them as worthy of rejection. And over time, it became normalized to reject large-scale climate interventions because that was the responsible position. This happened through citation chains and literature reviews, through the way canonical texts frame what counts as serious scholarship, and through peer review norms and the informal culture of what gets you taken seriously at conferences versus what gets you sideways looks. You absorb this through professional formation. A climate scientist in 2026 doesn’t need to have specifically read about Wexler’s hydrogen bombs or Project West Ford to adopt the institutional view that large-scale interventions are hubristic. The field carries the lesson forward.

And the lesson that crystallized was broad. It wasn’t just that specific proposals were dangerous—it was that anything resembling the mastery posture was suspect. This is routinely brought up as an objection to climate interventions by serious people who think that they could substitute for or delay the hard work of cutting emissions. Johan Rockström says in the video linked below that SRM is not an option because “It allows the world to release the little pressure we have on the accelerator of decarbonizing the global economy.”

The UNFCCC established mitigation as the central project of climate policy, and the scientific community organized its identity around that project. The heuristic became: if someone is proposing something other than emissions reduction, they’re either naive or they’re running interference for the people who caused the problem.

I’ve written before about encountering this firsthand at the Global Tipping Points Conference (where that video was recorded). There I sat through days of presentations on civilizational-scale risks and watched the community that produced those presentations decline to discuss what we might do about them on relevant timescales. During a coffee break, a scientist I’d just met, upon learning I was interested in how we’d actually respond to tipping point risks, moved almost immediately to the position that carbon dioxide removal and geoengineering are just being advocated for on behalf of oil and gas. I was at this incredibly niche academic conference because I’d spent years working on CDR and was genuinely trying to understand the tipping point literature. The condescension was remarkable.

But that’s what the heuristic produces. It creates an asymmetry where the risks of intervening get scrutinized exhaustively and the risks of not investigating barely register as a question worth asking. Across funders, conservation organizations, and researchers, the pattern is consistent: any proposal for deliberate climate action beyond emissions reduction triggers this immune response of rejection. And whatever the merits of that response in the twentieth century, it’s now operating in a very different world than the one that produced it.

The situation changed; the heuristic didn’t

We temporarily breached 1.5°C in 2024. We’ve added well over a trillion tonnes of CO₂ to the atmosphere. Ice sheets are losing mass. Methane release is accelerating. Tipping point risks that were theoretical projections twenty years ago are becoming observable trends. The status quo that justified the old asymmetry—where inaction was roughly equivalent to safety—doesn’t exist anymore.

The 20th century proposals were about improvement. Those engineers wanted to make climates more convenient, open new land for settlement, and melt ice because someone thought it would be economically useful. But the serious researchers proposing interventions today are doing something fundamentally different. They're trying to manage risk under worsening conditions. The people whose work gets characterized as reckless are mostly arguing that we should do careful research so we understand the options before we need them. Research to better understand our options for managing risk is not reckless—it’s responsible.

And there’s an irony I keep coming back to as well. The intellectual framework that makes the strongest case for at least investigating faster-acting climate tools—complex systems thinking, nonlinear dynamics, tipping point cascades, the understanding that small perturbations can trigger irreversible large-scale shifts—was built by the same researchers who are most resistant to engaging with those tools. Their own science shows that the risks of the next few decades may not wait for the slower solutions (decarbonization and carbon dioxide removal) to scale. The professional identity they’ve built around that science is the thing preventing them from following it to its conclusion.

That’s what an immune response looks like when it starts attacking something the body needs. The caution was earned. But I think it’s now doing more harm than what it was designed to protect against. The heuristic trained an entire field to ask one question—what are the risks of intervening?—and that question deserves rigorous answers. But there’s a second question that barely gets asked, and it deserves equal rigor: what are the risks of not investigating these tools while we still have time to understand them?

This and every other article I publish is free because I want these ideas to reach as many people as possible. Paid subscriptions are how I keep doing this work independently. They allow me to follow the research on climate interventions and meet the researchers, practitioners, founders, and policymakers shaping how this landscape evolves.

Paid members get access to our community chat, where we discuss the latest developments in climate interventions and make sense of them together. I’m sharing all the really interesting videos, papers, stories, and other links I’m coming across in there. If you’ve found value in this newsletter, I’d appreciate your support.

Subscribe now

Something that has always been a challenge for me is that I make logical leaps in my head and then jump into conversations, assuming the other person is right there with me. It rarely works. And when it doesn’t, it’s not just that they don’t follow along. It’s that they sometimes end up disagreeing on principle, because they feel like something is being pushed on them that they didn’t ask for.

For years at Nori, we tried to sell carbon removal credits to companies that had publicly announced sustainability commitments. These were companies that genuinely cared about their environmental impact. But carbon removal is abstract and invisible, and it's always been a tough sell. Eventually, we noticed that companies seemed to go through a three-stage process in their sustainability journey.

1. First was identifying their carbon footprint and environmental impact and figuring out how to measure all of that, which is no small task for a larger business.

2. Second was doing what they could to reduce that impact, and not just carbon—plastic waste, water waste, supply chain inefficiencies, all of it.

3. Third, if they got there, they would pay for carbon removal to address what couldn’t be reduced.

Very few companies ever made it to that third stage, but the ones that did had two things in common: the capability to identify why and how much carbon removal they would buy, and the willingness to do it, often driven initially by a single champion inside the organization. My friend Tito Jankowski, who founded AirMiners and has done more than anyone to build the CDR startup ecosystem, talks about this a lot. It almost always starts with one person who goes deep enough on the problem to really feel it and then becomes the internal evangelist. But even that champion can’t get anywhere until the institution around them has gone through its own stages of understanding. You need both the individual conviction and the organizational readiness, and the organizational readiness only comes from doing the foundational work first.

One time, we pitched Alaska Airlines on carbon removal credits. Airlines were generally interested in carbon emissions, but in the end, Alaska found it too confusing or risky or whatever other reasons they had, and instead, they focused on reducing plastic waste and started using those boxed waters on flights. And honestly, that made sense for where they were. They hadn’t gone through the earlier stages yet. We were trying to skip them to the answer before they’d fully internalized the problem.

I keep thinking about this pattern because I’m watching it play out right now between countries and climate interventions, and it’s helped me understand something about why the politics of this space look the way they do.

For decades, the way most governments have thought about climate change is basically linear. Temperatures will go up gradually, seas will rise gradually, the weather gets worse over time, and you respond to all of these harms with mitigation (decarbonization) and adaptation. That framing has produced real progress on clean energy and emissions standards. But of course, the science increasingly doesn’t support the assumption of predictability behind it. The climate system has tipping points. These are thresholds where changes become self-reinforcing and irreversible, regardless of what we do afterward. The looming threats include AMOC collapse, ice sheet destabilization, permafrost methane release, Amazon dieback, and more. And these are not theoretical anymore, as coral reefs are now said to be past their tipping point of recoverability.

Countries are starting to reckon with this, and they’re going through their own version of those three corporate stages.

1. Stage one is acknowledging that the risks are non-linear, that the Earth system has thresholds we might be approaching or have already crossed.

2. Stage two is acting on that understanding within the existing toolkit. This means faster decarbonization, more carbon removal, and better adaptation. All of that matters.

3. But stage three is accepting that all of it may not work fast enough to prevent cascading failures, and beginning to seriously research climate interventions like sunlight reflection methods, marine cloud brightening, and ice sheet stabilization.

Most countries haven’t completed stage one. There are a handful who are working through stage two. And essentially none have arrived at stage three. I’m going to argue here that this sequencing matters enormously.

Risk-first successes

The UK is a good example of how difficult stage one can be. In late November 2025, ten experts delivered a national emergency briefing to about 1,200 British leaders at Central Hall Westminster—politicians, executives, faith leaders, etc.—modeled on the COVID briefings. The topic was the full scope of environmental and climate risk. The ten experts focused on just risks and didn’t mention potential interventions. This was purely stage-one work, and even that was eye-opening for much of the audience. According to one of the presenters, fewer than 15% of British MPs in one survey knew that global emissions needed to peak by 2025 for any chance at 1.5°C.

Then in January, the UK’s national security assessment on ecosystem collapse came out. And this one was especially interesting because this was not voluntary. Instead, someone filed a freedom of information request after Downing Street tried to suppress it, reportedly because the findings were too negative. As George Monbiot wrote:

The most important document published by the UK government since the general election emerged last week only through a freedom of information request. The national security assessment on biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse was supposed to have been published in October 2025, but the apparatchiks in Downing Street sought to make it disappear. Apparently there were two reasons: because its conclusions were “too negative”, and because it would draw attention to the government’s failure to act.

The assessment, compiled with input from MI5, MI6, and GCHQ, warned that every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to irreversible collapse. This was a government trying to bury what its own intelligence agencies are telling it. That’s stage one on hard-mode.

And yet, others inside the UK system have clearly gone through their own version of the journey. In 2025, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency committed around £57 million to its “Exploring Climate Cooling” programme. They are funding 22 projects across SRM modeling, marine cloud brightening, Arctic sea ice restoration, and more. NERC added another £11 million for SRM impact modeling. The government’s official line is that this is about understanding options, not deploying them. But somewhere in that bureaucracy, there are champions who’ve done the stage-one and stage-two work internally and are laying groundwork for stage three while the broader leadership class is still absorbing the basics. This is the same dynamic I described with companies and carbon removal. It starts with one person who gets it, trying to drag the rest of the organization forward.

Iceland is further along. In November 2025, their climate minister brought AMOC collapse before the National Security Council as an existential threat—the first time any country had formally treated a specific climate phenomenon that way. “We cannot afford to wait for definitive, long-term research before acting,” Climate Minister Johann Pall Johannsson said. Stage one complete, working through stage two.

But the most interesting document I’ve seen recently is the Nordic Council of Ministers’ report on AMOC tipping risks, published just last week. The Nordic Council of Ministers is how Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden coordinate on shared policy challenges, so when they commission something with 60 contributing experts, it carries weight across the region. And what struck me reading it is that you can actually watch a stage-two-to-three transition trying to happen on the page.

The report establishes that the uncertainty range for the AMOC tipping point starts at 1.4°C of warming, that we’re already at roughly 1.4°C, and that 1.5°C will be reached within years. It describes what collapse could mean for Northern Europe: plummeting winter temperatures, disrupted food systems, and geopolitical instability. And then in Section 3.3, it arrives at climate interventions. It acknowledges that SRM “could provide additional means to limit global warming levels.” It cites studies showing that polar SAI could reduce AMOC weakening and “could be feasible more quickly, rebuilding existing aircraft.” It also engages seriously with the science of marine cloud brightening over the North Atlantic.

From everything I’ve read in the last year, this feels like actually a huge inclusion. Almost every tipping point discussion I have seen from academics has concluded with the same old “…and that’s why we need to focus on rapid decarbonization.” This actually leaned into what we might do about the risk. Though I do wish the recommendations went a bit further. The report calls for “balanced, ethical research” and regulation “against premature or unilateral implementation.” More research is absolutely the right call as that’s exactly what should happen next. But given what the analysis just laid out about where we might already be relative to the tipping point, I’d want to see that call for research come with a real sense of urgency behind it. Less “we should look into this carefully” and more “we need to understand this as fast as we responsibly can because the timeline may be shorter than we thought.” I think the next version of something like this, a few years from now, will probably read that way.

Solution-first is easier to oppose

The risk-first framing has actually been working in the Nordics and UK. Now consider what has been going on in other parts of the world, where those stages were skipped entirely.

In Mexico, Make Sunsets released sulfur dioxide balloons in Mexican airspace without consultation. That was the Mexican government’s introduction to solar geoengineering. It felt like unauthorized experiments over their territory, and so they announced an intention to ban all SRM experimentation (though they have not yet put it into effect, three years later.)

But in parts of Africa and the Pacific, the pattern was actually reversed. It wasn’t the intervention community that jumped to the solution, it was the opposition. Groups opposed to SRM engaged with government leaders and built coalitions around rejection, framing climate interventions as neocolonialism and unacceptable risk, often before those same leaders had deeply engaged with what non-linear tipping-point dynamics might mean for their own populations. The African Ministerial Conference on the Environment called for a global non-use agreement. Vanuatu argued at the ICJ that solar geoengineering is inconsistent with international law. These are sovereign governments making serious decisions, and the sovereignty concerns are real. But the conversation they were brought into centered the solution, not the problem. And it was opponents, not advocates, who set that frame. Now those political positions exist, and they’re going to be hard to revisit even as the risk picture evolves.

So you end up with the same result from opposite directions. Make Sunsets skipped to the answer from the pro side. Anti-SRM campaigns skipped to the answer from the opposition side. In both cases, the underlying problem—what do cascading tipping-point risks actually mean for these specific countries and populations—never got its day in court.

The difference between institutional shifts and mass awareness

I know some people will read this and think: hasn’t the climate movement been leading with risks and catastrophe for decades, and hasn’t that failed to move people? That’s a fair point when it comes to mass public campaigns. Telling the general public that the world is ending hasn’t been an effective way to build political will. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about institutional buy-in. This means getting civil service agencies, national security councils, and scientific advisory bodies to do their own rigorous analysis within their existing mandates. An intelligence agency doesn’t need to be emotionally persuaded about climate change. But it does need to understand that AMOC collapse is a national security threat that falls squarely within what it’s already supposed to be assessing. An agricultural ministry needs models showing what monsoon disruption does to food systems. That kind of specific, concrete risk work is what actually creates the conditions for a country to eventually consider interventions, because it builds understanding across the institutions that would need to support any decision. That’s what happened in Iceland. That’s what’s happening, slowly, across the Nordics.

And I think that points toward what the intervention community should be focused on right now. I don’t think we should be advocating for interventions directly. Not yet, and not to audiences who haven’t done the foundational work. Instead, the best thing we could do is help accelerate the transitions between stages. We should help more governments do the kind of specific, rigorous risk assessment that makes the intervention question arise naturally from their own analysis, on their own terms, rather than arriving as a proposal from outside. Create the conditions where champions can emerge inside governments the way they emerged inside companies so that people who’ve gone deep enough on the problem to feel its weight can bring their institutions along.

At Nori, the companies that eventually bought carbon removal were the ones that had gone through the earlier stages themselves. By the time they arrived at stage three, nobody had to sell them on it. The decision felt obvious because they understood the full picture. I believe the same will be true for countries. The goal isn’t to convince skeptical governments to accept something they haven’t asked for. It’s to help them arrive at a place where they’re asking the right questions, and then trust that honest engagement with the problem leads to honest conclusions about what the response needs to include.

This and every other article I publish is free because I want these ideas to reach as many people as possible. Paid subscriptions are how I keep doing this work independently. They allow me to follow the research on climate interventions and meet the researchers, practitioners, founders, and policymakers shaping how this landscape evolves.

Paid members get access to our community chat, where we discuss the latest developments in climate interventions and make sense of them together. I’m sharing all the really interesting videos, papers, stories, and other links I’m coming across in there. If you’ve found value in this newsletter, I’d appreciate your support.

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It’s frustrating because unscrewing the hose would have taken thirty seconds. Of course, I knew intellectually that freezing water expands and can burst pipes. But I grew up in Arizona, where I learned a completely different set of survival skills: keep the shades drawn during the day, carry water everywhere, and for the love of god, never touch a seatbelt buckle that’s been baking in the sun. Those responses are automatic for me. But I have to consciously think about what do in cold weather, which means sometimes I don’t.

We Gain Expertise Through Experience

We’re all from warm weather, in a sense. Human civilization developed during an unusually stable stretch of Earth’s climate, the ten thousand years since the last ice age, and that stability was consistent enough for us to develop agriculture and build cities and establish trade routes that depend on predictable seasons and coastlines. Nobody alive has experiential pattern recognition for ice sheet collapse or permafrost methane release or the shutdown of the ocean circulation patterns that regulate temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere. We’ve never lived through these things. Neither did our parents, or theirs, going back hundreds of generations.

Human cognition evolved for a different set of problems. We’re good at threats we can see and have seen before: a rustle in the grass that might be a predator, or a facial expression that signals anger. Our threat-detection systems run on pattern-matching, and the patterns come from lived experience. But the difference between a million and a billion doesn’t register viscerally, even though one is a thousand times larger. Thirty years from now feels like an abstraction in a way that next week doesn’t. We usually expect causes and effects to be proportional, so the idea that a small temperature increase could trigger cascading failures feels wrong even when we understand the mechanism intellectually. And we’re particularly bad at risks we’ve never encountered, because there’s nothing to pattern-match.

The result is that you can know something without feeling it. Climate scientists who’ve spent decades studying ice sheet dynamics can explain exactly how Thwaites Glacier could destabilize and what it would mean for sea levels, and still not walk around with the gut-level urgency that the situation warrants. The knowledge sits in one part of the brain while the motivation (or openness) to act sits in another, and the connection between them depends on experiences we don’t have.

When the Frame Breaks

At Davos this year, not a single world leader mentioned climate change. The entire conversation, if mentioned at all, was about energy security. Marianne Hagen, a former Norwegian deputy minister of foreign affairs, watched this shift happen in real time after Russia launched its war on Ukraine. In a recent Atlantic article about geoengineering research on Antarctic glaciers, Hagen described her own transformation on the subject:

Marianne Hagen, a former Norwegian deputy minister of foreign affairs, told me that she’d long considered geoengineering “science fiction and just something not worth spending a lot of time on.” Then she watched as the Ukraine war changed the conversations around her: Energy security came to the forefront of European politics, and “nobody talked about energy transition anymore.” She thought of the vulnerable coastal nations she’d visited as a government official and, in 2024, signed on to co-lead the curtain project with Moore. “I ended up in John’s camp, mostly out of despair, because I could not see a safe pathway forward for future generations without doing the necessary research on these Band-Aid, buy-time solutions,” she said.

Her phrasing, “mostly out of despair,” stayed with me. She didn’t change her mind because she encountered new data or better arguments. She changed because her existing frame broke completely, and she had to construct a new one from the wreckage. The familiar way of thinking about the problem stopped working, and only then could she see what had been invisible before.

If Tipping Points Tip, It’s Already Too Late

Bill Gates has been one of the more visible funders of geoengineering research, including early support for Harvard’s SCoPEx stratospheric aerosol experiment. At a recent talk at Caltech, he was asked about when he’d support actually deploying these technologies, not just researching them. According to Axios, which reported on his comments, Gates said he’d support deployment if the planet hits climate tipping points. Axios added context, noting that scientists say such scenarios are “likely decades away, even as extreme weather worsens today.”

Gates understands the science better than most, yet he frames deployment as something you do after tipping points are reached. The reporting frames tipping points as something decades in the future that we’d approach gradually, like a budget running down. Both framings are exactly backwards, and they illustrate this cognitive problem with uncomfortable clarity.

Tipping points aren’t a line you approach gradually and can step back from. They’re phase transitions, points where a system shifts into a new state and can’t easily return. Picture leaning back in a chair on two legs. You can lean a little, lean a little more, it’s fine, it’s fine…and then suddenly it’s not fine, and you’re on the floor. The fall happens fast. There’s a threshold you cross where the dynamics change entirely, and you can’t just lean forward again to fix it.

The whole reason tipping points are dangerous is that they’re irreversible once crossed. Waiting until after a tipping point tips is like waiting until after your pipes burst to unscrew the hose. The intervention only works if it happens before.

Gates is one of the most analytically rigorous people on the planet, and he’s funded serious research in this space for years. But he’s reasoning about an unfamiliar risk using frameworks built for familiar ones, treating a non-linear threshold like a linear decline you can monitor and respond to proportionally. That’s not how these systems work.

The Axios framing compounds the error. “Decades away” suggests we have time to wait, as if the relevant question is when tipping points arrive rather than how long it takes to prepare for them. Cooling interventions can’t be deployed overnight. They require years of research to understand regional effects, international governance frameworks that don’t currently exist, diplomatic relationships that take time to build, and public trust that has to be established before a crisis rather than during one. If you start preparing after tipping points are triggered, you don’t have time to do any of this responsibly. You get improvisation under pressure, which is exactly the scenario everyone agrees we should avoid.

How To Compensate For Missing Intuition

When your cognitive architecture isn’t built for the risks you face, trying harder to care doesn’t help. Willpower doesn’t rewire pattern recognition. What works is building external systems that compensate for what the brain can’t do natively, and humans are actually quite good at this. We can’t intuitively calculate compound interest, so we built spreadsheets. We can’t perceive ionizing radiation, so we invented Geiger counters. The history of science is largely a history of building instruments that translate invisible phenomena into something we can perceive and act on.

For climate tipping points, this means building tools that make the abstract concrete. Not just temperature projections on a chart, but simulations that let you see what specific changes mean for specific places: what your city looks like with seven feet of sea level rise, or how agricultural zones shift when monsoon patterns change. The goal is to engage the parts of the brain that respond to visceral experience, not just the parts that process data.

It also means building institutional structures that force sustained attention. The problems that get solved in this world are the ones with budgets, reporting cycles, and constituencies that hold decision-makers accountable. Quarterly earnings get attention because there’s infrastructure that makes them visible and consequential every three months. Tipping point risks need equivalent infrastructure, not because corporate earnings and ice sheet stability are the same kind of thing, but because human organizations lose focus on anything that doesn’t have structural reinforcement.

And it means preparing the option space before you need it. We need research that develops the knowledge base, governance frameworks that establish how decisions would get made, diplomatic relationships that enable coordination, and trust-building with publics who will need to understand what’s happening and why. All of this takes years, and none of it can be rushed in a crisis.

What We Do Now

I’m going to remember to unscrew the hose next winter, not because I’ll suddenly have cold-weather instincts but because I’ve added it to my phone’s reminders app. I’ve built a small external system that compensates for the pattern recognition I lack and probably won’t develop at this point in my life.

That’s the work for tipping point risks, at a civilizational scale. We don’t have the intuitions for these dangers, and we’re not going to develop them through experience, because by the time we experience ice sheet collapse, it’s too late to prevent it. We have to build the systems that make these risks visible and actionable, and we have to build them before we need them.

We still have some time left. But time runs differently for preparation than for crisis. The moment when action becomes obviously necessary is long after the most effective action could have happened. Effective action requires groundwork laid years earlier, by people who could see what wasn’t yet visible to everyone else.

I didn’t grow up in cold weather, and none of us grew up with tipping points. The risks that will define this century aren’t ones our intuitions are equipped to handle. Recognizing that is where the work begins.

This and every other article I publish is free because I want these ideas to reach as many people as possible. Paid subscriptions are how I keep doing this work independently. They allow me to follow the research on climate interventions and meet the researchers, practitioners, founders, and policymakers shaping how this landscape evolves.

Paid members get access to our community chat, where we discuss the latest developments in climate interventions and make sense of them together. I’m sharing all the really interesting videos, papers, stories, and other links I’m coming across in there. If you’ve found value in this newsletter, I’d appreciate your support.

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After I published the Stabilization Framework series, my friend and former investor Rahul Shendure sent me a question worth sharing:

Are there other examples of activists explicitly embarking on a multi-year plan to shift an Overton Window for an issue with existential implications?

If you’re going to argue, as I have, that building cultural permission is the highest-leverage intervention point for climate interventions right now, you should be able to point to cases where that’s actually worked. I don’t just mean movements that succeeded through luck or historical accident, but campaigns where someone sat down, wrote out a multi-year strategy for making the unthinkable acceptable, and then executed it.

The answer to the question is yes, there are examples. But none of the precedents faced the exact combination of challenges we face, which means we’re adapting playbooks rather than following them.

The Gold Standard: Marriage Equality

In 1983, a Harvard Law student named Evan Wolfson wrote his third-year thesis arguing that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry. At the time, this was considered absurd not just by opponents, but also by most gay rights advocates, who thought the goal was too radical and would invite backlash. Wolfson laid out a multi-decade path to success anyway, and then spent the next thirty years executing it.

Freedom to Marry, the organization Wolfson founded in 2001, operated as a strategy shop: a central hub that continuously tested frames, disseminated messaging into litigation and campaigns, and coordinated the overall theory of change. Their “Roadmap to Victory” made the strategy explicit. The Roadmap laid a plan to win marriage in a critical mass of states, build national public support past majority levels, and then secure a Supreme Court resolution. They worked backward from an endpoint that seemed impossible and mapped the intermediate steps required to get there.

There are several key lessons to be drawn from this:

1. Make the destination explicit early. Wolfson argued for marriage itself, not civil unions or domestic partnerships, even when that seemed unrealistic. The theory was that aiming at the real goal would produce transformational rather than merely transactional change.

2. Lose forward. Early defeats were treated as opportunities rather than disasters. Each loss clarified messaging, built organizing capacity, and created precedents that could be leveraged later. Wolfson explicitly described this as part of the strategic arc.

3. Pivot the narrative. The early message framing emphasized rights, benefits, and legal equality. It wasn’t landing. So in 2010 the campaign shifted to an emphasis on shared values of love, commitment, family, and belonging. This reframe correlated with a sharp shift in public opinion and more favorable media coverage. The lesson is that leading with what you deserve is less persuasive than leading with what you share.

   

4. Conversation as engine of change. Freedom to Marry invested heavily in programs designed to trigger interpersonal conversations, guided by research on persuasion. They understood that people change their minds through relationships. The campaign deliberately targeted “reachable but not yet reached” moderates and gave them emotional pathways toward acceptance through stories of parents and grandparents coming around.

From the thesis to the Obergefell decision that legalized gay marriage across the US took thirty-two years. That’s the timeline for the most deliberately planned Overton Window campaign in recent American history.

The Fastest Case: AI Safety

AI safety moved from fringe concern to government summits and Time Magazine covers in roughly fifteen years. The strategy was explicitly elite-focused:

1. Publish rigorous books that could serve as intellectual on-ramps (Superintelligence, The Precipice).

2. Build organizations like MIRI and funding bodies to professionalize the field.

3. Cultivate networks that placed AI safety people in academia, industry, and policy roles.

The approach worked because when ChatGPT created a moment of widespread public attention in 2022, there was already an epistemic community in place. People who shared frameworks and language were ready to shape the conversation rather than scrambling to build one from scratch. Concentrated philanthropic capital accelerated the timeline considerably, funding the organizations and research that gave the field institutional weight.

Fifteen years is still a long time. But compared to the thirty-year arcs of other successful campaigns, it shows that elite-focused strategies with sufficient resources can move faster than mass persuasion campaigns typically do.

What Makes Climate Interventions Harder

None of these movements faced the combination of challenges that climate interventions face.

Time pressure. Marriage equality took thirty years. AI safety, the fastest case, took fifteen years from founding organizations to mainstream policy recognition. We may have ten to twenty years before tipping point risks materially narrow our options. Running a thirty-year playbook on a compressed timeline may require fundamentally different tactics.

Opposition from multiple directions. Marriage equality faced organized opposition, but that opposition was external to the movement. Environmental allies weren’t attacking marriage equality advocates. Climate interventions face conspiracy theorists on one side (chemtrails, weather modification paranoia, RFK Jr. on daytime television) and mainstream environmental groups on the other (moral hazard concerns, accusations of enabling fossil fuel interests).

The nuclear power rehabilitation effort is the closest structural parallel here. Pro-nuclear climate advocates face hostility from environmental groups who should, in theory, be allies on decarbonization. Their strategy has been to reframe nuclear as a climate necessity rather than defending it on its own terms, and recent developments (global commitments to expand nuclear capacity, tech companies commissioning plants to power their data centers, and the World Bank lifting its financing ban) suggest progress. It’s worth watching as the most similar case to the dynamics climate interventions face, even though the verdict isn’t yet in.

Governance complexity varies. Marriage equality could be won state by state, building momentum toward a national resolution. AI safety could advance through elite consensus and corporate adoption. Climate interventions are more varied: stratospheric aerosol injection would affect the entire planet and require international coordination, but marine cloud brightening to protect coral reefs or interventions to stabilize ice sheets could be more regional or local. That variation matters strategically. Smaller-scale interventions might follow a “build momentum through wins” logic more similar to marriage equality, while global-scale cooling requires governance frameworks we don’t yet have.

Simultaneous need for elite and mass permission. AI safety grew primarily through elite discourse shift. You didn’t need mass public buy-in, just enough influential people taking it seriously. Marriage equality required a genuine public opinion change. Climate interventions seem to require both: institutional decision-makers need permission to act, but conspiracy-driven state legislation in Tennessee and Florida shows that mass discourse can constrain elite options. You can’t ignore either arena.

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What We Can Adapt

Despite the differences, the cross-cutting patterns can be useful to us.

Make the destination explicit. Wolfson’s thesis named the endpoint when it seemed impossible. The Stabilization Framework is an attempt to do the same: name what we actually need (cooling interventions, ice sheet protection, ecosystem preservation, as part of an integrated response with emissions reduction and carbon removal) rather than hedging toward something more palatable.

Treat narrative as infrastructure. Marriage equality’s pivot from rights to love wasn’t a messaging tweak. It was a strategic reorientation that changed everything downstream. The frame shapes what’s possible. Getting the frame right is foundational work.

Build a strategy shop. Freedom to Marry served as a central hub that tested messages, tracked what worked, and diffused successful frames into every channel: litigation, legislation, media, and interpersonal conversation. Climate interventions don’t have that coordinating function. The field has researchers and policy organizations and startups, but no one is doing the systematic work of building and spreading narrative infrastructure. Perhaps the Climate Emergencies Forum can fill that role.

Find sympathetic constituencies. Marriage equality found conflicted moderates who could be reached through personal stories. AI safety found tech leaders already worried about what they were building, as well as existential risk people in the Effective Altruism movement. For climate interventions, I have been hypothesizing that the carbon removal community may be the natural starting point. These are people who already understand the timeline problem and have arrived at the same conclusions through their own experience. From there, the circle expands to climate tech generally, then to climate-concerned people across different domains.

Create intellectual on-ramps. Books like Superintelligence and Tim Urban’s seminal 2015 post The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence (which blew my mind the first time I read it), served as entry points that converted interested outsiders into engaged participants. The Stabilization Plan I’m working toward is an attempt at something similar: a comprehensive resource that helps people understand the full picture and what it implies for action.

Accept losing forward. This may be the hardest lesson. The instinct is to avoid high-profile defeats. But Wolfson’s framework suggests that defeats such as the Alameda MCB experiment, properly leveraged, build capacity and clarify strategy. The question is whether we have time for the iterative learning that losing forward requires.

The honest answer to Rahul’s question is that we’re attempting something without a complete playbook. The precedents show that Overton Windows can be deliberately shifted, that explicit multi-decade campaigns can succeed, and that making the unthinkable obvious is possible. They also show that it usually takes longer than we have.

But we have tools that didn’t exist when Wolfson wrote his thesis in 1983. The attention economy works differently now. Podcasts and YouTube channels reach millions without waiting for coverage in legacy outlets. Creator networks can rival broadcast media reach. AI accelerates what small teams can produce. The gatekeepers who once controlled which ideas got airtime have lost much of their power. None of that guarantees we can compress a thirty-year arc into ten, but it changes the math on what a small group of people can attempt.

As Gimli puts it in Fellowship of the Ring: “Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?”

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This article represents the synthesis of all of my research, reading, and conversations over the last twelve months. Here I am laying it all out for examination. I want to be challenged on where you think this gets things wrong or can be honed and improved. Please comment at the end with any thoughts or questions you have.

The climate toolkit keeps expanding, and each expansion has followed the same pattern: resistance, then reluctant acceptance, then obvious necessity.

In the 1990s, mitigation was the entire conversation. We should reduce emissions, transition to renewables, and stop burning fossil fuels. In the 2000s, adaptation entered the frame as it became clear that some warming was already locked in and we’d need to prepare for impacts regardless of how quickly we decarbonized. By the 2010s, carbon removal had forced its way into serious discussion, with the recognition dawning that even aggressive emissions cuts wouldn’t be enough to stabilize the climate without actively pulling CO₂ back out of the atmosphere.

I lived through the carbon removal debates. When I entered the field in 2015, even mentioning negative emissions drew accusations of enabling fossil fuel companies, of providing moral cover for continued drilling, and of dangerous distraction from the real work of cutting emissions. The moral hazard arguments were fierce. Over ten years, the conversation has shifted because the math became undeniable. Carbon removal went from heresy to IPCC pathways to corporate procurement programs to bipartisan legislation. The resistance didn’t actually vanish; it just got overwhelmed by necessity.

We’re at a similar inflection point now, not with a single technology but with a category: stabilization.

This article is a proposal for how to think about the range of climate interventions we’re going to need in the 21st century. These are interventions that go beyond reducing emissions and removing carbon to actively preserving stable conditions while those slower solutions scale up.

We face destabilizing systems everywhere we look. Not just in the climate itself but in the socioeconomic and political structures that depend on climate stability. Insurance markets are withdrawing from entire regions. Food systems around the world are stressed by drought and heat. Migration patterns are already shifting in ways that fuel political backlash. The capacity for democratic coordination is fraying under compound pressures. These are the stakes I laid out in my recent “Carbon Removal Won’t Scale in Time” presentation, and they’re why I think stabilization—as a frame—matters now.

In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, I wrote about the narrative vacuum around climate interventions and why the permission problem persists despite everyone recognizing it exists. This piece covers what I propose to do about it: adopt a stabilization framework that makes these conversations possible, and build the cultural infrastructure to support it.

What Stabilization Could Mean

I use “stabilization” deliberately. The word captures purpose—preserving conditions rather than engineering new ones—and it’s defensive rather than hubristic in its connotations. It also connects to something people already feel in their bones: the sense that systems are destabilizing all around us, that the ground keeps shifting, and that we need to arrest that slide before it overwhelms our capacity to respond.

“Geoengineering” sounds like playing God. “Solar radiation management” is jargon that makes normal people tune out immediately. “Restoration”—a term I’ve been asked about before—speaks to an acknowledged problem but begs the question: restore to what? And it misses a key insight. “Stabilization” names what we actually need right now: stable enough conditions for the long work of decarbonization and carbon removal to succeed. It’s not the solution itself but what enables the actual solutions to work.

When I talk about stabilization, I’m trying to capture a range of interventions that share a common purpose: preventing irreversible cascades of compounding catastrophic risks while the slower solutions scale. This could include:

• Cooling interventions like stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening, and cirrus cloud thinning.

• Ice sheet preservation using thermosiphons to stabilize glaciers, seabed curtains, and other interventions to slow collapse that’s already underway.

• Ecosystem protection, from localized cooling to protecting coral reefs to interventions that prevent Amazon dieback.

• Tipping point prevention more broadly, from Arctic preservation, to permafrost management, to other efforts that keep feedback loops from triggering.

• Regional weather modification and storm intensity reduction, though I know that category is contested and raises its own set of concerns.

Some of these interventions are further along in research than others. Some will face more governance challenges than others. Some people will object to including certain categories at all. The framework is a starting point for conversation, not a final taxonomy, and I expect it to evolve as more people engage with it.

What matters strategically is recognizing that these interventions don’t all have the same scale or level of complexity. Deploying nanobubbles to protect a specific coral reef involves fundamentally different governance challenges than global stratospheric aerosol injection does. Marine cloud brightening in a bounded region is different from interventions that affect the entire planet’s solar radiation balance. If everything gets lumped into a binary yes/no vote on “geoengineering,” we lose the ability to make progress on smaller interventions that might build trust, demonstrate responsible governance, and create capacity for larger ones later. The climate stabilization framework creates space for a spectrum of interventions differentiated by scope, reversibility, and governance requirements, rather than forcing an all-or-nothing choice.

The simple version of this framework is Reduce, Remove, Stabilize. None alone is sufficient. Reducing emissions won’t lower temperatures for decades; it only slows the rate at which they rise. Removing carbon dioxide won’t meaningfully affect global temperature until the second half of this century at the earliest, and only if we scale the industry far beyond anything we’ve achieved so far. Stabilizing conditions could work faster, but only makes sense as part of an integrated approach where we’re simultaneously addressing the underlying accumulation of greenhouse gases. We need all three tools working together. Stabilization is essential to make the other two possible to achieve.

The Precarity Trap

Countries with strong economic conditions tend to have more capacity for environmental action. They have cleaner energy policies, better environmental regulations, and more public support for long-term climate investments. But when affordability becomes the dominant concern, when economic anxiety rises to the top of political discourse, climate drops down the priority list. We’ve seen this play out in recent elections across the developed world, where inflation and cost of living overwhelmed nearly every other issue. And in much of the developing world, where economic precarity has always been the baseline, the bandwidth for long-term climate planning has never been abundant.

Voter polling consistently shows economic concerns like healthcare costs, inflation, housing, and job security dominate voter priorities by wide margins. When people are worried about affording groceries or medical care, when they’re choosing between prescriptions and rent, atmospheric carbon concentrations feel distant and theoretical. Climate becomes something you have bandwidth to care about when your immediate needs are met, and climate impacts are going to make economic conditions worse nearly everywhere.

Now consider what happens as those impacts intensify. Crop failures raise food prices. Extreme weather events disrupt supply chains and spike costs for basic goods. Insurance markets destabilize or withdraw entirely from high-risk regions, leaving homeowners exposed. And climate-driven migration—already underway, already reshaping politics—strains receiving communities in ways that fuel populism and political extremism.

This goes beyond just economic precarity into sociopolitical precarity. When migration becomes a wedge issue, when populist movements gain power by stoking fear of outsiders and promising to close borders, the political capacity for international cooperation on climate erodes. The parties and coalitions most hostile to climate action are often the exact same ones gaining ground from migration-driven backlash. The destabilization feeds on itself.

Think of it like a boxer. You can take some punches, you can absorb a bad round, recover between bells, and come back strong. But if you keep getting hit—round after round, with little time to catch your breath or reset—eventually you lose the capacity to continue the fight. You get knocked out not by any single blow but by the accumulation of damage you couldn’t recover from.

That’s what cascading destabilization means for our ability to respond to climate change.

Research on snowballing crises makes this concrete. After the 2021 Texas winter storm—which grew from weather event to power outage to water contamination to mental health crisis—researchers tracked impacts for nearly a year afterward. Using Crisis Text Line data, they found that total crisis conversations and thoughts of suicide increased substantially after the initial event and remained elevated for up to 11 months.

Populations hit by one disaster become less likely to rebound before the next one hits, because they can’t replenish economic and social capital between crises. Each successive shock finds people with fewer resources to cope, less resilience to draw on, and diminished capacity to respond.

Now apply this to climate at a planetary scale. If tipping points are triggered—think ice sheet collapse, ocean circulation pattern shift, permafrost thaw that releases stored methane, and/or ecosystems like the Amazon transitioning from carbon sink to source—each one depletes our collective capacity to respond to the next. These physical impacts will erode our ability to coordinate, to sustain political coalitions, and to maintain the economic stability that makes long-term planning possible.

One finding from the research on our responses to polycrisis stuck with me. Without deliberate effort, organizations and societies tend to regress to pre-crisis practices after the immediate threat passes. We can’t assume we’ll rise to the occasion. We can’t assume that escalating disasters will galvanize collective action rather than fragmenting it. Destabilization begets more destabilization, which undermines the capacity for coordination that climate response requires.

Given all this, why aren’t more people already working on stabilization interventions? Part of the answer is a persistent objection that deserves serious engagement.

Taking Moral Hazard Seriously

Critics of cooling interventions worry about moral hazard—that having a technological option will reduce pressure to decarbonize. Why do the hard work of transitioning away from fossil fuels if we can just cool the planet instead?

I don’t wave this away. The concern is legitimate because we’ve already seen fossil fuel executives use carbon removal as explicit justification for continuing their business model. The worry that the same thing could happen with cooling interventions, that fossil fuel interests could weaponize stabilization framing to delay transition, is real and needs to be addressed through how we govern these tools, not dismissed as ideological noise.

But I’ve come to believe there’s another risk we’re not weighing adequately, and it follows directly from the precarity trap I just described. If destabilization reduces our capacity to decarbonize, then the moral hazard calculation changes.

The political constituency for climate action requires some degree of economic security. The societal capacity for long-term coordination—the kind that is essential for energy transitions and international agreements—requires not being overwhelmed by cascading crises. If we let tipping points happen, we don’t just face worse climate outcomes in the physical sense; we face a world less capable of responding to them, a world where the political coalitions and institutional capacity and public bandwidth needed for decarbonization have been eroded by compound disasters.

Stabilization doesn’t let us off the hook. Rather, it preserves the conditions under which we can stay on the hook.

The logic runs like this:

• Stabilization interventions preserve climate stability,

• which preserves economic and social functioning,

• which preserves the political space for sustained climate action,

• which enables continued progress on decarbonization and carbon removal.

This path is a virtuous cycle where buying time creates the conditions for lasting solutions.

The alternative runs the other direction:

• Uncontrolled warming triggers tipping points,

• which cause economic disruption,

• which fuels political chaos,

• which reduces coordination capacity,

• which allows more warming.

That’s a doom loop, and once we’re in it, the off-ramps get harder to reach.

The risk-risk framing (risk of moral hazard coupled with the risk of destabilization of society) doesn’t make moral hazard disappear, but it does contextualize it. Both risks are real. Responsible governance of stabilization interventions would need to explicitly couple any deployment with maintained and accelerated decarbonization. The goal is both/and, not either/or, and if stabilization were ever used as an excuse to slow the energy transition, that would be a failure of governance, not a vindication of the tools themselves.

I’ll be direct about where I’ve landed. I believe some form of cooling intervention is likely to be deployed within the next few decades, whether through coordinated international action or unilateral desperation by countries facing existential climate impacts. Which means the question isn’t whether it happens but whether we’re prepared to do it well or badly, whether deployment happens under conditions of careful governance and broad legitimacy or under conditions of panic and conflict.

If we were ready—if we had done the research, figured out how to manage risks, built the governance frameworks, established international coordination mechanisms, and developed public understanding—I would support deploying stabilization interventions today. The suffering that climate change is already causing, and will increasingly cause, argues for acting quickly once we know how to act responsibly. But the “if we were ready” in that sentence is doing a lot of work. We’re not ready. We need to get ready. And getting ready requires being able to have the conversation.

Building Cultural Permission

Over the past year, I’ve had dozens of conversations—probably fifty or more—with people working across the climate interventions space. They span researchers, governance experts, funders, communicators, entrepreneurs, and policymakers. The pattern that emerged is stark: there is not enough philanthropic capital flowing to this work, and public funding isn’t filling the gap either. The scale of resources going into understanding and preparing for these interventions is orders of magnitude off relative to the actual scope of the risk.

Good work is happening (I’ve written a guide to the organizations in this space) but all of them are resource-constrained. The entire field amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars for work on problems that will affect billions of people. The mismatch is staggering.

The funding bottleneck isn’t because funders don’t care about climate. Major foundations already pour resources into decarbonization, into adaptation, and into climate justice work. The bottleneck is that this particular space—cooling interventions and climate stabilization—feels too politically risky to touch.

If you’re a program officer at a major foundation that typically funds environmental work, climate interventions are either not on your radar at all, or if they are, you see them as too fraught to champion internally. There’s the chemtrails association. But more likely is your concern about moral hazard critique coming from environmental allies you respect. It feels exceptionally risky to be seen as enabling fossil fuel interests or techno-utopianism. All the dynamics I described in Part 1 of this series make advocating for this work feel like a career risk for anyone inside a foundation who might otherwise push for it.

So the funding stays on the sidelines, either ignoring the issue or waiting for someone else to go first. And without funding, the field can’t build the capacity for careful research, inclusive governance, and public engagement that would make these interventions actually viable. The permission problem and the funding problem are the same problem, each reinforcing the other.

This is what led me to conclude that cultural permission is the highest-leverage intervention point right now. Not because communications work is more important than scientific research or governance design—it isn’t—but because without cultural permission, the funding doesn’t flow. And without funding, the research and governance work can’t scale to what the problem demands.

We have to make this permissible to discuss. Not because I’m advocating deployment tomorrow, but because we need to be doing the research, building the frameworks, and preparing for decisions that are coming whether we’re ready or not. If we can’t even fund the preparation, we guarantee that when the moment arrives, we’ll be caught unprepared and forced into bad choices under bad conditions.

How do you actually move an Overton window? Ideas are memetic—they spread through networks of people who influence each other, and large shifts in what’s considered acceptable don’t happen through academic papers circulating among people who already agree. They happen when a critical mass of influential people encounter an idea, engage with it seriously, and start talking about it with each other in ways that create social proof for further engagement.

Two recent examples have shaped my thinking about what this could look like.

The abundance agenda—articulated by Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, and others—targeted a specific audience (the Democratic Party and the center-left policy world) but reached beyond it through a public book, podcasts, and sustained argument. The more people bought into the frame, the more palatable it became for policymakers to advance proposals that fit within it. The idea created permission for action that hadn’t existed before.

Leopold Aschenbrenner’s situational-awareness.ai had a similar effect in the technology community when it came out in 2024. A dense, comprehensive treatment of AGI timelines and their implications, it created a wave. Suddenly everyone in tech was reading it, discussing it, and taking seriously arguments that had been background noise before. The conversation moved from “I’ve vaguely heard concerns about this” to “we’re all actively engaging with this” in a matter of weeks. That shift from ambient awareness to active public discourse is what changes what’s politically possible.

We need something similar for climate stabilization: a comprehensive, accessible articulation of the situation that gives serious people a framework for engaging with it, something that can create a wave of understanding among the intelligentsia who shape discourse and the funders who resource work in this space.

That’s the hypothesis I’m working with. Shift what’s permissible to discuss, unlock philanthropic capital, and let that capital flow to the research and governance work that actually needs doing.

What’s Coming

In Part 1 of this series, I argued that we’re losing an information war we’re not even fighting. The narrative vacuum around climate interventions is being filled by conspiracy theorists—RFK Jr. endorsing chemtrails on daytime television, Nicole Shanahan’s “Dark MAHA Report” calling for constitutional amendments against weather modification, and content creators building audiences on paranoid fantasies about government poisoning programs. The serious people working on these questions are doing so in relative obscurity while the loudest voices spread confusion and fear.

Articles and academic conferences won’t win that war. We need a different approach.

I’m working toward what I’m calling the Stabilization Plan. This will be a comprehensive resource that combines the long-form nuanced writing this topic deserves with a strategic campaign to reach the people who shape discourse and seed these ideas where they can spread. It will have deep explanation of the climate math that makes stabilization necessary, honest assessment of each intervention option with its risks and uncertainties, direct engagement with the governance challenges we’d need to solve, and storytelling that helps people see what responsible deployment could actually look like—as well as what uncontrolled destabilization looks like if we don’t prepare.

The goal is to create an artifact around which we can orient the conversation I keep insisting we need to have, something designed from the start to reach the people who shape discourse, and through them, the funders and policymakers who can resource the work and create the political space for action.

When trying to launch a major influencing campaign, you don’t do it into a void. You build toward a moment, you prepare the ground, and you make sure when you ask people to engage they have something substantial to engage with. That’s what the Stabilization Plan will be.

We have some very important choices to make in the next few years that are going to impact outcomes on Earth for the next several centuries. We must build the cultural infrastructure that makes responsible action possible before catastrophe forces rushed and reactive decisions that lack the legitimacy that comes from inclusive deliberation.

This article—this whole series—represents the synthesis of many months of research, reading every book I could find on this topic, conversations with dozens of people working across the ecosystem, and sustained effort to think through the problem in public and get feedback. It’s my perspective, developed through immersion in this space, and it’s where I’ve landed after all that work. I expect it to evolve as I learn more and hear from others.

What I want now is feedback. Does stabilization as a framework resonate? Does this way of thinking about the problem help clarify what needs doing? What am I missing, what am I getting wrong, what objections haven’t I adequately addressed?

If this resonates with you, please share this article. The whole point is that these ideas need to spread beyond the small community already engaged with climate interventions. Permission gets built through ideas moving from person to person until a critical mass of people are thinking about them.

The community working seriously on climate interventions remains small relative to the scope of the problem. The gap between what needs doing and who’s doing it is immense. But the conversation is expanding. If you’ve read this far, you’re now part of that expansion.

The full Stabilization Framework series:

This and every other article I publish is free because I want these ideas to reach as many people as possible. Paid subscriptions are how I keep doing this work independently. They allow me to follow the research on climate interventions and meet the researchers, practitioners, founders, and policymakers shaping how this landscape evolves.

Paid members get access to our community chat, where we discuss the latest developments in climate interventions and make sense of them together. I’m sharing all the really interesting videos, papers, stories, and other links I’m coming across in there. If you’ve found value in this newsletter, I’d appreciate your support.

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A few months ago I wrote about facilitating a breakout session on narrative and communications at a Climate Emergencies Forum workshop. There were serious people at that table, folks with real expertise in climate communications and policy, and we had a genuine conversation about how to share messages that actually resonate with what people care about. We all knew the common takes about how climate change never ranks high in voter priorities relative to things like economic affordability and healthcare. The outcome from the session—which I helped shape as facilitator—was that the field should do more demographic research, compile the results, and find ways to train the various organizations working on catastrophic climate risk to speak about these issues more effectively in a way that resonated more with what regular people care about.

I left feeling frustrated with myself as much as anything, and I think I understood why even in the moment.

From my experience in the startup and tech world, I’ve come to believe that if you want to reach large numbers of people about something important, you can’t rely on focus groups and message training alone. You need to lead strongly with a perspective rather than hedging everything into mush. You have to use the channels people are actually using, which means podcasts and YouTube and social media and newsletters, not just op-eds and position papers that circulate among people who already agree with you (though I think op-eds like this are helpful). And you need to engage with people as if they’re intelligent adults who can hold complexity in their heads.

The people at that workshop weren't wrong about what they proposed. Demographic research and communications training are useful things. But I kept feeling like there was a deeper issue that none of us were naming: we were approaching a permission problem with messaging tools. It's what the field knows how to do. It's also not sufficient.

The permission problem

A politician who wants to engage seriously with sunlight reflection or other climate interventions will face attacks from multiple directions at once. Conspiracy theorists will accuse them of pushing chemtrails. And environmental groups will warn about moral hazard and giving fossil fuel companies an excuse to keep drilling. Scientists who work on this stuff often avoid public engagement because it puts their careers at risk, and I’ve watched other scientists actively censor colleagues who try to raise these topics publicly.

The Overton window for discussing interventions that respond to catastrophic climate risk currently runs from vociferous opposition to careful neutrality, and that’s the entire range of acceptable opinion. There’s almost no space for someone to say “I think we need to seriously prepare for these interventions” without facing professional consequences.

You can’t fix that with better messaging. No amount of demographic research will change the fact that taking a public position on this stuff can harm your career. Searching for just the right words won’t solve this. The real problem is that cultural permission to even have the conversation doesn’t exist.

Messaging is about finding the right words to make your position palatable within the current range of acceptable opinion. Permission-building is about expanding that range in the first place. They're different problems requiring different tools.

Two different worlds

I’ve been thinking about why this permission problem persists when the people working on climate interventions clearly understand it is real. And I think the answer is that this field operates almost entirely within a set of institutions whose tools aren’t suited to permission-building, even though they’re essential for everything else.

Call it World 1: academia, research institutions, policy organizations, international bodies, government agencies. This world operates through peer review and consensus-building and careful deliberation. It moves slowly on purpose, because when you’re trying to establish scientific credibility or develop governance frameworks for interventions that could affect the entire planet, moving slowly is appropriate. World 1 has also made genuine efforts toward global inclusion, with organizations like the Degrees Initiative funding researchers in the Global South so that climate-vulnerable nations can develop their own expertise rather than depending on wealthy Northern institutions to make decisions for them.

World 1 should be leading on climate interventions that respond to catastrophic risk. I believe that. The stakes are too high and the governance questions too serious for the move-fast-and-break-things approach. But World 1 cannot build cultural permission through its channels. Academic papers and institutional reports don’t shift what’s speakable in mainstream conversation anymore. Policy briefs don’t create the conditions where an elected official can engage with these topics publicly without getting destroyed from both sides.

Then there’s World 2, which is where I come from: tech, startups, venture capital, as well as podcasters, newsletter writers, YouTubers, entertainment, and the entire ecosystem of people competing for attention in digital media. World 2 moves fast and iterates constantly and thinks about distribution and audience-building in ways that would feel foreign to most researchers. It’s also where the vast majority of people actually encounter new ideas, including the policymakers and philanthropists and business leaders that World 1 ultimately needs to influence. When someone wants to get up to speed on an unfamiliar topic, they’re more likely to start with a podcast episode or a well-written essay than a literature review.

World 2 also tends to be heavily American in ways it doesn’t always recognize. The platforms are American, the venture capital is mostly American, and the cultural assumptions about how things should work are shaped by Silicon Valley. People building things in World 2 aren’t always thinking carefully about how their work lands in Bangladesh or Nigeria or Brazil.

For climate interventions responding to catastrophic risk, World 2 is almost completely empty. The serious work happens in World 1, which is appropriate. But the accessible channels where most people form their opinions are filled with conspiracy theories on one end and sensationalized startup drama on the other. Almost nobody is doing the work of translating World 1’s careful research into forms that can actually build cultural permission.

What happens when World 2 rushes in without understanding World 1

There are a few exceptions, and from where I sit, I don’t think it’s going all that well.

Make Sunsets has been launching high-altitude balloons releasing small amounts of sulfur dioxide, first in Mexico and then in the US. The logic is classic World 2 thinking: the crisis is urgent, institutions are moving too slowly, someone should just demonstrate that this technology works rather than waiting around for permission. The result has been backlash that makes World 1’s work harder. Mexico allegedly banned outdoor SRM experiments in response. The EPA sent inquiries (which Make Sunsets responded to, to their credit). People working in policy circles tell me that when they meet with congressional staffers about climate interventions, the first question they get is often “what about Make Sunsets?” and they have to spend precious time managing that conversation before they can discuss anything substantive.

At the same time, more people are aware of the potential to cool the planet through Make Sunsets' work. I've spoken with some of their customers, and they feel inspired and optimistic about the possibility of taking action on global temperature. That's a good thing. Creating hope and a sense of agency is a goal I share. Whether that tactical tradeoff is worth the governance backlash, I genuinely don't know.

Stardust presents a different kind of problem. They recently raised $60 million in venture funding to develop novel cooling particles. I can trace the logic of their decisions step by step, and each one makes sense in isolation:

1. Sulfur dioxide (for SAI) is a pollutant with health impacts and potential risk to the ozone layer, so why not engineer something better?

2. Philanthropic funding for this kind of work isn’t flowing at scale, so raise venture capital because that’s where the money is.

3. Venture capital requires returns on investment, so develop proprietary intellectual property that you can commercialize.

But the endpoint of that chain is a private company trying to own IP on planetary-scale interventions, which creates incentive structures that are fundamentally misaligned with the governance requirements for something that affects everyone on Earth.

The closest analogy I can find is nuclear weapons. Not because cooling particles are necessarily weapons (though they could be), but because the effects are inherently global. We wouldn't tolerate a venture-backed startup developing nuclear bomb capabilities and then shopping them to governments with assurances about responsible use. We built an entire international framework around the recognition that some technologies are too consequential for that model. Stratospheric interventions have a similar scope: release particles into the stratosphere and they circulate globally. There's no version of "one country deploys this for itself." The intervention is planetary by nature, which is what makes private IP ownership on the core methods so structurally problematic.

I recognize the counterargument: if everyone waits for governance frameworks to catch up before developing anything, we might wait too long. That's a real tension, and I don't have a clean answer for it. But there's a difference between private companies providing implementation services under public direction—building capacity that governance frameworks can eventually direct—and private companies developing proprietary control over the intervention itself. The latter inverts the relationship that legitimate governance would require.

I’m not attacking these companies or the people behind them. I understand why they made the choices they made, and honestly, a decade ago I might have made similar ones. But the pattern is World 2 actors getting frustrated with World 1’s pace and charging ahead without understanding why World 1’s slow legitimacy-building process actually matters. The backlash from these efforts makes the permission problem worse, not better. And the more this happens, the more climate interventions get framed in mainstream coverage as billionaire tech bros trying to hack the planet, which is political poison for the researchers and policymakers who need public trust to do their jobs.

The bridge that needs building

So here’s where I’ve landed after a year of trying to understand this ecosystem and figure out where I might contribute.

World 1 should lead on climate interventions responding to catastrophic risk. I genuinely believe that. But World 1 alone can’t build the cultural permission it needs to lead effectively, because its tools and channels aren’t suited for that work.

World 2 has the tools and instincts for building cultural permission, but it’s mostly not engaged with this space. And when World 2 actors do engage, they tend to make things worse by racing ahead of the legitimacy infrastructure that World 1 is trying to build.

The gap is World 2 work that’s genuinely in service of what World 1 needs. Not replacing World 1’s leadership, but enabling it. What we need is narrative work, accessible communication, and cultural content, all oriented toward creating the conditions where serious governance conversations can actually happen rather than getting derailed by controversy.

I come from World 2. I spent years building a carbon removal company and thinking about how to create markets and shift cultural narratives (and we were largely successful!) I’ve now spent the past year immersed in World 1 for climate interventions, learning from researchers and policy people and trying to understand what they’re doing and what they need. What I keep seeing is two worlds that barely talk to each other, and a permission problem that neither one can solve on its own. Both are needed!

Building that bridge is what I’m trying to do. I want to build the cultural permission that makes World 1’s leadership actually possible. I want to make this category of interventions feel like something serious people can discuss openly, rather than something that ends careers and attracts attacks from all directions.

Next week I’ll write about what that work actually looks like in practice: the stabilization framework, and what needs to exist to make it real.

Part 1 in this series:

Part 3 in this series:

This and every other article I publish is free because I want these ideas to reach as many people as possible. Paid subscriptions are how I keep doing this work independently. They allow me to follow the research on climate interventions and meet the researchers, practitioners, founders, and policymakers shaping how this landscape evolves.

Paid members get access to our community chat, where we discuss the latest developments in climate interventions and make sense of them together. I’m sharing all the really interesting videos, papers, stories, and other links I’m coming across in there. If you’ve found value in this newsletter, I’d appreciate your support.

Subscribe now

That’s the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services endorsing the chemtrails conspiracy theory.

In July, his former running mate Nicole Shanahan published what she called the “Dark MAHA Report on Geoengineering,” sourced to an anonymous whistleblower with supposed high-level security clearances. The report calls for a constitutional amendment(!) “guaranteeing the right to unaltered weather in America” and conflates legitimate scientific research on cooling interventions with secret government poisoning programs. It’s been amplified across conspiracy networks as vindication for what the chemtrails crowd has been saying all along.

I know we already know this about many other aspects of the Trump administration, but it needs to be said about this too: the conspiracy theorists aren’t coming. They are already running things.

The narrative vacuum

There’s a vacuum right now around cooling interventions, and it’s getting filled, just not by the people doing careful work on these questions.

When most people first encounter the idea that humans might deliberately cool the planet, where do they encounter it? Possibly chemtrails videos on YouTube. Or maybe the recent wave of coverage around Stardust, the startup that announced a $60 million funding round and got written up in the New Yorker, Politico, the Atlantic, and MIT Tech Review. The stories focus overwhelmingly on controversy: will they actually do this, should anyone be allowed to, who decides, what could go wrong, etc. Controversy drives clicks, so controversy is what gets covered.

Meanwhile, there are hundreds of researchers doing diligent, rigorous work. The Degrees Initiative is building research capacity in the Global South so that climate-vulnerable nations can develop their own scientific expertise on these questions rather than depending entirely on research from wealthy Western institutions. SRM360 tracks developments across the field and creates educational resources. The University of Chicago’s Climate Systems Engineering initiative is advancing the underlying science. Reflective is building knowledge infrastructure to inform decisions about stratospheric aerosol injection. Both the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering and the Centre for Future Generations are working on governance frameworks to ensure these decisions get made legitimately. Operaatio Arktis is working with Nordic governments to address Arctic tipping point risks.

None of this gets the coverage. Journalists gravitate toward Make Sunsets launching balloons in Mexico, city councils shutting down marine cloud brightening experiments, and RFK Jr. making wild claims on daytime television. The people trying to carefully understand the science and build appropriate governance? They’re working in relative obscurity while the vacuum fills with something else.

I don’t actually think it’s a problem that conspiracy theorists exist. I don’t buy into the idea from the last 10 years that we would be better off if we could just “prevent misinformation.” Conspiracy theorists have always existed and always will.

The actual problem is the absence of an accessible alternative—a positive vision for what responsible cooling interventions might look like that ordinary people can understand and evaluate. Without that, conspiracy thinking becomes the default frame, because it’s the only frame available.

The trust vacuum pattern

COVID showed us how this works.

In the early months of the pandemic, US public health institutions made choices that turned out to be catastrophic for trust. Officials told people masks wouldn’t help while internally working to preserve supplies for healthcare workers. Vaccine messaging shifted from “prevents infection” to “prevents severe disease” to eventually just “prevents severe outcomes”—without ever clearly acknowledging what had changed or why. The message that vaccines would prevent transmission was used to justify policies long after we knew it wasn’t really true. Questions about whether the virus originated in a laboratory were dismissed as conspiracy thinking before eventually being treated as legitimate scientific inquiry.

I got vaccinated, I wore masks for a long time, and I’m not trying to relitigate every decision. But the pattern that emerged wasn’t just “difficult calls in a fast-moving crisis.” It was institutions that didn’t update their public messaging even when they had better information, that kept policies in place past their justification, that seemed to treat the public as something to be managed rather than informed. Whatever the intentions, the result was a trust vacuum. And that vacuum got filled by people positioning themselves as truth-tellers against a lying establishment. RFK Jr. had been an anti-vaccine activist for years, but the pandemic gave him a massive platform and a narrative that resonated: they lied to you about masks, they lied to you about vaccines, they lied to you about the lab leak, what else are they lying about?

Vaccine hesitancy is higher now than before COVID. The person who built that platform is running the country’s public health agencies, and he’s not just pushing anti-vax theories—he’s pushing chemtrails theories too, from a cabinet position, on national television.

The instinct to stay quiet

There’s a wariness in the climate interventions community about public engagement, and I’ve sensed it in conversations even when nobody states it directly.

These are genuinely complex decisions that require careful deliberation, so the wariness does seem somewhat prudent. Researchers need space to think through problems without being shouted at by people who don’t understand what they’re studying. Going too public too fast risks politicizing the issue before the science is mature enough to withstand political pressure. And the chemtrails problem is real. Any public discussion risks amplifying conspiracy theories rather than displacing them.

There’s also serious academic work on how to do public engagement well. There are methodologies for informed deliberation, frameworks for including affected communities, and research on what kinds of communication actually build understanding rather than backlash. That work is valuable and I would like to see more of it happening. But there’s a difference between a careful community engagement process and what I’d call public leadership: making an affirmative case about what the situation actually is and what we’re proposing to do about it.

There is a strong argument that these intervention decisions will ultimately be made by elite institutions—governments, international bodies, research consortiums—not through popular referendum. That’s how representative democracy works. The fastest path to good policy might run through institutional channels, not public campaigns.

But this logic has a gap: working through institutional channels doesn’t prevent public conversation. It just means that conversation happens without input from the people who understand what they’re talking about.

What happens when you cede the field

The public conversation happens regardless of whether researchers participate in it.

It fills with RFK Jr. on Dr. Phil. It fills with Nicole Shanahan’s absurd Dark MAHA Report. It fills with state legislators in Tennessee and Florida passing bills to ban “geoengineering” based on chemtrails conspiracy theories rather than any understanding of what researchers are actually studying. Meanwhile, the only mainstream coverage of actual climate intervention work comes when a startup raises money. The Stardust $60 million round got written up everywhere, while the steady work of research institutions goes largely unreported.

This isn’t a criticism of researchers for focusing on research, or of institutions for working through institutional channels. That’s their job, and they’re doing important work. The gap I’m identifying is a different role that nobody is filling. This is the work of making an accessible, affirmative public case for why we need to be studying these interventions and what a responsible path forward might look like.

And the people in those institutions consume accessible media too. Policymakers and funders listen to podcasts on their commute, read newsletters and Substacks, scroll social media like everyone else. When someone wants to understand a new topic, they might very well start with a podcast episode or a well-written essay, not a literature review. Working through institutional channels and communicating through accessible channels aren’t mutually exclusive—and the second can actually support the first.

What leadership looks like

I recently watched Deep Impact (for the first time!), and I was struck by the depiction of Morgan Freeman as president facing an extinction-level asteroid. He has to tell the country that civilization might end. He doesn’t hide it or downplay it, but he also doesn’t just deliver bad news and walk away. He lays out what the government is doing. He’s honest about uncertainty. He treats the public like adults who can handle hard information when it’s delivered with clarity and compassion and paired with a plan.

That’s what I want to see on climate interventions. Honesty about the threat and what we don’t yet know, paired with a clear articulation of what we’re proposing to do about it.

We’re obviously not getting that from the current administration. But leadership doesn’t have to come from government. Researchers like David Keith and Daniele Visioni already speak plainly about what they’re learning—that’s not the gap. The gap is in making an affirmative case for why we’re going to need these interventions, not just explaining the research. It’s the difference between “here’s what we’re studying and here are the uncertainties” and “based on what we know about tipping points and timelines, we need to be preparing for large-scale climate interventions, and here’s what a responsible path forward looks like.” That second message is what’s missing from public discourse, and it’s hard for researchers in institutional positions to deliver it.

That leadership also has to be genuinely global. Right now, the vacuum is being filled by American culture-war insanity. It’s our conspiracy theorists, our political circus, our tendency to turn everything into content for online fights. That’s a problem for the whole world, because climate change affects everyone and any interventions would too. The nations most vulnerable to climate impacts—the ones who will suffer the worst consequences of both continued warming and any interventions we might pursue—should have voice in these decisions precisely because they bear the most risk. The people who will live with the consequences have a stronger claim to shaping the decisions than those who caused the problem and will be more insulated from its effects. A leadership vacuum filled by US conspiracy theorists isn’t just an American failure. It’s a failure of the entire global conversation that needs to happen.

Why I keep talking about stabilization

We need language for this that isn’t captured by either conspiracy theorists or techno-utopians.

“Geoengineering” is loaded. It sounds like playing God, and it gets conflated with everything from weather modification to chemtrails to Bond villain schemes. “Solar radiation modification” is accurate but it’s jargon, the kind of term that makes normal people tune out immediately. Scientists talk about restoring “Holocene-like conditions,” which is precise but means nothing to anyone who isn’t already deep in climate science.

I’ve written before about why stability is the frame I keep returning to. What we actually want is stable conditions—the kind where the massive work of decarbonization and carbon removal can succeed, where supply chains and insurance markets function, where we’re not constantly responding to cascading crises that make long-term planning impossible.

So I use a simple framework: reduce, remove, stabilize.

Reduce emissions through decarbonization and the energy transition. Remove carbon dioxide through nature-based approaches like forests and soil, as well as engineered solutions like direct air capture, enhanced weathering, and ocean-based methods. Stabilize conditions through cooling interventions, ice sheet protection, ecosystem preservation, and whatever else it takes to prevent tipping points from cascading while the other two tools scale up.

None of these alone is sufficient. Reducing emissions is essential but won’t lower temperatures for decades or even centuries—it only slows the rate of increase. Removing carbon is essential but won’t meaningfully affect temperature until the second half of the century. Stabilizing conditions could work faster, but only makes sense as part of an integrated approach where we’re also addressing the underlying accumulation of greenhouse gases. We need all three working together.

The stakes

We can’t afford to let the RFK Jrs of the world own this narrative by default.

That’s what happens when people who understand the science stay in insider channels while conspiracy theorists dominate the accessible ones. It’s what happens when the only public-facing stories are about controversy and when the people doing serious work on climate interventions don’t feel empowered to make an affirmative case for what they’re studying and why it matters.

The researchers and governance experts working on these questions aren’t doing anything wrong. They have roles and constraints and theories of change that make sense for their positions. Academic institutions are unlikely to directly advocate for cooling interventions. Research programs need to maintain credibility.

The gap I’m pointing to isn’t their failure though. What I’m trying to point out is an opportunity that nobody is filling. Almost no one is doing narrative work in accessible channels. Almost no one is building the cultural permission space that would make it easier for everyone else to do their work.

That’s what I’m building. Not a campaign to convince people of a particular policy outcome, but an effort to make it possible to have honest conversations about the full range of climate interventions before crisis forces decisions that haven’t been thought through.

What does building that actually look like in practice? It turns out the answer depends a lot on which world you’re operating in. There are two very different ecosystems with different logics for how change happens, and they barely talk to each other. More on that in my next post.

Part 2 in this series:

Part 3:

This and every other article I publish is free because I want these ideas to reach as many people as possible. Paid subscriptions are how I keep doing this work independently. They allow me to follow the research on climate interventions and meet the researchers, practitioners, founders, and policymakers shaping how this landscape evolves.

Paid members get access to our community chat, where we discuss the latest developments in climate interventions and make sense of them together. I’m sharing all the really interesting videos, papers, stories, and other links I’m coming across in there. If you’ve found value in this newsletter, I’d appreciate your support.

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I negotiated with the company to buy a chunk of the IP. I got the carbonremoval.com domain, the social media accounts, and the podcast (Ross still publishes new episodes of Reversing Climate Change, FYI). I made a list of everything I wanted to save.

But…I forgot to include YouTube on that list.

The account was tied to a Google Workspace that got deleted, and years of video content went with it. I only recently discovered that I have a lot of it backed up in an old Dropbox folder on my laptop, including all the recordings from Reversapalooza, the conference we hosted in April 2018.

As we’re heading into the end of the year, I wanted to make this archive available. I’ve been meaning to do something with it, and I’d rather share it now than risk losing it again.

Reversapalooza

In April 2018, we brought together about 100 people in Seattle for two days. In attendance were scientists, farmers, ranchers, entrepreneurs, and sustainability directors. We were trying to convene everyone who believed carbon removal was real and figure out how to actually build a market for it.

Carbon removal still faced serious moral hazard objections at the time. A lot of climate advocates thought that talking about CDR would give fossil fuel companies cover to keep drilling. The people who were actually working on it were scattered across academia, agriculture, and a handful of early startups, and there wasn’t much connecting them to each other.

Among the speakers, Klaus Lackner from Arizona State was there as an early advisor to Nori. We brought in Keith Paustian from Colorado State, Rattan Lal from Ohio State, and David Montgomery from the University of Washington to talk about soil carbon. Ethan Steinberg presented on agroforestry. We had people from the Buckminster Fuller Institute, EDF, and the Savory Institute. Amanda Ravenhill from BFI gave the opening plenary.

We ran a carbon trading simulation game. We demoed an early version of the Nori marketplace. We spent a lot of time discussing verification, because the core question was always how do you actually prove that carbon got removed. We were working backwards from the idea that if you’re going to build a transaction-fee marketplace, you need volume, and in late 2017 when we founded the company, the only method with any real scale potential was regenerative agriculture.

Déjà Vu

Going through this material, I keep having the same feeling that I’ve seen all of this before.

The arguments we were navigating then—moral hazard, “natural” vs. “engineered” solutions, whether it was too early to be talking about this stuff publicly—I’m hearing very similar arguments now in the climate interventions space. The technologies are different, but a lot of the patterns are the same.

For anyone working on cooling interventions or SRM who keeps running into the “but won’t this distract from emissions reduction” objection: the carbon removal community heard the exact same thing seven years ago. The field kept building anyway.

The Archive

I’ve uploaded the videos to YouTube and I’m linking them here. I’m also attaching some documents that I think are worth preserving.

Reversapalooza Sessions

The whole playlist: Nori Archive

1. Introduction

2. Carbon Markets Today

3. Carbon Removal Methodologies (soil, mine tailings, DAC, agroforestry)

4. Nori CRC Trading Game

5. Nori Marketplace Demo

6. Blockchain & Nori 101

7. Open Source Tech Presentations

8. Returning the Carbon to the Ground

9. Proving the Carbon is Removed

Visual Notes

Catherine Madden did visual note-taking throughout the conference, and her illustrated notes capture the conversations in a way that’s different from just watching the recordings.

Reversapalooza Visual Notes

4.12MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

e.g.:

The White Paper

This was our detailed writeup of how we saw the state of carbon markets in 2017-18, what we wanted to build, and how we planned to do it. It’s long, but it’s a pretty thorough snapshot of our thinking at the time.

Nori White Paper

1.32MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

The Founders

Here are all seven of us in late 2017.

Why I’m Sharing This

I want this archive to exist somewhere accessible. The Internet Archive has a snapshot of the old Reversapalooza website, but having the actual video content available matters to me.

There’s also something useful about being able to see what building from zero looks like. The carbon removal industry now gets measured in billions of dollars of investment and real policy attention. In 2018, there were research centers, policy groups, and a handful of startups working on this, but whether it would ever grow into a real industry was still an open question. The whole field was small enough that you could get a meaningful cross-section of it into a single conference room, trying to figure out if any of this was actually going to work.

It has been messier than we planned and much slower than we hoped, and we’re still very early in what’s going to be a long haul. But the industry exists now in a way that it didn’t then, and that’s meaningful progress.

This past October, I co-hosted a dinner in London with Tito Jankowski from AirMiners. We were at the Carbon Unbound conference, and after day one wrapped, about 20 carbon removal founders gathered in a private dining room near Liverpool Street Station.

We called it “Are We On Track?” We didn’t mention that we’d be getting into cooling interventions.

We opened with a presentation on catastrophic tipping point risks—AMOC collapse, ice sheet destabilization, and Amazon dieback. We walked through the timeline reality: warming acceleration and the gap between where CDR is now and where it would need to be. If we’re going to hit 10 billion tonnes of removal by 2050, the scaling curve says we should be approaching hundreds of millions of tonnes by 2030. That’s four years away. We’re currently doing single-digit millions. We asked the room: Do you think we’re on track?

Throughout the presentation, we broke into smaller discussions. Tito, Mark Turner from SRM360, and I facilitated conversations about the timeline problem, tipping point risks, and eventually the cooling interventions that might buy us time—stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening, approaches that most of them had heard of but never really engaged with.

Towards the end, someone at the table said something that’s stuck with me: “This is crazy, and I don’t think we should do it, but I want to learn more.”

That’s the response I was hoping for. I wouldn’t expect anyone to react enthusiastically to this stuff—that would be kind of weird. And I’d hope they wouldn’t dismiss it outright, because then we’d have failed at what we were trying to do. What I wanted was honest discomfort paired with intellectual curiosity. That’s what we got.

This piece is about why CDR people are uniquely positioned to engage with cooling interventions, and what that means for how we close the perception gap.

The Context Problem

I spend a lot of time thinking about how we get from where we are now—cooling interventions as a taboo topic most people haven’t engaged with—to where we need to be: a society that’s informed enough to make good decisions about these tools before we’re desperate.

The bottleneck isn’t technology or cost. Unlike solar panels or DAC plants, you can’t just point to a working system and let results make the case. The barriers are cognitive and political: governance, research gaps, and public understanding. Whether we’re ready to use these tools responsibly when we need them depends on whether enough of the right people understand them to have informed conversations. Right now, we can’t even get to the hard questions about governance and deployment because most people don’t know the basics.

So if the goal is closing that perception gap, the question becomes: who’s closest to having the context they need? Where’s the shortest path?

Most climate intervention content doesn’t help here. Academic papers and specialist conferences assume you already get it. Basic explainers assume you need to learn what albedo means. There’s almost nothing for people who are partway there.

Two Dimensions of Awareness

I used to think of this as a ladder composed of rungs of understanding, with SRM researchers at the top and the general public at the bottom. Just move people up the ladder, and we’d get more understanding and awareness.

I’ve come to realize that framing is incorrect, however. There are actually two separate things people need to understand.

The first is timeline awareness. How deeply have you internalized that our current approach isn’t working fast enough?

Some people still believe the clean energy transition will handle climate change on its own. Others know we need carbon removal but assume we’ll scale it in time. Some are starting to realize CDR isn’t scaling fast enough. And a smaller group has accepted that even with maximum effort, CDR mathematically can’t close the gap before we hit tipping points.

The second is intervention awareness. How much do you know about cooling methods?

Some people have never heard of them, or only know the chemtrails conspiracy version. Others are vaguely aware SRM exists but think it’s fringe science fiction. Some know the methods exist but haven’t looked into specifics. And a small group actually understands the approaches, the trade-offs, and the governance challenges.

The moment when cooling interventions start to seem necessary—not desirable, but necessary—is when someone gets far enough on both dimensions. You need to understand how bad the timeline problem is AND understand that these tools exist and what they involve.

One without the other doesn’t get you there.

Where CDR People Sit

Here’s what I’ve noticed: CDR people are already far along on understanding the timeline problem. They just haven’t engaged with cooling interventions.

All of them know CDR is necessary. That’s why they’re in the field. Many are starting to worry about whether it’s scaling fast enough. They see the gap between where we are and where we need to be. Some have fully internalized that even heroic scaling efforts probably won’t close the gap in time for tipping points.

But on intervention awareness? Most have barely engaged. They’ve heard of geoengineering, usually with negative connotations. They haven’t looked into how SAI or MCB actually work, what the trade-offs are, or why governance rather than technology is the real bottleneck.

Compare that to other groups. Sustainability professionals often still believe mitigation plus some CDR will handle everything. Climate-engaged consumers might not even know what carbon removal is. These folks need to move on both dimensions, which means they’re further from the destination on both fronts.

CDR people are one dimension away. Everyone else is two.

What CDR People Already Have

The carbon removal community has done a lot of cognitive work that most people haven’t.

They’ve accepted that reducing emissions isn’t enough. That was itself controversial not long ago. They’ve made that leap.

They’ve dealt with the moral hazard argument. “CDR lets polluters off the hook!” They’ve heard this, wrestled with it, and concluded the tools are still necessary. They know how to think about approaches that could theoretically be misused as excuses for inaction.

They’ve internalized that timing matters. Carbon removal isn’t just about pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere eventually. It’s about doing it fast enough to matter. When you act affects what’s possible.

They think in portfolio terms. Climate response isn’t one solution. It’s a set of approaches working together. This is just obvious to CDR people.

And they understand the scale problem viscerally. The gap between current removal capacity and what we need isn’t abstract to them. Anyone who’s tried to build in this space feels it.

That’s a lot of ground already covered.

What’s missing is smaller. The specific math showing that even aggressive CDR can’t scale in time for tipping points. Awareness that cooling interventions are real options, not science fiction. Understanding that governance and politics are the blockers, not technology. And maybe some permission to engage with this stuff without feeling like they’re abandoning the mitigation mission.

Getting Up to Speed

I’ve written about both of these dimensions elsewhere, so I won’t rehash everything here.

If you want to go deeper on the timeline problem—why I think even aggressive CDR scaling won’t close the gap before tipping points—I wrote about James Hansen’s acceleration paper and my own “timeline collapse moment” in Break Glass, Cool Planet. The CDR scaling math specifically is in We Won’t Achieve Gigatonne Carbon Removal.

If you want to understand cooling interventions themselves—the methods, trade-offs, governance challenges, and why this isn’t science fiction—I put together a resource guide: How to Learn Everything You Need to Know About Climate Cooling.

When both pieces click, the conclusion isn’t that we should deploy tomorrow. It’s that we need to take this seriously now, while there’s still time to prepare responsibly.

What the Dinner Showed

We didn’t open that London dinner by arguing for geoengineering. That would’ve been the wrong move.

We started with questions CDR people already cared about. Are we on track? What happens if removal doesn’t scale fast enough? What options do we actually have?

The cooling methods came last, after we’d established the timeline reality. By that point, people weren’t asking whether these tools were legitimate. They were asking what they needed to learn.

The pattern across the conversations was pretty consistent. Initial discomfort that this feels like giving up on mitigation. Then some version of intellectual honesty—but if the math doesn’t work, what’s the alternative? And then curiosity: “I don’t know enough about this yet.”

That’s the response I was hoping for. Discomfort plus curiosity. A willingness to engage with something that feels wrong because the stakes demand it.

What I’m Asking

If you work in carbon removal, you’ve already done most of the hard work.

You’ve accepted that mitigation alone won’t solve this. You’ve navigated the moral hazard debates. You think in portfolio terms. You know the timeline matters.

I’m not asking you to become an SRM advocate. I’m asking you to get informed. Understand the methods well enough to form an opinion. Know the trade-offs, the governance challenges, the open questions.

Because this conversation is going to happen. And when it does, you’ll want to have done the reading.

“This is crazy, and I don’t think we should do it, but I want to learn more.”

That’s where it starts.

This and every other article I publish is free because I want these ideas to reach as many people as possible. Paid subscriptions are how I keep doing this work independently. They allow me to follow the research on climate interventions and meet the researchers, practitioners, founders, and policymakers shaping how this landscape evolves.

Paid members get access to our community chat, where we discuss the latest developments in climate interventions and make sense of them together. I’m sharing all the really interesting videos, papers, stories, and other links I’m coming across in there. If you’ve found value in this newsletter, I’d appreciate your support.

Subscribe now

COP30 just wrapped in Belém. You’ve seen the takes already: disappointment about fossil fuels, cautious optimism about forests, and debates over whether it was a success or failure. I’m not going to re-litigate the negotiations because that’s not my beat.

But I want to name something that’s been crystallizing for me over the past several months. Something that explains why these conferences keep producing the same pattern of raised hopes and dashed expectations. Why smart, committed people keep talking past each other. Why, after 30 years of international climate negotiations, the world remains on course for almost 3°C of warming.

We are trapped in a paradigm that no longer fits our reality.

The Emissions Management Paradigm

Since the early 1990s, the international community has organized its climate response around one central concept: emissions management. The goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and success gets measured in tonnes of CO2 avoided or removed. This framing shapes everything! From international negotiations focused on emissions targets, to national policies aiming to cut emissions, to corporate sustainability programs that track emissions footprints.

This does make intuitive sense. Emissions cause warming, so we must reduce emissions. It’s clean, logical, and also increasingly insufficient.

The emissions paradigm has given us:

• The UNFCCC (1992)

• The Kyoto Protocol (1997)

• The Paris Agreement (2015)

• 30 COPs and counting

And where are we? Emissions are still rising. We’ve breached 1.5°C. The gap between pledged action and required action grows wider each year. COP30’s own assessment: current commitments deliver less than 15% of the emissions reductions needed by 2035 to hold warming to 1.5°C.

The system’s purpose is what the system does, and this system doesn’t produce the results we need.

My Own Journey Through This Paradigm

I was a true believer in emissions management thinking. My entry into climate work came in 2015 when I started wondering: climate change seems like a problem of too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so why don’t we pull that CO2 back out? That question led me down the path of carbon removal, eventually to co-founding Nori and spending nearly a decade building infrastructure for the CDR industry.

During those years, I used to make a specific argument. I’d say: “We spend so much time focusing on the global temperature metric. What we should really be focusing on is the global atmospheric carbon number. If we could just get that number back down to 350 parts per million, we’d be in good shape.” I thought I was being clever. I’d add: “What even is the average global temperature? It’s like asking what’s the average global phone number. How useful is that?”

I was wrong. Or rather, I was incomplete.

Yes, it’s essentially correct that if we could get atmospheric carbon concentration back down to 300 or 350 ppm, we’d be a lot better off. That’s accurate as far as it goes.

But now that we’re in temperature overshoot—now that we face catastrophic risks to food systems, to insurance markets, to migratory patterns and ecosystems, now that tipping points loom within decades rather than centuries—the carbon-focused frame is no longer enough on its own. The timeline matters, the rate of change matters, the stability of the systems we depend on matters. And managing atmospheric carbon, while necessary, doesn’t directly address any of those.

I had to shift my own paradigm. That’s what I’m trying to articulate here.

Why We Talk Past Each Other

Last week, I wrote about the blurry line between adaptation and geoengineering. I was trying to understand why people who agree on the severity of the climate crisis can reach completely opposite conclusions about the same intervention.

When I shared the piece on LinkedIn, climate researcher Daniele Visioni responded with a link to something he’d written that cut right to it: “SRM only makes sense if considered through the lenses of adaptation, and not through those of mitigation.”

Through the lens of mitigation—the emissions paradigm—solar radiation management looks like cheating. It doesn’t reduce emissions. It doesn’t address the “root cause.” It could create moral hazard by reducing pressure to decarbonize. It’s a techno-fix that lets polluters off the hook.

Through the lens of adaptation—protecting lives and ecosystems from harm—SRM looks like an obvious tool to consider. We already accept that we need to adapt to climate impacts. We build seawalls, develop drought-resistant crops, install cooling centers. If we could reduce some of those impacts by reflecting a bit more sunlight, why wouldn’t we at least research that option?

Same intervention, but people reach opposite conclusions depending on which lens they’re looking through.

Carbon removal faces similar dynamics. Through the emissions lens, CDR is “negative emissions”—valuable primarily as an accounting offset. Through a different lens, it’s drawing down the excess carbon that’s destabilizing our climate system.

The paradigm you start with determines where you end up.

What Do We Actually Want?

As I mentioned last week, the systems theorist Donella Meadows identified the most powerful leverage points for changing complex systems. Near the top of her list—more powerful than changing rules, incentives, or even the structure of information flows—is changing the existing paradigm. The mindset out of which the system arises.

Which raises a question we don’t ask often enough: What do we actually want?

“End fossil fuels” is a method. “Net zero emissions” is a target. “Stay below 1.5°C” is a threshold.

But what’s the underlying goal?

I think what we actually want is stable conditions. Temperature stability. Ecosystem stability. The roughly predictable climate patterns that human civilization developed within. The conditions where we can grow food reliably, where coastlines stay where they are, where extreme weather remains extreme rather than routine, and where the systems we depend on keep functioning.

The Stability Paradigm

What if we organized our climate response around stability rather than emissions?

The organizing question shifts from “How do we reduce emissions fast enough?” to “How do we restore and maintain stable conditions?”

That sounds like a small reframe, but it’s not:

Different metrics become central. We already track temperature trajectory. And various efforts track ecosystem health, tipping point research, and climate pattern changes. But these metrics are currently subordinate to the emissions framework. In a stability paradigm, they’d be primary. The question shifts from “are we hitting our emissions targets?” to “are we actually stabilizing the system?”

All tools are evaluated the same way. Emissions reduction matters because high emissions destabilize. Methane reduction matters because it can affect temperature faster than CO2 reduction. Carbon removal matters because it helps return atmospheric CO2 toward stability. Cooling interventions matter because they can stabilize temperature faster while other tools catch up. Ecosystem protection matters because intact ecosystems buffer against instability. Catastrophic risk prevention matters because some instabilities, once triggered, cannot be reversed. No tool is inherently virtuous or suspicious—each is assessed by its contribution to stability, on the timeline that matters.

Urgency is calculated differently. In the emissions paradigm, urgency is about cumulative carbon budgets. In the stability paradigm, urgency is about proximity to tipping points and rate of destabilization. These can point in different directions. We might be “on track” for a carbon budget while racing toward an ice sheet collapse that nothing in our emissions plans addresses.

Success looks different. Success isn’t a percentage reduction from a baseline. Success is restored stability. A climate system that’s returned to predictable patterns that human civilization can work within.

Why Stability Resonates Now

There’s a reason this framing might land differently in 2025 than it would have a decade ago: we feel instability everywhere now.

The last ten years have delivered Brexit, Trump, a global pandemic, war in Ukraine, war in Gaza, the collapse of trust in institutions, social media fragmenting consensus reality, economic whiplash where nobody can agree if things are good or bad. The ground keeps shifting and nothing feels settled.

Climate change isn’t separate from this. It’s a threat multiplier that makes every other form of instability worse. Climate-driven migration increases political tensions, extreme weather disrupts supply chains, agricultural volatility feeds economic uncertainty…and it all compounds.

The emissions paradigm frames climate as one more problem on the pile. The stability paradigm reveals something different: climate stability is a precondition for addressing everything else. It’s not just another crisis competing for attention. It is the foundation that makes other solutions possible.

This is why I’ve been arguing that cooling interventions aren’t “Plan B.” They’re potentially essential for Plan A to succeed. If we can stabilize temperature faster, we create the conditions where emissions reduction and carbon removal can actually work at scale. We buy time not just for climate solutions, but for addressing everything else too.

Climate stability isn’t separate from political stability, economic stability, or food security. It’s underneath all of them.

The Void

What troubles me is that I don’t see anyone articulating what a holistic stability-focused climate strategy actually looks like.

We have emissions scenarios, net-zero roadmaps, carbon budget calculations, models of how much warming different pathways produce.

What we don’t have is a comprehensive framework that:

• Works backward from the goal of stable conditions

• Evaluates all available tools—reduce, remove, adapt, cool—against that goal

• Addresses the timeline honestly (emissions reductions won’t lower temperature at all, just slow its rise; carbon removal won’t meaningfully affect temperature until the 2100s)

• Maps the relationship between climate stability and the other forms of stability we need

• Provides a strategic plan rather than a negotiating position

The emissions paradigm has produced elaborate infrastructure: COPs, NDCs, carbon markets, disclosure frameworks, and net-zero pledges. The stability paradigm has almost nothing. There is no international framework, no shared metrics, and no common language.

I believe that’s why we keep running the same play at every COP and getting the same results. We’re negotiating within a paradigm that can’t produce what we actually need.

Shifting the Paradigm

I’m not naive about how hard paradigm shifts are. The emissions paradigm is embedded in international law, institutional mandates, career incentives, and mental models across the climate community. It’s not going to change because someone writes a newsletter post pointing out its limitations.

But paradigm shifts do happen. They start small—a few people seeing something differently, naming it, building frameworks that help others see it too. The old paradigm doesn’t get refuted so much as it gradually becomes obviously inadequate to more and more people.

I think we’re at that moment. You can see it in the repeated disappointments of international negotiations, in the growing recognition that even perfect emissions reduction won’t prevent dangerous warming in time, and in the emergence of cooling interventions as a serious research area. You can see it in the visceral experience of climate instability—heat domes, megafires, impossible hurricanes—that makes “emissions targets” feel disconnected from what’s actually happening.

The paradigm is already shifting. Can we accelerate that shift fast enough to matter?

What would it look like to take stability seriously? To develop metrics for it, institutions around it, a strategic framework that integrates all our tools in service of it?

This is the direction I’ve been building toward. Not just naming the paradigm shift, but trying to articulate what a stability-focused strategy actually looks like in practice. The honest accounting of where we are, what tools we have, what timelines we’re working with, and what it would take to restore stable conditions to our climate system.

I don’t have it all figured out yet. But I’m increasingly convinced this is both the right question, and that answering it well matters far more than winning the next round of negotiations within a paradigm that keeps producing the same results.

We’ve been managing emissions for 30 years and the climate keeps destabilizing. Maybe it’s time to try managing for stability instead.

More on this to come.

This and every other article I publish is free because I want these ideas to reach as many people as possible. Paid subscriptions are how I keep doing this work independently. They allow me to follow the research on climate interventions and meet the researchers, practitioners, founders, and policymakers shaping how this landscape evolves.

Paid members get access to our community chat, where we discuss the latest developments in climate interventions and make sense of them together. I’m sharing all the really interesting videos, papers, stories, and other links I’m coming across in there. If you’ve found value in this newsletter, I’d appreciate your support.

Subscribe now

I’ve been puzzling over something for months now, and I still don’t have a clean answer. What’s the actual difference between “adaptation” and “geoengineering”?

This isn’t just semantics. The categories matter because they determine what’s acceptable to discuss. Adaptation is something we’ve largely accepted as necessary. Nobody gets attacked for advocating better flood defenses.

Geoengineering remains taboo in most climate circles, the kind of thing that gets researchers excluded from conferences and accused of shilling for fossil fuel companies. But when I try to articulate why these things belong in different categories, I keep coming up short.

Think about what already falls under the adaptation umbrella: The Netherlands has spent centuries building an intricate system of dikes, pumps, and water management infrastructure to keep the sea at bay. Houston is constructing barriers to protect against intensifying hurricanes. California deploys thousands of firefighters and runs increasingly sophisticated forest management programs. Cities worldwide are retrofitting buildings for extreme heat, installing cooling centers, updating stormwater systems. Farmers are shifting crop varieties and planting schedules as growing seasons change.

Nobody objects to any of this. We just do it because we have to.

I spent years working to separate carbon removal from geoengineering. In the early days of the CDR industry, the two were lumped together under the same scary umbrella. “Geoengineering” meant any large-scale intentional intervention in Earth systems—including pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere. Many of us who built that industry worked deliberately to disentangle the concepts, to make carbon removal feel like a normal part of the climate toolkit rather than something hubristic and dangerous.

It worked. Today I meet people outside the climate world who casually understand and accept the idea of removing carbon from the atmosphere. They don’t flinch at it. The category shifted because we shifted it.

So I know these boundaries are malleable, which makes me wonder what’s actually holding the current line in place.

Testing the Obvious Distinctions

Is it scale? Dutch water management is massive infrastructure spanning an entire nation. California’s wildfire response mobilizes tens of thousands of people across millions of acres. Meanwhile, some proposed marine cloud brightening experiments are tiny—a single ship spraying sea salt in a limited region. Scale doesn’t cleanly separate adaptation from geoengineering.

Is it risk to others? This one has some merit. A seawall in Miami doesn’t harm anyone in Mumbai. Stratospheric aerosol injection could change monsoon patterns halfway around the world—the intervention affects people who didn’t consent to it.

But what about ice sheets? Collapse of those affects everyone too. Sea level rise from Antarctic melting will reshape coastlines globally. The harm from inaction is also transboundary. So the question becomes whether there’s a meaningful difference between causing harm through action versus allowing harm through inaction. Classic trolley problem—and I don’t think climate policy is going to settle it.

Is it about intentionality? Maybe the distinction is whether you’re trying to change a planetary system versus protecting something local. But emissions reductions are intentionally changing planetary carbon cycles—we just frame it as “stopping harm” rather than “intervention.” And protecting ice sheets would protect everyone on Earth. The intent is planetary even if the action is localized. Peter Olivier wrote a good piece on this question here.

Is it reversibility? Tear down a seawall and the situation returns to baseline. Some geoengineering approaches have termination problems—stop stratospheric aerosol injection suddenly and temperatures spike. This matters for governance and deserves serious attention.

Yet plenty of adaptation isn’t reversible either. Once you’ve relocated a coastal city, that’s permanent. Once agricultural systems have shifted and communities have reorganized, you can’t easily go back. And some proposed ice sheet interventions, like thermosiphons, seem quite reversible—pull them out and you’re back to the previous state.

Is it just familiarity? Seawalls have existed for centuries. Stratospheric aerosols feel like science fiction. This is probably the most honest explanation, but it’s not a principled distinction. It’s psychological comfort masquerading as a category.

Is it about who decides? Local adaptation gets decided locally. Geoengineering affects everyone, so governance becomes contested. This is a real challenge, but it’s a governance problem rather than a definitional one. It tells us that some interventions require far more careful deliberation—not that they belong in a fundamentally different category.

None of these hold up. The line keeps moving when I push on it.

The Case That Breaks the Frame

Ice sheets are where this really broke down for me.

If you care about sea level rise—and you should, given the hundreds of millions of people living in coastal areas—then you have to care about what’s happening in Antarctica and Greenland. The ice sheets are destabilizing and we are watching it happen in real time. And once certain thresholds are crossed, the physics becomes self-reinforcing. You don’t get to undo it.

So: should we try to protect the ice sheets?

Intuitively, this feels like adaptation. We’re protecting something precious from harm. We’re not trying to redesign the climate; we’re trying to keep what we have. It’s defensive, not offensive.

Then I read Ross Andersen’s piece in The Atlantic about what ice sheet protection would actually require, and the categories stopped making sense.

Scientists have proposed using thermosiphons—long tubes that pull heat out of the ice-bedrock interface—to freeze portions of the Thwaites Glacier in place. The concept is elegant. Thermosiphons are already used in the Arctic alongside oil pipelines to prevent permafrost melt. They’re passive, powered by temperature differentials alone. No diesel, no moving parts.

The problem is getting them there.

Andersen describes what a serious mission to stabilize Thwaites might look like. A field team of around 5,000 people deployed to one of the most remote glaciers on Earth. There’s no precedent for anything like this in polar science.

You can’t fly heavy equipment onto Thwaites because its surface is riddled with crevasses. You can’t dock ships alongside it because the ice shelf towers 100 feet above the water and constantly calves building-sized chunks of ice into the bay. The only accessible route runs through the Ronne Inlet, 750 miles away.

The logistics cascade from there. Ship thousands of containers of cargo from Chile. Trail an icebreaker into the inlet. Unload onto a 12-foot-high ice shelf. Tractor everything 150 miles inland to a staging ground. Then convoys traverse a high ice plateau alongside Antarctica’s tallest mountain range. Ground-penetrating radar operators scan for crevasses. When the snow is too thin to support a tractor, they blow up the crevasse with dynamite and fill it in with bulldozers.

After weeks on the ice, losing days to extreme weather, the convoy reaches the glacier’s edge and divides into smaller groups heading to 100+ separate drilling sites. That first season, nobody even unpacks a drill. They just build basic infrastructure and berms to keep winter snow from burying everything.

The drilling itself requires specialized hot-water equipment, made bespoke for polar missions. There are only about 50 such drills in the world. You’d need more than double that number. Each borehole could take days to complete, especially where the ice thickens to more than half a mile. Parts break constantly, and there are no hardware stores in Antarctica.

And we don’t even know if any of this would work. These are proposals, not proven solutions. Organizations like the Arête Glacier Initiative are doing foundational research to understand what’s actually happening beneath the ice sheets and what interventions might be feasible. We’re still in the early stages of asking the right questions. Some researchers think a checkerboard array of drilling sites could create enough “sticky spots” to slow the glacier’s flow. Others are skeptical. The subglacial environment is complex and poorly understood. We might try something and make it worse.

When I read that Atlantic piece, part of me thought: this is insane. Another part thought: this might be one of the most epic engineering challenges humans have ever attempted, and if we pulled it off, it would be genuinely heroic—a clear, measurable effort to protect hundreds of millions of people from displacement and suffering. Both reactions are probably appropriate.

The Uncomfortable Follow-On

Say we somehow pull this off. We mobilize an Apollo Program-scale effort, solve the logistics nightmares, develop the technology, and successfully install thermosiphons across Thwaites and other vulnerable glaciers.

That still doesn’t solve the underlying problem.

Thermosiphons pull heat from the ice-bedrock interface by exploiting temperature differentials. If ocean and air temperatures keep rising, you’re fighting a losing battle. You’re not preventing melting; you’re slowing it. This would merely buy more time.

Which brings me back to the same timeline problem I keep writing about: emissions aren’t declining fast enough, carbon removal isn’t scaling fast enough, and the temperature keeps rising. Even the most heroic adaptation efforts can only buy time if we’re not also addressing the underlying temperature trajectory.

The math still points toward needing to cool the planet.

The Paradigm Problem

Donella Meadows, the renowned systems thinker, wrote about leverage points—places where interventions in complex systems have the most impact. Near the bottom of her list in terms of impact are the things we usually focus on: parameters, numbers, subsidies, taxes. At the top is something more fundamental: the paradigm out of which the system arises. The basic assumptions we don’t even think to question.

I suspect the adaptation/geoengineering distinction is one of those unexamined paradigms.

The current frame says: adaptation is local and safe; geoengineering is planetary and scary. But when I try to find the principled boundary, it dissolves. What we have instead is a set of intuitions about what feels normal versus what feels hubristic. Seawalls feel normal because we’ve built them for centuries. Stratospheric aerosols feel dangerous because they’re unfamiliar (also because SAI does have inherent dangers).

These intuitions aren’t worthless—unfamiliarity often correlates with unexamined risks. But they’re not a rigorous basis for deciding which interventions deserve serious consideration.

Ice sheet protection sits right on the fault line. It feels like adaptation—we’re protecting something we value from harm. But the scale, complexity, and global implications start to look a lot like what we’d call geoengineering in other contexts.

A Different Frame

What if instead of categorical thinking we evaluated interventions based on their actual risk profiles?

Engineers do this routinely. You don’t ask “is this a safe technology or a dangerous technology?” in the abstract. You ask: what are the specific risks? How likely are they? How severe? What’s the uncertainty? And critically: what are the risks of the alternatives, including doing nothing?

This is a risk-risk framework. It acknowledges that every option has downsides, including inaction.

Take ice sheet protection as an example. The risks of attempting it include: technical failure after enormous resource investment, unintended consequences in a poorly understood system, and diverting attention and funding from other priorities. These are real and deserve serious weight.

The risks of not attempting it include: accelerating sea level rise, displacement of hundreds of millions of people from coastal areas, cascading economic disruption, and the political instability that follows when that many people lose their homes. These are also real.

You can make a similar comparison for stratospheric aerosol injection. Risks of action: altered precipitation patterns, ozone impacts, termination shock if deployment stops suddenly, differing outcomes affecting geopolitics, governance nightmare of who controls the deployment apparatus. Risks of inaction: continued warming toward tipping points, crop failures, heat deaths, ecosystem collapse. Neither column is empty.

The point isn’t that one side always wins. The point is that you’re comparing concrete risks against concrete risks, rather than sorting interventions into “acceptable” and “forbidden” categories based on whether they pattern-match to familiar activities.

Where I’ve Landed (For Now)

I don’t have a tidy conclusion. I started this piece trying to understand a distinction that everyone seems to treat as obvious, and I ended up less sure it’s meaningful at all.

What I do believe: the current framing—adaptation acceptable, geoengineering taboo—doesn’t survive scrutiny. It’s based on intuitions about familiarity and scale that break down when you look at specific cases. Ice sheet protection is the clearest example, but probably not the only one.

I’m not arguing we should deploy stratospheric aerosols tomorrow. I’m arguing we need better frameworks for evaluating the full range of interventions available to us. Categorical taboos aren’t a substitute for rigorous risk assessment.

The climate crisis is already forcing choices we’d rather not make. We’ll make better decisions if we’re thinking clearly about what we’re actually choosing between.

This and every other article I publish is free because I want these ideas to reach as many people as possible. Paid subscriptions are how I keep doing this work independently. They allow me to follow the research on climate interventions and meet the researchers, practitioners, founders, and policymakers shaping how this landscape evolves.

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The core argument is straightforward: carbon removal is absolutely the long-term solution. The IPCC projects we need 10 billion tonnes removed annually by 2050. I’d argue our goal should really be more like 60 billion tonnes removed every year, but even 10 billion is going to be an astronomical lift. And it has to happen one way or another, because there is no substitute for actually drawing down atmospheric CO₂ if we want to solve this permanently.

But the math doesn’t work. Carbon removal won’t scale fast enough to prevent us from crossing critical tipping points. Today we’re removing single-digit millions of tonnes. Even in optimistic scenarios, meaningful temperature reduction from CDR is a next-century solution, and the tipping points—AMOC collapse, permafrost methane release, coral reef systems—aren’t waiting that long.

Which means we’re going to have to cool the planet down while we scale up removal and drive down emissions. The question isn’t whether we’ll intervene to lower temperatures. The question is whether we’ll do it through deliberate choices made via rigorous democratic governance processes, or whether we’ll do it in desperation after crossing points of no return.

I’m not saying deploy stratospheric aerosol injection tomorrow. I’m saying that accepting “one method has problems, so let’s give up” is not a satisfactory outcome. If SAI proves unfeasible due to governance challenges or unacceptable side effects, then we find other approaches—marine cloud brightening, methane destruction, cirrus cloud thinning, approaches we haven’t thought of yet. We keep looking until we find solutions that manage the tradeoffs, minimize harm, and actually work geopolitically. The physics doesn’t care about our governance challenges. The tipping points don’t wait for us to achieve political consensus.

Carbon removal remains essential—it’s the only permanent solution, the only way to address ocean acidification, the only path that lets us eventually scale back cooling interventions. But in the meantime, we have to figure out how to bring the temperature down. Not as a replacement for emissions cuts and removal, but as a bridge that buys time for those solutions to reach the scale we desperately need.

The presentation walks through this logic: why we’re using the wrong mental model when we focus on annual emissions instead of temperature, why tipping points demand faster action than CDR can provide, and why the carbon removal community is uniquely positioned to advocate for cooling research and governance development.

If you missed the live session, this captures the core argument I’ve been building toward over the past year of writing here.