Stabilization is a term I thought I was making up. I started suggesting it last fall because I wanted a way to talk about this work that could move past geoengineering, and I think about naming more than most people in climate do because I spent ten years doing category creation in carbon removal (CDR). I was just a guy proposing a word, and I proposed it to solve some specific problems.

My intent with this article is to do two things:

1. Steelman the arguments we’ve heard against the term

2. Clarify a more specific definition of stabilization and invite further discussion, refinement, and improvement

Here are the parameters Ben and I discussed (starting last fall) as we developed the “Stabilization Plan” concept and the term that came from it:

• If important Earth systems destabilize to the point of impairing the ability of governments and markets to respond to the root causes of climate change at all, then we are in serious future danger. We simply must find ways to avoid this outcome.

• To avoid it, the field needs to grow, which means more philanthropic funding and more people coming to the space. Only a few foundations have been willing to fund research, and most of that goes to SAI. This leaves other stabilizing interventions severely underfunded, all from the same small set of funders we came to call “the usual suspects.”

• Everyone (even the interconnected usual suspects) refers to these interventions differently, so the field is fragmented in how it organizes, funds, researches, and acts on any of them.

• The fragmentation happens in part because “geoengineering” is a poisoned word that has come to mean many things, and it carries an innate hubris that turns many people off. “Climate engineering” carries most of the same turnoffs.

• To have the potential for success, this work should eventually be funded and carried out by nation states, which means politicians need to be able to talk about it in a way that garners support from their constituents.

• Emergency framing is a nonstarter.

• “Climate interventions” covers what many of these things are, but it is unlikely to galvanize anyone beyond the most involved researchers or practitioners. As a field name it sounds dangerous and risky. It’s not “for” something the way “renewable energy” or “carbon removal” or even “adaptation” are “for” solutions. It doesn’t describe a desired end state or set a goal. It doesn’t invite people to join the field and contribute. It’s not aspiring or inspiring.

The esteemed systems expert Donella Meadows wrote that her number two most effective way to intervene in a system is to change “The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises.” From Meadows:

So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.

So last fall I suggested we needed a new paradigm for thinking about these activities. I proposed that the thing we all want is stability, because stability is a necessary precondition for finishing the job of decarbonization and legacy carbon removal, which will take decades if not centuries. To those of us who have adopted the term, stabilization feels like it could be the new paradigm that helps set the “goals, power structure, rules, and culture” for striving to prevent Earth systems from destabilizing further, and the many systems downstream of them from following. I took her advice, pointed at the anomalies, and wrote a bunch of articles about it.

And the word spread further than I expected! Several groups working in this space converged on it as shared language, papers have mentioned it, we co-hosted an event in San Francisco built around it, at least two organizations (that I know of) rebranded to include Stabilization in their names, and the Global Risk and Stabilization Summit convenes in Iceland this October.

It turns out I wasn’t making it up, though. Stabilization carries a long history in climate circles, which I didn’t know when I started using it and have since learned. As more people adopted the framing, we started hearing objections from scientists, researchers, and policy folks we interacted and shared the report with. Many of these objections have changed how we use it. Other points we disagree with, and I’ll explain why. All of it is good, however, because it forces us all to discuss more directly the underlying problems we’re trying to solve together.

Most of what’s below is a composite of feedback from interviews, report responses, and calls, left unattributed since we promised interview participants confidentiality. The exception is Holly Buck, who published her opinion last week, and I respond to her thoughts directly further down.

Our initial framing on stabilization

Stabilization is work that attempts to intervene directly in Earth systems destabilized by climate change that are at risk of runaway or self-reinforcing outcomes. This is done to buy the time now required to complete implementation of slower, more permanent climate solutions.

Nobody trying to shade coral reefs by brightening clouds is purporting to stabilize the entire climate. Neither is someone who attempts to refreeze Arctic sea ice. In both cases, they are acting on systems that, if their destabilization proceeds unabated, will threaten the stability of other systems as well—from human systems like food production to ecosystems and weather. The object of a stabilization intervention is an Earth system, and the beneficiary is every system downstream of it.

An analogy we (meaning Ben and I) use frequently comes from healthcare. When a trauma team stabilizes a patient, nobody in the room believes the patient has been cured; stabilizing is the interstitial step that keeps additional treatment possible. In the same way, stabilization measures are meant to be temporary, wound down as emissions cuts and carbon removal bring the climate back toward safety.

This is also why we’ve been moving toward using stabilization by itself rather than prepending it with climate. What we’re trying to stabilize is a set of Earth systems. Calling it climate stabilization has led some people to see an all-encompassing term for all parts of climate response, while we see a need to create space alongside mitigation and adaptation.

The third pillar

The two established pillars of climate change response, reflected in the IPCC’s working group structure, are mitigation and adaptation. When we say mitigation, we mean managing the stocks and flows of greenhouse gases, cutting new emissions (decarbonization) and drawing down legacy ones (carbon dioxide removal). This is a paraphrase of the IPCC, which defines mitigation as “a human intervention to reduce emissions or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases”.

Adaptation absorbs consequences of climate change in human systems, e.g. with seawalls and heat plans and changed agricultural practices; in the IPCC’s words, it is “the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects” so as to lessen harm.

Stabilization acts on destabilizing Earth systems directly. These three pillars sort the work clearly. Halting deforestation or sequestering carbon in biochar both influence carbon stocks/flows, so they go with mitigation. Building seawalls or planting species of crops that tolerate heat better are clearly adaptation measures. Preserving an ice sheet doesn’t target greenhouse gas concentrations, so it is clearly not mitigation, and as I wrote in What’s the Difference Between Adaptation and Geoengineering?, it is also quite different from adaptation. Where, then, should it go? Our proposed answer is stabilization.

The IPCC glossary does have a stabilization entry, and while this isn’t commonly used today, it means something different: a state where the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases holds constant over time. That is mitigation’s finish line—an end state rather than a pillar of work. I address this collision between the older sense of the word and ours in the objections below.

Adding a pillar has happened before. Adaptation was not always considered a reasonable and important aspect of climate change response. Ian Burton, the geographer who did more than anyone to push adaptation onto the climate agenda from the first international climate meetings onward, spent years being told by mitigation’s most fervent advocates that even talking about adaptation was counterproductive. If we could just focus on mitigation, then adaptation wouldn’t be necessary. Here’s Al Gore in 1989:

The advice to adapt rather than prevent these [climate] changes is unwise counsel. The changes are occurring so rapidly that adaptation will not be possible without major disruptions in our civilization. The advice to adapt is an obstacle to the correct political response, which is prevention.

Burton’s answer was that both would be needed, because you “wouldn’t be able to mitigate fast enough” to escape adapting. He kept at it until the IPCC gave adaptation a working group home in the mid-1990s, and in 2021 he shared a Frontiers of Knowledge Award for the paradigm shift. He spent years doing what Meadows describes, pointing at the anomalies until the paradigm moved.

So why does stabilization need a pillar at all? The answer is the one Burton gave in the 1990s, except now we have even more data. Atmospheric CO2 reached 427 ppm in 2025. We emit around 40 billion tonnes of CO2 every year (with no sign of that going down), and the entire carbon removal industry has durably removed about one and a half million tonnes, cumulatively, ever. Even the most optimistic scaling scenarios put cumulative removal by 2050 at roughly 100 billion tonnes, which works out to only two or three years of current emissions. And CO2 does not clean itself up on any timescale that helps us. A large share of every tonne we emit stays in the atmosphere for centuries, so ending all emissions tomorrow would only stop the problem from growing without shrinking it. The Earth systems at risk will keep responding to the heat already locked in while we spend decades (potentially centuries!) scaling carbon removal. Burton said we wouldn’t mitigate fast enough to escape adapting. The numbers today say we won’t mitigate or remove fast enough to escape stabilizing.

The objections

This is just geoengineering with a new coat of paint.

I said at the top that I wanted to move past geoengineering, and so have many others, so the suspicion of a “rebrand” is fair. We argue that the renaming is necessary to change the conditions preventing the field from growing. “Geoengineering” and “Stabilization” point in different directions. Geoengineering is solutions-first. It names a set of technologies and leads with what we could do to the planet, and one of the clearest findings from our interviews was that solution-first framing turns people away while risk-first framing brings them along. Stabilization is risk-first. It names the state we want, and the only reason to pursue it is that specific Earth systems are being destabilized. The actions stay what they are—call them climate interventions or Earth-system interventions or stabilizing interventions—undertaken in service of the goal and only when justified by the risk. The contents of the term has also changed. The original geoengineering definition bundled in carbon removal, while stabilization leaves CDR as part of mitigation and includes work nobody calls geoengineering, like Arctic rewilding or localized reef cooling. In our Building Permission Space report, we made the case that this renaming is intentional and useful for the field’s goals.

Stabilization already means something else.

It does, and this was the objection we heard most from people close to the UNFCCC/IPCC processes. The Framework Convention’s stated objective is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at a safe level, so for more than thirty years “climate stabilization” has meant managing concentrations, or holding temperature at a target, or sometimes just solving climate change in general. The general take has been something like: the whole climate era began as a stabilization project, so why reach for a word the field already used up? Our response is that as we define it, stabilization is neither the stabilization of concentrations, which is mitigation’s objective, nor a fixed temperature target. The objects are particular Earth systems. And it is a very useful word that accurately describes the attempted work of this field. Our shift away from climate stabilization and toward stabilization alone attempts to integrate this feedback.

If you’re going to use it, make it the umbrella.

Some people flipped the objection around and suggested the opposite, keeping the word but making it the overarching category, a stabilization that contains mitigation and adaptation along with anything else as the means, since the point of every climate response is a stable Earth. I understand the logic, but believe the strategy is backwards. Asking the entire climate world to reorganize its language under a term we floated a year ago would be both naive and ill-advised. But adding stabilization alongside the existing pillars asks nothing of anyone except consideration and tolerance. A new umbrella also wouldn’t help create what this field needs. Large climate philanthropies and government policy agendas allocate resources to line items for mitigation, for adaptation or resilience, sometimes for carbon removal and superpollutant destruction, and whatever remains to a scattering of uncategorized projects around the edges. A new umbrella over the whole table restructures their work without creating the line item that so many uncategorized and underfunded research efforts sorely need.

Can you stabilize a system while the planet keeps warming?

Yes, partially, and partial is already how the second pillar works. If warming is the destabilizing force and warming continues, then stabilizing anything is incomplete by definition. The same is true of adaptation, which is by definition something we do while the Earth keeps warming; a sea wall does not stop the sea from rising, and nobody concludes that adaptation is incoherent. Stabilization operates the same way, by attempting to hold specific systems stable, as long as required, with success measured against the system’s existing trajectory rather than the planet’s temperature.

It over-promises.

Stabilization names an outcome, and this objection is correct that the name doesn’t answer whether the outcome is deliverable. We know a lot about the coupling between cutting emissions and atmospheric concentrations. We know much less about the coupling between attempting to stabilize an ice sheet and the prevention of ice sheet collapse. Additionally, any proposed stabilizing intervention could act and fail, or worse, act and cause new harm. This objection would state that a humbler word like interventions is safer because it promises nothing beyond the action, and whoever intervenes still has to make the case that it will work.

That asymmetry is real, and it’s precisely why the field needs more funding: funding for people studying the potential risks of interventions, funding for people developing governance mechanisms around deploying them, and funding for people developing new or alternative interventions so that we have options when some interventions turn out to be harmful. But mitigation and adaptation also name outcomes we haven’t finished delivering. Both are partially done and pointed in a generally good direction, neither is moving fast enough, and the global conversation about each is whether we’re delivering. Nobody reads those words as guarantees. A pillar’s name states the intention the work gets organized around and judged against.

Ben put it more simply on one of our calls: nobody aspires to intervene. Intervening is a cost, a thing you would rather not have to do, while stability is what people want, and a field should be named for what it is for. The outcome-name also does something useful for these technologies that carry the most hubris risk. A field named stabilization hands the world the standard to judge it by, because for any proposed intervention the question becomes whether the system is measurably more stable, on what evidence, and at what cost. A field named for its activity can “succeed” just by being busy. I would rather have a name that makes it easier to understand what success means.

Science needs rigor, and this term doesn’t have it yet.

Correct. The term is ambiguous partly because this usage is new. Scientists parse every word, want rigorous definitions, and have watched loose terminology cause damage in this field before. Stabilization is not yet a rigorously defined scientific term, and the definition below is a field-building definition, proposed to satisfy the parameters at the beginning of this article—where politicians, funders, and newcomers were the constraints—rather than built to survive peer review. Those audiences pull in different directions than science, and right now this objection is valid, as there is no real scientific rigor around it. What I’d ask of scientist readers is participation. Our own usage has already changed in response to feedback. The move away from the climate modifier came from these conversations, and the pillar framing in this piece is itself a second or third iteration. Our hope is that the word earns rigor the way words do, by entering scientific and academic discussion and getting argued over. We started this discussion around stabilization, but we don’t claim to own the word.

The public case against the word

Last week Holly Buck published the fullest public version of the case against the term, Selling Stability: The Problem with Pitching “Climate Stabilization” as a New Category of Climate Response, at African Tech Futures Lab. Holly has studied geoengineering and its politics for the better part of two decades and wrote After Geoengineering (which I loved, and you should read), and I learn something from her writing every time. She made her case in public, so I’ll respond to it the same way.

By my reading, we agree on many underlying premises. The tipping-element risks are real and potentially urgent and severe, a reflexive loop in which climate change erodes our capacity to respond to climate change is a real risk, the research landscape for response measures is broken, and a container for these interventions would help people think about them and would probably motivate additional research funding. The remaining disagreement seems to me to be over whether this container, with this name, costs more than it delivers. Her history section also complicates the prior-usage objection by identifying that the earliest use of climate stabilization in the scientific literature, a 1974 paper in Science, meant climate control and intervention, and she describes today’s usage as the term coming full circle.

Two of her arguments moved me. The first is about baselines:

Stabilization elides questions about whose baseline is being stabilized—and whose is being destabilized by stabilization itself. This is the same question that was asked in 1974, though from many more voices. For much of the majority of the world, things have not been stable at all. Indeed, for communities who have lived through colonialism, extraction, and displacement, “stability” was rarely on offer to begin with. Stabilization language casts political acts in terms of neutral systems maintenance, obscuring whose reality and power is actually being protected.

I partly agree. The objects in our definition are physical systems, and the destabilization of those particular systems lands first and hardest on the people for whom stability was never on offer. A disrupted Atlantic circulation would impact monsoons and agriculture, collapsing coral reefs would impact local food systems, and sea level rise will reach every low-lying coast on Earth. That is an argument about who has the most at stake. It is not an argument about what anyone wants, and we don’t pretend the two are the same. High stakes don’t produce consent. Deciding which systems get stabilized, at what baseline, and for whose benefit is the rightful job of politics. Our field definition refuses to presuppose which systems ought to be stabilized or what a stable future should look like, and Holly’s critique clearly shows why those questions deserve real deliberation. We are explicitly not trying to hide political choices behind a fig leaf of technology or technical descriptions. All of that social legitimacy and governance work can and should fit within the pillar.

The second is about what the word implies.

Stabilization presents an inaccurate picture of what is actually happening to the planet. Solar radiation modification is likely to stabilize global mean temperature, but create novel biospheric conditions, because the amount and type of sunlight is being changed and CO2 emissions would be decoupled from temperature. This would be a new situation for ecosystems, in ways that have not been seriously researched. As a recent piece by ATFL’s Climate Intervention Futures Initiative noted, stabilization describes an aspiration, not a guarantee. Stabilizing temperatures is not the same thing as holding the climate steady. Ultimately, it’s the planet itself that does the stabilizing.

I agree without reservation. Her line about it being an aspiration rather than guarantee is close to how I’d describe all three pillars. The medical sense of the word carries some of this already, since a stabilized patient is not a healed one. This is an example of where a critique pushed us to improve the clarity of the definition, and the definition below now says clearly that a stabilized system is not a restored one.

Where I disagree with the article is her conclusion that the container problem dissolves if we just call things what they are. She asks where the desire to taxonomize comes from, notes that a name changes none of the work, and asks who the sales pitch is for. They are fair questions, but they fold two things together, because the need for a class term exists before anyone tries to “sell” anything.

The first reason for the term is pragmatic. The potential interventions are so varied that on the surface they almost seem unrelated. What do wildfire management policy that keeps abrupt permafrost thaw in check, reflective coverings on glaciers, marine cloud brightening over reefs, cirrus cloud thinning, sea ice thickening, and stratospheric aerosols all have in common? Anyone who needs to discuss the class as a class, in a research agenda or a governance framework or a funder’s memo, either recites that list or borrows a word that fails somewhere, because geoengineering doesn’t fit the wildfire policy, cloud thinning is not sunlight reflection, and none of it is mitigation or adaptation. The nearest candidate is “climate interventions”, and we use it ourselves for naming the actions. But the field is more than its actions. The field includes the monitoring that tells us whether a system is approaching a threshold and it includes the governance work that decides whether anyone should act. None of that is “intervening”. And part of the field’s job is deciding whether to act at all, so naming the whole field for the act would prejudge the very question the governance work exists to ask. The definition below says we don’t presuppose that intervening is the right answer, and the field’s name shouldn’t presuppose it either. An umbrella term is useful when people keep needing to refer to a class of work the existing words don’t cover, and that need would exist even if nobody were trying to grow the field.

The second reason is the one the parameters at the top of this piece state outright. We see the need far more money and many more people in this work, and names and aspirations are, in part, how that happens. Right now one foundation might file this work under climate interventions, another under tipping point risks, another under extreme adaptation, and most file it nowhere at all, which is the fragmentation problem seen from a funder’s perspective. A single coherent term reduces that friction, and it gives the entrepreneurs and researchers who aren’t here yet a field they can find. A program doing marine cloud brightening can and should keep saying MCB, plainly; the umbrella term is for talking about the class and for growing it. A name doesn’t change any of the work to be done, but it does change who shows up to contribute to the work.

Holly raises more than I can take up here, on agency and on what the frame leaves out, and I hope you read her piece in full. I believe we agree on the deepest point, that the work matters more than the taxonomy, and the taxonomy is only worth arguing about because it affects how fast the work gets people and money. And ultimately, this term is a proposal, not dogma. If the field finds it useful, we’ll see it get adopted more widely. And if the field doesn’t, then we’ll all collectively figure something else out.

The definition, as it stands

Here is the full definition as we are now using it, revised by everything above. It will keep changing, and the feedback form in the observations report is the best channel for changing it.

Stabilization is the work of keeping critical Earth systems from crossing into runaway, self-reinforcing destabilization, the kind that could foreclose our collective capacity to respond to climate change at all. It is an emerging pillar of climate response that sits alongside mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation, which includes carbon removal, addresses the cause by reducing and drawing down greenhouse gases. Adaptation absorbs the consequences in human systems reducing harm. Stabilization, if it is feasible and desirable, intervenes directly in the Earth systems most at risk of nonlinear, possibly irreversible change, to buy the time that mitigation requires.

This is not the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations, and it is not holding global temperature at a fixed target. Those are objectives served by mitigation and removal. Stabilization is a near-term response to a risk profile that has developed faster than we have implemented mitigation efforts. Possible tipping elements including the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Atlantic overturning circulation, permafrost, and warm-water coral systems are approaching limits on timescales that decarbonization and carbon removal simply cannot address in time.

Stabilization measures are meant to be temporary, wound down as mitigation and removal bring the climate back to safety. We are honest that the warming already committed to the system through past emissions means that some measures may need to hold for decades or longer. They remain a bridge, not a destination. A stabilized system is not a restored one. Interventions that keep a threshold from being crossed still leave the planet in a changed state, and what it means for ecosystems to hold in novel conditions is an area this field must research.

When we call stabilization a field, we mean something specific and modest. A field is a loose-knit body of people working across many disciplines, from climate science and engineering to finance, governance, and frontline engagement, in pursuit of a shared set of goals. It is not an organization, it has no central authority, and it does not speak with one voice. We are not declaring a field into existence. Much of this work is decades old, carried on by researchers and governance experts through years when pursuing it cost people funding and reputation. What we are observing is a field that is beginning to cohere. We can see this in the new research, new funding, and new initiatives emerging across these areas, and we are naming it so the people doing the work can find each other. Some of them will disagree about the name, and reasonable disagreement among contributors is a feature of a healthy field rather than a flaw in it. Even so, we assert that the moment has come for this work to organize and grow.

Avoiding catastrophic, irreversible destabilization is worth preparing to act on now, before the conditions for a considered response are gone. That commitment is to building tools and preserving options, not to deploying them. We do not assume that intervention is the right answer in any specific case. Nor do we presuppose which systems ought to be stabilized, or what a stable future should ultimately look like. Those are the scientific, governance, and legitimacy questions this work exists to consider. What we assert is narrower: building the capacity to choose well, in time, beats being forced to choose without it.

I believe stabilization is the right name, and none of the feedback has felt like a deal-breaker. It has felt like people pointing out where the term is unclear and could become clearer, and to me that means the process is working. Meadows wrote that paradigms change when people point at the anomalies of the old one and speak, with assurance, from the new one. That is what this piece has tried to do. And, helpfully, the critics were doing the same thing to us. They pointed at our anomalies, and the definition above is better for it. Perhaps Earth-system stabilization is a better term than climate stabilization. Or perhaps it’s better on its own as just stabilization. The formal definition should end up written by many more hands than ours. If the name helps you explain your work, use it. If it gets in your way, tell me how, because the definition is only going to improve by people pushing back on it.

Related: the Global Risk and Stabilization Summit happens October 12-13 in Iceland, and you can apply to attend at globalstabilization.org.

A little over a year ago, in July 2025, I spent four days at the Global Tipping Points conference in Exeter, listening to scientists lay out what happens if the Amazon tips into savannah or the Atlantic circulation shuts down, and then watching much of that same community treat the question of directly intervening in those systems as unfit for polite discussion. I wrote about that experience at the time, and I came home feeling radicalized. If these risks are as serious as the science says, then preparing to respond to them requires an enormous amount of work that has barely started: governance structures, social legitimacy, community engagement, and public narratives, in addition to all the engineering, field research, funding pipelines, and talent pipelines that any technical field needs.

The situation was worse than just an early start, though, because many of the people best positioned to argue for that preparation were instead arguing against it. I’ve written about the resulting dynamics before: the taboo blocks the funding, the missing funding blocks the people, and the missing people guarantee the work stays undone, which keeps the whole subject easy to dismiss.

So in the fall of last year I went out and pitched a project plan. I was calling it the Stabilization Plan, modeled loosely on Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness, and the idea was a targeted informational campaign making the case for climate stabilization to the audiences whose permission matters most. I eventually laid out the thinking here in this newsletter in The Climate Stabilization Framework. I pitched it to philanthropies the way I had pitched Nori to venture capitalists, because that was the fundraising I knew how to do, and it turns out that’s not how you raise nonprofit money (oops). The feedback I got was remarkably consistent. Why start a new organization when the work would make more sense housed inside an existing one? And could the scope come down to something milestone-based rather than one grand campaign? Both pieces of feedback turned out to be right.

That’s when I had the good fortune of talking with Joshua Elliott, the chief scientist at Renaissance Philanthropy and leader of the Advanced Research for Climate Emergencies (ARC) program, who was interested in exactly this narrative dimension of the climate intervention space. I had also met Ben Lachman at a Climate Emergencies Forum workshop during New York Climate Week, a longtime entrepreneur whose background runs from software and hardware through fifteen years of climate mitigation work, and he became my partner in all of this. Together with Joshua we scoped a three-month research pilot, which kicked off in February.

If you come from the for-profit world, you would recognize what we did as customer discovery. We conducted 29 formal interviews with funders, researchers, practitioners, and policy actors around the world who work on climate interventions, asking where people get blocked, how fundraising actually goes, and what the politics look like, spoken and unspoken. We deliberately scoped the research to three risk domains: coral reefs, the cluster of Arctic risks, and permafrost. We chose those domains because when mainstream media writes about geoengineering it is almost always writing about stratospheric aerosol injection, and we wanted to test whether other interventions could be disaggregated from SAI. You do need planetary-scale governance for SAI, but you don’t need planetary-scale governance in place to start experimenting with marine cloud brightening to shade a specific local coral reef, for example. The prerequisites are fewer, and the work could start sooner.

We also ran a live test of the framing. In April we co-hosted an event during SF Climate Week called Stabilize Earth, which I wrote about at the time, and which turned out to be one of the field’s largest semi-public gatherings to date. All of this fed into a short observations report, where we acknowledged the biases plainly. We were very much talking to the converted, so the observations reflect converging views within the field rather than the views of the public or of skeptics.

Permission Space And Narrative Framing Report

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(Download the report above or click here to open in a browser.)

The example that best captures the state of this field is permafrost. The frozen ground of the boreal north holds roughly twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere, and under continued high warming, published estimates of what could escape as CO2 and methane by 2100 run to hundreds of gigatons of CO2-equivalent. When you ask people how many researchers worldwide are working directly on keeping permafrost frozen (not counting generic GHG mitigation efforts), even people who work in climate, almost nobody guesses anywhere near the real answer, which is a handful at most. That contrast between the scale of a risk and the number of people working on it repeats across the whole field.

By our estimate, all of climate stabilization runs on fewer than a thousand full-time people worldwide and on the order of tens of millions of philanthropic dollars per year. Climate mitigation, for comparison, has tens of thousands of organizations, millions of people, and roughly two trillion dollars a year in capital behind it. None of this takes anything away from mitigation, which as Ben likes to put it is the boulder already rolling downhill, just not quite fast enough. But the comparison is still valid, because this shows what happens to a category of climate response when the subject stays taboo long enough that people and funding never arrive.

The full report contains nine observations, and I would rather you read them than my summary of them, but a few are worth pulling forward here. Risk-first framing opens doors that solution-first framing closes. Latent support is larger than visible support, because speaking up in this field carries asymmetric career risk, and as we put it in the report, silence in this field is not opposition. Philanthropic capital follows institutional cover, not just conviction. Majority World institutional engagement with intervention research, in India and in Ghana among others, is moving faster than many Western observers realize. And nearly half of our interviewees independently named some version of the same missing piece: connective infrastructure that the field does not yet have.

That last observation is the one Ben and I are now acting on. Following the pilot, we joined Renaissance Philanthropy to lead the Climate Emergencies Forum and evolve it from the convening body it has been since 2024 into a proactive field-building organization. Our logic is that the destabilization of these Earth systems will eventually force governments to fund stabilization research and readiness at billions of dollars per year, and whether that capital arrives in time, and whether it lands well, depends on what exists to receive it. Absorbing investment at that scale takes people, institutions, de-risked science and engineering, and public legitimacy, and today the field is short on every one of those dimensions. Closing that gap within roughly a decade means working on three problems now.

1. The field needs more philanthropic capital. Tens of millions of dollars per year is the current reality, and most of it has gone to global sunlight-reflection approaches rather than the broader portfolio of system-specific interventions. We think this needs to grow by two orders of magnitude within about ten years, and in the near term that growth mostly has to come from philanthropy, because philanthropic capital is what grows a field to the point where governments can fund it seriously. (I plan to write separately about the role of for-profit companies in stabilization, which I think is real but different.)

2. The field needs more people. There are hundreds of full-time people today, and we would like to see tens of thousands within ten years. Permafrost is the extreme case, but the pattern repeats across the risk domains where there are whole categories of problems that essentially no one is working on. Ben and I have already been fielding calls from seasoned entrepreneurs who attended Stabilize Earth and want to contribute without knowing where to start, which tells us the on-ramps matter as much as the recruiting.

3. The field needs common groundwork. The most consistent finding across our interviews was that the field lacks shared infrastructure that no single organization can build for itself, so each one rebuilds it alone. That groundwork starts with shared definitions and frameworks that let a program officer or a newcomer place stabilization in context, and a shared map of the risks, the interventions, the funding, and the gaps, similar in ambition to what Frontier’s gap database did for carbon removal. It extends to the community-engagement protocols, governance frameworks, and regulatory strategy guides that every new organization currently reinvents from scratch. All of that duplicated effort slows everyone down and keeps the field hard for incoming talent and capital to find.

Offering stabilization as a name is part of the same work. This field has been forming whether anyone names it or not. We’re suggesting a name so that the people already doing the work can find each other, and so that funders and newcomers can find them, because you can’t recruit someone into a field that officially doesn’t exist.

Which brings me to the summit. In October, CEF is convening the Global Risk and Stabilization Summit in Iceland, October 12 and 13, intended as the field-wide gathering. There will be several hundred people in attendance, with the goals of building a shared picture of the field’s current state and creating the collaborations it needs next. If you are working in or want to work in this field, you can apply to join us directly at globalstabilization.org. I hope to see many of you there.

The report remains open for feedback, and the form linked inside it still works. We have already received a lot, especially on the word stabilization itself, where the objections have been good enough that they deserve their own article. That piece will come next.

Ted Nordhaus is a hard person to dismiss on this subject. By his own account he has been supportive of geoengineering research over the years: he argued in Foreign Affairs in 2018 that the two degree target created its own moral hazard by making adaptation and geoengineering research look unnecessary, he suggested in his review of Elizabeth Kolbert's Under a White Sky that future societies might engineer the climate to preserve biodiversity, and in 2024 he proposed using marine cloud brightening to moderate the natural climate swings of the El Niño cycle. When someone with that record announces that he now doubts the wisdom of even the research, it's worth finding out where the argument goes wrong.

And he gets a lot right. The break-glass-in-case-of-emergency framing deserves to die. There is no observable threshold where the world will agree that the emergency has arrived, and if we wait for one, we will have waited too long, because interventions at meaningful scale have lead times measured in years while the outcomes worth preventing become unpreventable quietly, well before they become undeniable. I used the framing myself when I first started writing about climate interventions; one of my early pieces is literally titled Break Glass, Cool Planet. What moved me off it was Oliver Morton’s The Planet Remade, which makes the best case against the emergency framing I’ve read. A technology you only reach for once the catastrophe is obvious is a technology you reach for too late.

He is also right that humanity has, so far and in aggregate, adapted faster than the climate has changed. Climate-related mortality has fallen dramatically over the past century, and disaster losses have stayed roughly flat as a share of the wealth exposed to them. Those trends are real, and parts of the climate movement do themselves no favors by pretending otherwise. The aggregate hides a great deal, since the adaptive capacity sits mostly in rich countries while the residual risk sits mostly everywhere else, but the direction of the trend is what he says it is. And he is right that catastrophism runs through parts of the climate conversation, the strain that gave us deadlines like twelve years to save the world, and that some advocates of cooling research have picked up the habit, describing the present as already catastrophic partly because catastrophe justifies the tool. That drift is real, I have watched it happen, and it deserves the criticism.

So I agree with more of his premises than I expected to when I opened the piece. The argument still fails, and it fails at one specific step. Ted claims that rapid climate change, the kind that outruns adaptation, is “almost singularly associated with geoengineering termination shock.” Most of the essay leans on that sentence, and the sentence is wrong.

Where the argument turns

His strongest argument runs something like this: human societies handle slow change well and fast change badly, so the rate of change matters as much as the magnitude; anthropogenic warming has been fast on geological timescales but slow on human ones, which is why adaptation has kept pace; termination shock would compress decades of warming into a few years, which adaptation cannot absorb; therefore the technology built to manage climate risk is the one thing that could turn a manageable problem into a catastrophe. As far as the mechanism goes, I think he is correct: speed, more than size, is what breaks adaptation.

Where he goes wrong is in believing the Earth system only moves fast when people push it. The Greenland ice cores record more than two dozen episodes during the last ice age, the Dansgaard-Oeschger events, in which temperatures over Greenland jumped by 8 to 16 degrees Celsius within a few decades. The driver was the Atlantic ocean circulation abruptly reorganizing itself. No one was flying stratospheric aircraft in the ice age. The climate did that on its own, repeatedly, and the same circulation is the one making headlines today as the AMOC, whose stability is an open research question: one much-debated study put a possible collapse near the middle of this century, another found it on course to tip without saying when, and others argue the observational record is too short to predict anything at all. That disagreement is the uncomfortable part, because it means we are leaning our weight on a system with known fast failure modes without knowing how close the edge is. The same concern applies to the West Antarctic ice sheet and to the carbon starting to leak from thawing permafrost.

This matters for his adaptation argument too, because the adaptive capacity he celebrates is a product of the stable conditions it grew up in. Wealth, infrastructure, insurance, supply chains, and functioning states are what stand between climate hazards and human suffering, and every one of them assumes a stable background against which to keep compounding. A world absorbing an Atlantic circulation disruption or simultaneous crop failures across major growing regions is a world with less capacity to adapt to everything else, a dynamic Laurie Laybourn, who leads the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, has named derailment risk: the consequences of destabilization eat away at the capacity societies need to address its causes. You cannot keep absorbing systemic shocks forever, because the shocks consume the capacity you absorb them with.

The experiment already ran

The strangest omission in Ted’s essay is an experiment that already ran. On January 1, 2020, an International Maritime Organization regulation cut the permitted sulfur content of shipping fuel from 3.5 percent to 0.5 percent, and sulfur dioxide emissions from the global fleet fell by roughly 80 percent within a year. Shipping exhaust had been brightening marine clouds for decades, visibly, in the satellite record. The regulation switched a large share of that off almost at once.

The lead paper on what happened next has the phrase “inadvertent geoengineering termination shock” in its title, and that is peer-reviewed language, in Communications Earth & Environment, describing a shipping regulation. A modeling study in Earth’s Future estimated the regulation pulled global warming forward by roughly two to three years, and estimates of the added heat imbalance run from about 0.06 to 0.2 watts over every square meter of the planet, depending on method, which is significant for a single rule change. The 2023 and 2024 temperature spikes had other contributors too, including El Niño and the Hunga Tonga eruption, and scientists are still arguing over how much of the jump came from the shipping rule. The direction is not in dispute.

I take two things from this. First, humanity has been running an uncontrolled aerosol cooling program for decades and terminated a large piece of it abruptly, through an air-quality rule made with no climate deliberation and no plan for measuring what would follow, which means the ungoverned path is already a matter of historical record. Second, the event confirms that termination effects are physically real, and that is the argument for treating termination as a design constraint rather than a verdict. Andy Parker and Peter Irvine worked through the failure pathways back in 2018 and concluded that a deliberate program built with backup deployment hardware and operated by agreement among several capable states would be resilient against all but the most extreme catastrophes, because sustaining a termination shock requires every capable actor on Earth to stop, simultaneously, for years, while temperatures climb around them and each has an overwhelming incentive to restart. Termination risk is a reason to engineer and govern deployment carefully, and a strange reason to know less about the system we would be governing.

The march is underway

Ted writes as though stopping the research would stop the march toward deployment. The companies he links to are evidence against that. He cites Stardust, the Israeli-American startup that raised 60 million dollars last October, the largest known funding round in the field’s history, with a business model of selling deployment capability to national governments and outdoor experiments already planned. Stardust took heavy criticism early on for keeping its particle chemistry secret, and in May it started publishing: white papers and preprints with university collaborators, disclosing particles built from amorphous silica and calcium carbonate. People I talk to in the research community were glad to see it, and I was too, though the safety questions are far from settled. Make Sunsets, meanwhile, has been lofting balloons and selling cooling credits for years and recently made its patent available royalty-free. Whatever you think of these companies, the capability is being built regardless of what academic researchers and their funders decide. And notice what pushed Stardust toward openness: a research community that existed to demand it and scientific norms that gave it something to publish into, which is the infrastructure Ted proposes to strip away.

So run his scenario forward under his own proposal. Suppose the research stops: the university programs wind down, the philanthropy dries up, the monitoring and attribution science never matures, the governance conversations never happen. The political incentives he describes remain, and so do the startups. The next accidental climate jolt arrives with no one equipped to measure it. If you wanted to guarantee the outcome Ted fears—deployment arriving through commercial secrecy or political panic with no public science and no institution capable of stopping or steering it—this is how you would arrange the world. Opposing research is a recipe for the exact worst outcome he believes might happen. The choice in front of us has never included a world where nobody builds this. The choice is between preparing in a way that mitigates the risks as much as possible and just allowing it to happen.

The position the horseshoe can’t see

The most interesting claim in the essay is sociological: that advocates and opponents of geoengineering have converged on identical, catastrophist views of climate risk, distinguishable only by the solution attached. There are people who fit that description. But the taxonomy has a hole in it, and I know because I live there.

I spent a decade on the other side of this problem. I co-founded Nori, one of the first carbon removal marketplaces, and spent years convincing investors and researchers and policymakers that removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere was necessary and possible. I believed we could scale our way out. What changed my mind was the arithmetic: carbon removal is decades away from moving global temperature, the tipping-point risks arrive on a faster clock, and the gap between those two timelines has to be covered by something. I am not a catastrophist about the present. I don’t believe we need to overhaul the global economy to respond to climate change, and I came to this work through market-based solutions. Ted’s horseshoe has no place for that position, and a growing part of this field lives in it.

His use of the word geoengineering deserves a look too, because in the essay it means one thing: global stratospheric aerosol injection, with its globe-spanning politics and its worst-case termination profile. Most of the intervention portfolio looks nothing like that. Marine cloud brightening is regional, and its clouds stop responding within days of stopping. Proposed interventions to slow ice sheet loss are anchored to particular glaciers and can be removed. Ted knows the difference, because the MCB program he proposed in 2024 to moderate the El Niño cycle was (even offered half in jest as he says it was) a bounded, regional intervention whose logic depends on the distinction his new essay erases. The question his essay never answers is what separates the intervention he proposed from the ones he now opposes. The way I hold the whole picture now: mitigation and carbon removal address the causes of the problem, adaptation shores up the human systems that absorb the consequences, and stabilization protects the climate systems that both of the others need time to work. Naming the pillar for its outcome also sets the standard it has to be judged against, something the word geoengineering never did.

Where does that leave the disagreement? Ted’s real question, underneath the essay, is whether a world this bad at telling real emergencies from manufactured ones can be trusted with a lever this large. That is a good question. It is also a governance research question, and governance research is part of what he is proposing to stop. The monsoon impacts, the termination pathways, the attribution science, the institutional designs that could make starting and stopping legitimate: these are the research agenda, and the people working on them are, in my experience, more sober about the risks than either pole of his horseshoe. He is asking one of the right questions, and I would welcome the exchange, because this field is better off with its sharpest critics inside the conversation. Readers who want to see what the field contains before picking a side can start with my standing guide, How to Learn Everything You Need to Know About Climate Cooling.

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Every plan to cool the climate or hold an ice sheet together counts on capable governments to pay for the work and run it, and enough cooperation between them to act together. That’s a bigger assumption than it looks, and right now it’s coming apart.

Start with the trust between governments. In January, Mark Carney told the World Economic Forum that the international order is in a rupture, not a transition, and he named the institutions he sees under threat: the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and the COP—the climate negotiations themselves. Carney ran two central banks before he became Canada’s prime minister, so he isn’t a man given to drama. You can see what he means in how this year’s two big wars are being handled. The US and Israeli war on Iran that resulted in the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, and Russia’s grinding war on Ukraine, are being managed, to the extent they’re managed at all, by leaders cutting private deals with each other rather than through any institution built for the job. Trump ended the Iran war over dinner with Macron. The talks his team have been brokering on Ukraine have gone nowhere. Either way, the shared machinery for handling big problems is being bypassed in real time. It’s the era of “the art of the deal.”

Now look at the governments themselves. Just this week we saw Keir Starmer forced out as British prime minister by his own party, the sixth British PM to go in seven years, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK pushing for an early election. The populist churn behind that isn’t unique to Britain; it’s running through most of the democratic world. So just as more weight would fall on individual governments to act, those governments are less steady than they’ve been in a generation.

Put those two things side by side. The shared institutions are fraying, which pushes more onto individual governments, and those governments are wobbling like a glass vase during an earthquake. Both halves of what a climate intervention would need—capable governments and enough cooperation to act together—are eroding at once. That’s the world any serious plan to cool the planet now has to survive in.

If we want a field that can put serious money and real operations behind interventions in, say, ten years from now, the governments we’re counting on have to be capable ten years from now too, and that capability doesn’t build itself. Watching where the world is heading matters just as much as watching the science on tipping points and intervention options. Stabilization already has a lot of moving parts that people are working hard on: the research, the funding, the field itself, and the genuinely difficult job of running an intervention in the real world. State capacity is one more, and I think it’s the one we’re paying the least attention to.

What stabilization is

Stabilization, the way I use the word, is the near-term work of keeping critical Earth systems from tipping into runaway change, the kind that would wreck our ability to deal with climate change at all. (I’ve written about it at more length in The Climate Stabilization Framework.) Cutting emissions and removing carbon dioxide go after the cause. Adaptation deals with the damage. Stabilization does something else. It steps in directly to protect the systems most at risk of a sudden, irreversible tip: the ice sheets, the Atlantic overturning circulation, the permafrost, the coral reefs, the Amazon, etc. The point is to buy time for the slower tools to catch up, because if we don’t, then our society will be hit by famines, droughts, migration, populism, and more, things that society not only can't withstand but that would eliminate our ability to address climate change at the root.

Stabilization is meant to be temporary, with interventions safely wound down as cutting emissions and removing carbon bring the climate back toward safe temperatures. And it works directly on shared systems that no company can own or sell, which makes it the one part of the climate response you can’t build a market around. And even if you wanted to try, what’s the business case? You can sell carbon removal today (with a lot of difficulty) and it hasn’t come close to affecting the total amount of CO2 in the air. You can’t “sell” a stable ice sheet. So more than any other part of the climate response, stabilization depends on governments that work.

What a capable government needs

So what does state capacity actually mean? The plain version is whether a government can get done the things it’s supposed to get done. Some governments are good at it, plenty aren’t, and the worrying part, which Francis Fukuyama has written about for years, is that even rich, long-stable democracies can lose the knack over time. There’s a useful distinction, from the sociologist Michael Mann (funnily enough, not the climate scientist Michael Mann, who hates this stuff and said so again in the Guardian this month), between a government’s power to give orders and its power to actually carry them out on the ground. The second kind is what stabilization needs, and it’s the harder kind to build.

What the climate-scientist Mann and his co-authors argued, as it happens, makes my case for me. Their warning is that cooling schemes would be wildly expensive, and that once you start one you can’t stop without risking a sudden snap-back of all the warming you’d been holding off. They mean it as a reason not to try. It’s also a near-perfect description of why this would take a strong, steady government rather than a market. The best argument against doing it doubles as the argument for being able to. And that’s where the skeptics lose me. A dependency this big is a map of what we’d have to build, not a reason to walk away from it.

The way I usually get a handle on a problem like this is to start from the goal and work backwards. What are we actually trying to make possible? Then, what has to be true for that to happen, what are the pieces, is there an order to them, what does each one depend on, and so on until you can see what has to get done now. So: the goal is to be able to carry out a stabilization intervention well and responsibly when we need to (and from where I sit, I feel confident we’re going to need to). That means de-risking these enough that doing one is a real option rather than a desperate gamble. What would a government have to be able to do to get there?

I count six things, and they aren’t a checklist you work through top to bottom. Think of them as links in a chain of dependencies. Some are genuinely sequential, where one has to be in place before the next is even possible. Others build each other up at the same time. The reason the chain is the right picture anyway is that all six have to hold. A weak link stops everything that depends on it, however strong the rest are.

It starts with seeing the threat coming, which means setting up the monitoring and sensing to track these systems and understand what’s happening to them. Underneath even that is the most basic thing of all, the will to want to see the threat, which plenty of governments don’t have. The United States right now is choosing not to look. Nothing else on the list matters if a government won’t let itself notice the problem in the first place.

Before a government can do anything this big and this contested, it needs permission, and that comes in two forms, one deeper than the other. The deeper one is legitimacy: enough trust at home, and enough consent from other countries, that people actually accept the intervention instead of fighting it. It’s the slowest of the six to build and the easiest to lose, and for anything at planetary scale it has to come early, because nothing downstream gets authorized or funded without it. Up until now, I’ve been referring to this legitimacy as the “permission space” necessary to work on these things. The legal kind follows from the legitimacy, and it is the formal authority to permit the work, oversee it, and enforce the rules. That authority, or the lack of it, stops a small outdoor experiment far more often than money or science ever does, and it tends to follow public consent rather than lead it.

None of the cross-border parts of that—the shared consent and the authority that spans jurisdictions—hold together without coordination, both between agencies intra-government, as well as between governments (that might agree on very little). Coordination is the connective link running underneath the others, and it’s the one the current breakdown is fraying fastest.

Then there’s paying for it, and, just as important, continuing to pay. That’s a different thing from deciding to spend once, because stabilization will play out over decades while budgets run year to year and election to election. The hard part is going to be the second and the third and the tenth and the hundredth payment, many years after political movements enabled the first payment.

Only with all of that in place can a government actually do the work (or contract it out), which takes the people and the institutions to run something big and complicated for years on end. That muscle can’t be assumed. Anyone who watched California try and fail to build high-speed rail knows how hard it is for a capable, wealthy government to just build a thing.

Some of this is being built right now. The clearest example is the pay-for-it link in the United Kingdom. A government agency there called ARIA runs a research program on climate cooling worth around fifty-seven million pounds, the biggest pot of public money for this kind of work anywhere in the world. It’s also a good reminder of how fragile these links are. ARIA was set up by Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, which was three (soon to be four!) governments ago. The cooling money is committed, but whether the next government keeps funding a speculative cooling program, with budgets tight and politics turning, is anyone’s guess.

Other links are being torn down just as fast. This is most obvious in the United States, where the Trump administration has been pulling apart the climate spending in the Inflation Reduction Act and cutting climate programs, including some of the monitoring that the see-it-coming link depends on. Put it together and the picture is sobering. No government has anywhere close to all six links, though plenty have a strong one or two. None has the whole chain, and that will need to improve rapidly, because a strong funding link or a strong research link doesn’t add up to being ready on its own.

It’s getting built unevenly

That’s the sobering version. The hopeful version is that these links do get built, country by country, and how it happens is something we can actually learn from. It mostly comes down to framing. How a government describes a risk decides which part of the government wakes up to it, and that matters more than you’d think.

Let’s look at Iceland for an example of this. Late in 2025, its government became the first to officially treat a possible collapse of the Atlantic overturning circulation as a national security threat, not just an environmental one. That sounds like wordplay until you look at the effects of that. Calling AMOC a security threat sent it to Iceland’s National Security Council, the one body that can put every ministry in the same room at once. Suddenly the people who handle the country’s energy, food, transport, and infrastructure were planning around it together. If you frame it as an environmental issue, I have a hard time believing that any of that happens. I talked with Páll Gunnarsson of the Reykjavík Institute, who was close to all of this, about how a country of four hundred thousand people moved faster than far bigger ones. Some of that is particular to Iceland, where the Gulf Stream is common knowledge and the government is already built around hazard preparedness. But the lever, the part that could be duplicated by other states, was the framing: security, not environment.

Finland did a quieter version of the same thing. While it held the rotating presidency of the Nordic Council of Ministers, it pushed tipping points onto the agenda, and the result was a Nordic report on AMOC earlier this year that treats the risk as a governance problem for the whole North Atlantic. The response to this report is what I found interesting. The same science landed in front of several governments and got very different responses. Norway is still deciding whether to call AMOC a security risk. The UK noted the reports but figures a sudden collapse is unlikely this century, and Ireland briefed its prime minister and a parliamentary committee but has not taken it further. You could imagine tracking this properly, every country scored on all six links, so you could see at a glance who has actually built what.

The derailment risk

Now put the two halves together, the links being cut and the links being built, and you get a loop other people have already named. Laurie Laybourn and his colleagues call it the doom loop, or derailment risk: climate damage chips away at a society’s ability to deal with climate change, which lets the damage get worse, which chips away further, and around it goes. The same tipping points that would make us want to intervene are the ones that would wreck the funding and the institutions and the coordination we’d need to intervene at all. Stabilization needs state capacity, and state capacity needs stabilization. The crisis in the news is that loop running in real time. A world that can freeze its own energy markets in a couple of weeks, run through six UK prime ministers in seven years, and hear another one of its leaders (Carney) say the climate talks are part of an order that’s falling apart is a world quietly losing the ability to do the kind of slow, patient work that takes decades.

This is the part that changed my own mind. I got into climate work in 2015 believing markets could do most of the heavy lifting, and I still think that’s true for a lot of it, because markets are how we’re actually decarbonizing and how a lot of adaptation will get done. There will be companies and markets in stabilization too, which is something I’ll write about another time. But follow the logic of wanting stabilization to actually succeed, and you end up somewhere that this pro-market classical liberal/libertarian did not expect ten years ago. The specific things stabilization requires, the planet-scale interventions nobody can sell, can only be done by governments that work. Wanting those interventions means caring whether governments are capable, which is not how I used to think. There’s even a name for roughly where I’ve landed, state capacity libertarianism: what’s worth asking of a government is just that it actually be able to do what it sets out to do, whether that’s a lot or a little. Wanting a government that works is not a small thing to want anymore. It might be one of the most important things this whole field comes to want.

Which gets me to the one thing I’d ask of this field. We watch the science on these interventions closely, and the engineering, and we should watch the state of the world with the same attention, as a real input and not background noise. If you aren’t paying attention to where things are headed, you won’t be ready to plan, or argue, or act when it counts. I ended the framework piece by saying the goal is to build the ability to choose well, in time, instead of being forced to choose with no good options left. Here’s what I’d add. That ability was never only about the science or the technology. It’s about whether institutions and governments can actually function, and that capacity is eroding right in front of us. Helping build it, helping make those institutions capable and trusted enough to do this work, is part of the job too.

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Link to previous article I wrote on this:

Guest introduction

Ross Centers founded what became the Planetary Sunshade Institute in 2018 and is the founder and CEO of Ethos, where he’s developed electrochemical metallurgy techniques on simulated lunar regolith. Morgan Goodwin is PSI’s executive director and has spent twenty years working in climate. The Institute recently convened the first planetary sunshade workshop in Nottingham, drawing more than eighty researchers, and is funded in part by the UK’s ARIA to baseline sunshade architectures. Learn more at planetarysunshade.org.

Key topics with timestamps (also use as YouTube chapter markers)

• 04:37 — A field comes into being. How a single paper from the 1980s and a workshop of eighty-plus people in Nottingham turned the sunshade from an idea into a research field.

• 07:52 — Welcome to climate. Morgan on what it’s like to enter climate work from the space world, and why the people closest to you often won’t engage.

• 22:13 — What a Dyson Swarm actually is. Solar-powered data centers orbiting the Sun, and the Kardashev-scale logic that points there.

• 27:09 — The planetary heat limit. Why even a fully renewable civilization eventually warms the planet through waste heat alone.

• 28:59 — SpaceX as a Dyson Swarm company. Ross’s read on what the largest IPO in history is actually for.

• 34:58 — Mining the Moon. Morgan’s Hoover Dam analogy and the economics of building from lunar material.

• 47:06 — The Heliogyro. A forty-kilometer spinning solar sail made almost entirely from aluminum, walked through step by step.

• 57:41 — Who governs the climate. Why only governments can deploy SRM, and what “the climate government” means.

• 1:01:29 — Sunshade and SAI as complementary backups. Why having two cooling technologies beats having one.

• 1:16:01 — Does a sunshade ever come down? The generational-memory question, and whether planetary management becomes permanent.

Inevitable & Obvious is where I work through the technologies and the politics of cooling the planet, with the people actually building the field. If conversations like this one are useful to you, subscribing for free at inevitableandobvious.com gets you every episode plus the writing that goes deeper than the audio.

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A planetary sunshade, if you haven’t encountered the concept, is exactly what it sounds like: reflective structures positioned in space between Earth and the Sun to reduce the amount of solar energy reaching us. The idea has been around since at least 1989, when James Early at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory wrote a short paper laying out the basic physics of placing a reflector at the L1 Lagrange point, a gravitationally stable spot about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, roughly 1% of the distance to the Sun. Early’s paper was concise and elegant, but it stayed almost entirely theoretical for 35 years.

That makes this workshop a seminal moment. Ross Centers, founder of the Planetary Sunshade Institute, opened by framing it as the transition from “a collection of papers and interesting ideas” into a field. A field has contributing thinkers, conferences, shared vocabulary, competing design proposals, and institutional credibility. The IAA co-sponsorship matters here because it anchors the sunshade conversation in aerospace engineering rather than atmospheric science, which is a different credibility base and a different audience entry point than the one SAI research has used.

Within the SRM world, the sunshade has long been the idea people acknowledge politely and then move past. Stratospheric aerosol injection is cheaper, faster, more studied, and deployable on a timeline that matches the urgency of the Earth’s energy imbalance. The sunshade, by comparison, requires building things in space at a scale humanity has never attempted. When I’ve talked with people in the SAI community about sunshades, the general take has been something like: sure, interesting, but we have more pressing problems. And the sunshade community itself largely agrees. Ross has said explicitly that he won’t support sunshade development without SAI proceeding in parallel, because if there’s a gap in coverage while the sunshade scales up, you risk exactly the kind of abrupt warming you’re trying to prevent.

So I went to Nottingham with genuine curiosity but also with the zero-sum question in mind: if funding is limited, why should any resources go here instead of toward SAI?

The answer I came away with surprised me.

What you’re actually building

Among all the presentations I saw, there were two main design families that dominated the technical discussions.

The first is solar sails: very thin reflective foils, massively large, positioned to block or redirect incoming sunlight. Solar sails have real flight heritage. NASA has tested several, from the small NanoSail-D experiment in 2010 through the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System launched in 2024, which demonstrated deployment and controlled orbital maneuvering using photon pressure. The engineering challenge with solar sails at sunshade scale is control. Photons exert pressure on the sail surface, and at the dimensions you’d need, maintaining precise positioning is a hard, unsolved problem.

The second design is the heliogyro: imagine a wheel with long blades instead of spokes, where each blade rotates on its own axis while the entire structure spins. The spin keeps the blades taut through centrifugal force, which may be better for the control problem. This is the design the Planetary Sunshade Institute favors for further research.

The diameter of a single heliogyro unit would be roughly 40 kilometers long. To shade about ~1% of incoming sunlight, you’d need over 5,000 of these units, with a total system mass of about 67 megatons. That is just an insane amount of mass to get into space. Which means boosting all of it from Earth probably isn’t the right pathway. According to an estimate presented at the workshop, 99.96% of the mass would need to come from the moon, with only about 23 kilotons launched from Earth (roughly 230 Starship flights for the sunshade components alone, with more needed for the lunar mining and factory infrastructure). If all that is true, then it follows that you can’t have a sunshade without industrializing the moon first.

The engineering is early. People at this workshop were presenting design concepts for the first time, and nobody is building hardware. The research projects represented here were largely preliminary, and there have been no major collaborations between space agencies on this. But there is now an organized technical community doing real engineering work, not just writing speculative papers, and the IAA affiliation gives that work institutional grounding.

SAI now, sunshade later

The sequencing logic I kept hearing at the workshop runs like this: SAI is the better overall near-term intervention. It’s deployable within a decade, relatively inexpensive (I’ve written about this before, but it’s estimated to cost roughly $10 billion per year for significant cooling), and the physics are (relatively) well understood. The sunshade is the long-term replacement, coming online in the second half of this century as SAI is gradually phased out.

Ross framed the two as “harmonious and complementary approaches” and described the relationship using a cycling metaphor: the sunshade rides in SAI’s peloton until conditions allow it to break away as the lead vehicle. His target is what he called “parity-of-readiness,” meaning that by the time SAI deployment begins, the sunshade community should already have demonstrators flying and a buildable plan on the shelf.

Given the hypothetical choice (with all costs and political constraints momentarily ignored) between injecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere and putting a reflector in space, I’d likely lean toward the reflector. SAI is clearly physically and politically plausible, but it introduces atmospheric pollutants, carries real risks of disrupting regional precipitation, and would likely make the sky noticeably whiter (which I think is both minor and maybe the most sad aspect of SAI). Ross compared SAI to chemotherapy and the sunshade to precision immunotherapy; I think that overplays how precise a sunshade would actually be, but the directional intuition feels correct. Reflection from space avoids stratospheric chemistry and aerosol side effects, can be adjusted or even shut off, and doesn’t add new particulates into the atmosphere. It introduces different risks rooted in large-scale space operations, dual-use and security concerns, and the politics of who controls a planet-scale piece of infrastructure in orbit. But on the overall physics and just straight vibes of the whole thing, the sunshade feels far more elegant to me.

Why the economics changed

One of the biggest obstacles to taking the sunshade seriously has always been cost. We’re talking about an estimated trillion+ dollars to build. In a world where climate philanthropy struggles to raise even tens of millions for SAI or climate stabilization research, the idea that anyone would fund building thousands of 40-kilometer structures in space for climate reasons alone has been, to put it generously, aspirational.

What shifted my thinking at this workshop was what I’d call the convergence argument: the economic forces pushing toward space industrialization have nothing to do with climate, and as it happens, they’re building exactly the infrastructure a sunshade would require.

If you look at the growth curves for compute and energy demand, I just don’t see any reason they’re going to flatten. And it’s not only compute. We’re electrifying everything as we decarbonize1, which means energy demand goes up even as emissions go down. This is the story of human civilization: energy demand constantly increases. If you play those curves out over time, generating energy off-planet starts to become cost-competitive, and eventually necessary. And though it may seem ludicrous to mention today, there is an actual thermodynamic ceiling on how much energy you can produce on Earth’s surface before waste heat alone becomes a climate problem. Current global energy use is around 18 to 20 terawatts. At roughly 25 times that level, waste heat adds about 1 watt per square meter of radiative forcing, which is significant. At 75 times current use, you’re at 3 watts per square meter, enough on its own to substantially warm the planet even in a fully decarbonized world. That ceiling is still far off, but the market forces pushing us toward off-planet energy generation will kick in well before we reach it.

The early stages of this transformation off-planet are already underway. Overview Energy is developing space-based solar power, with satellites in geosynchronous orbit collecting continuous sunlight and beaming it back to Earth. They’ve completed an airborne demonstration and are targeting a first orbital demo in 2028. Starcloud is building orbital data centers with large solar arrays and radiative cooling for GPU-heavy AI workloads, betting that abundant solar energy and the vacuum of space as a heat sink make orbital compute cost-competitive with terrestrial facilities. These are early companies working on early technology, but they represent a capability we’re going to have to develop regardless: generating and consuming energy off of Earth. And building that capability is also building the industrial base you’d need for a sunshade.

And then there’s SpaceX, which is raising what will likely be the largest IPO in history next month. At a recent keynote, Elon Musk discussed long-term plans for lunar industrialization, including a concept for a “terafab” and a mass driver(!) on the moon2. SpaceX isn’t the only company in this domain, but their ambitions set the scale for what the industry is heading toward. Just this week, NASA held a conference laying out their own phased moon base timeline: first crewed mission by 2029, semi-annual missions through 2032, and sustained human presence beyond that, with cargo capacity scaling from 4,000 kilograms to 150,000 kilograms per delivery.

The moon has aluminum and silicon in abundance. If you’re already harvesting lunar resources for commercial purposes, building orbital infrastructure for energy and compute, and launching at the frequency that SpaceX’s cost curves suggest, the sunshade stops being a standalone climate megaproject. It becomes a climate application built on commercial infrastructure that’s coming regardless of whether anyone cares about Earth’s energy balance.

To be clear, I don’t want to overstate this. The trend lines point in this direction, and you can see how the pieces fit together, but any of a dozen things could slow or redirect the trajectory of space industrialization. What I can say is that when I arrived at Nottingham, I assumed we’d probably build a sunshade eventually, but I couldn’t tell whether that meant the 2040s or the 22nd century. I didn’t yet see where it fit within our current trajectory. I left the workshop thinking the overlap between space industrialization and climate need gives it a much more concrete path than the pure-climate-funding frame ever could.

The zero-sum question, revisited

I posed the zero-sum funding question to many people at the workshop. If five million dollars could go to SAI research, or marine cloud brightening, or ice sheet protection, or sunshade research, where should it go? The honest answer is almost certainly one of the nearer-term stabilization interventions, where even single-digit millions can make meaningful impact now. Most sunshade researchers would probably agree.

Two responses changed how I think about the question, though. The first was about different money. The SpaceX IPO is going to create enormous new wealth among people who are interested in space for space reasons, not climate reasons. Those newly wealthy people represent a different potential funding pool than climate philanthropy, and they might be more naturally drawn to the sunshade than to atmospheric particle injection.

The second was the technology-tree argument, and it resonated with the part of me that spent years playing strategy games as a kid. If you’ve ever played a game like Civilization, you know that certain technologies require prerequisites, and you can’t skip the early steps just because you need the later ones urgently. Solar sail control systems, heliogyro dynamics, and lunar resource extraction techniques all have their own development timelines. Getting that work started now, even modestly, is how you have capability ready when the commercial space infrastructure matures enough to make full-scale deployment practical.

The governance question

On the third day of the workshop, there were breakout sessions covering different aspects of the field, from technical requirements to financing to governance. I participated in the governance breakout, with about a dozen people for 80 minutes. I’ve sat in on, read, and watched a lot of governance discussions about SRM over the past year, and this one was a genuinely useful exercise that surfaced some of the more interesting ideas I’ve encountered. The group ran a backcasting exercise from the year 2100: imagine a sunshade is operating successfully, and describe the governance system that made it possible. Then work backward.

The model that drew the most energy in the room was that of an independent central bank: an institution given a mandate (temperature stabilization for a thriving civilization), operating with its own resource mobilization capacity, technology-agnostic across a defined toolkit, making evidence-based decisions independently of direct political control while remaining accountable to a representative framework. The Bank of England was the reference case. The room explicitly rejected a UN-agency model as lacking the autonomy and enforcement power the task requires.

The group was already grappling with the hardest problems. Weaponization came up repeatedly: a sunshade is dual-use technology, and whoever controls it controls Earth’s thermal management from orbit. Then there’s what someone in the room called the “Sunshade Industrial Complex” risk, the concern that at trillion-dollar scale, the institution maintaining the sunshade develops its own incentive to keep expanding it. The group’s response to that was interesting: the capability itself persisting isn’t the problem, because climate management is going to be a permanent need. What you have to guard against is the logic of “we need an ever-larger sunshade” becoming self-justifying.

I’ll be recording a podcast with Morgan Goodwin, the executive director of the Planetary Sunshade Institute, and Ross Centers next week, where we’ll dig deeper into both the technical and governance questions. More on that soon.

Where I landed

I went to Nottingham thinking the sunshade was genuinely interesting but pretty far out. I couldn’t see the path to it becoming real in the way I can see that path for SAI or marine cloud brightening or even ice sheet interventions. I came away thinking the trajectory of space industrialization makes this far more plausible than I’d appreciated, in ways that have nothing to do with the usual arguments for or against space-based reflection.

SAI research remains the right near-term priority. Nobody at the workshop disagreed with that. The sunshade isn’t going to help with the warming we’ll face in the 2030s and 2040s. But if you zoom out to the rest of this century, to the question of what long-term temperature management actually looks like at the scale and duration we’re going to need, the sunshade is where the economic trend lines and the climate need meet. The world is unlikely to fund a trillion-dollar climate project any time soon. But it may build the infrastructure for other reasons, and a planetary sunshade becomes the highest-value climate application you can run on it.

The next workshop is in two years and I plan to go back. My favorite thing about doing this work is meeting the people who are directly building toward these solutions, and this was one of those rooms. There were 70 people from around the world who showed up to a university in the English Midlands to work on something that most of the climate world still treats as science fiction. I think they might be early, but I don’t think they’re wrong.

Sunlight reflection has spent decades as an idea scientists batted around at academic conferences. Now venture-backed companies are racing to build deployment systems, state legislatures are passing bans on weather modification research, and the public still mostly thinks the contrails overhead are a government plot. Ben Kalina has been pointing a camera at this entire evolution for fifteen years. Plan C for Civilization, his documentary on the field’s emergence as serious research, is the closest thing we have to a real historical record of how this is unfolding. We talked about what changed Ben’s mind about the timeline, why average audiences leave his film more curious not less, the strange dynamics of venture capital entering a space that runs on trust, and what of the Stardust Solutions optics problem can and cannot be engineered away.

Ben Kalina is a documentary filmmaker and a professor at Drexel University. His new film Plan C for Civilization follows the emergence of solar geoengineering research, centered on David Keith, the SCoPEx experiment at Harvard, and the late entrance of Make Sunsets. The film is currently in festival distribution and screening tour. More at plancforcivilization.com.

Key topics with timestamps

• (02:00) The fifteen-year project — How a film begun in 2009 ended up documenting a field that took most of that time to become real

• (05:30) David Keith, Ken Caldeira, and the 1998 Aspen meeting — The origin moment that drew two researchers in by trying to prove the idea ridiculous

• (07:40) Why SCoPEx mattered symbolically — A small experiment that did the work of declaring solar geoengineering research a legitimate field

• (09:20) The Make Sunsets entrance — Move-fast culture meets a field that desperately needs trust

• (13:30) The choice to go to Sweden — What the headline missed about the actual procedural reality

• (16:30) Time and the climate conversation — Why the carbon curve has changed how Ben thinks about decisions

• (19:50) From “scare them straight” to “help them grapple” — How a fifteen-year project changed its own purpose

• (23:00) What the focus groups show — Why average viewers come away wanting more research, not less

• (28:30) The fall tour — Taking the film to states with proposed weather modification bans

• (36:00) Storytelling and fiction — Why direct air capture, ocean iron fertilization, and SAI all need better cultural artifacts

• (46:30) Slow science versus move fast — The dichotomy the field is currently navigating

• (54:30) Stardust and the trust problem — Why isotopic markers cannot do all the work

• (58:00) Who is actually in this field — Fifteen years with the researchers

Notable quotes

“This stuff is coming at us, solar geo, much, much faster than most people realize. There’s probably some major decisions that are going to start getting made in the next few years. And the public has no clue. And if they do, they think they’re talking about chemtrails.” — Ben Kalina

“When you start talking about making the planet more reflective, that’s a ‘could possibly go wrong’ thought. That’s a classic ‘why the hell would we do that.’” — Ben Kalina

“We could have the science down to a T with solar geoengineering. You could have isotopic markers on the particles you’re putting up there, and there’s still going to be a big piece of this that is just trust.” — Ben Kalina

“Nobody in this field is a climate denier. They all come to this kind of as a career last resort, after having sort of figured out that there’s nothing else where they can contribute.” — Ben Kalina

“Stardust Solutions, in this moment, being an Israeli company of former nuclear scientists funded by Silicon Valley tech billionaires whose stated goal is to change the planet’s temperature, and accidentally, by the way, name themselves after the empire’s plan to build the Death Star.” — Ben Kalina

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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?”

Leave a comment

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:

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