What do oil companies, ultraconservative think tanks, and billionaires agree on regarding global warming? Perhaps that it is propaganda, pseudoscience, or a hoax? Or perhaps something more paradoxical: that they have found its solution.
For decades, climate change has forged a destructive path through our world as mitigation efforts have fallen short. A suite of technological innovations now promises to reverse this damage. Among these is stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), a form of geoengineering that proposes injecting large quantities of aerosol particles, namely sulfur dioxide, into the stratosphere to reflect incoming sunlight. SAI has incredible potential to reduce global mean temperatures by several degrees within a matter of months, with deployment projected to add decades before the Earth reaches the catastrophic 2.5 degrees Celsius threshold of warming. This would vastly extend the timeline to carry out a comprehensive green transition and avert the worst of climate change.
Research into the nascent technology has garnered inexplicable political backing from climate-skeptic politicians, think tanks, and lobbyists, as well as funding from the same billionaires and fossil fuel companies who profit from enterprises that warm our climate. This is no accident. Behind closed doors, SAI serves to maintain the centrality of fossil fuels to the global economy while stalling a green transition. By preserving the longevity of petro-assets and relegating clean-energy alternatives to solutions of the past, SAI is not a climate solution but a tool of capital preservation.
Capitalists’ solipsistic accumulation has polluted the Earth and warmed its climate, with the global end state being total ecological collapse. Despite their resistance to upending the hegemony of fossil fuels, financial elites recognize the threat that climate change poses to both global economic stability and fossil fuel corporations through regulation and the rise of energy alternatives. A Citi report estimates a loss of $44 trillion in global GDP with an increase of 2.5 degrees Celsius in global temperature by 2060. At the same time, nearly $100 trillion in unburnable fossil reserves and idle assets could become ‘carbon stranded’ — economically worthless — by 2050 as a result of the transition to low-carbon or renewable energy sources. Risks to petroleum assets from stringent climate policy, as well as risks to financial assets and coastal infrastructure from warming-induced environmental shifts, are set to have fatal impacts on the capitalist world order. Moreover, a green transition would undermine the American-led global economic order from within by eroding the petrodollar system that anchors global oil trade to the US dollar. Thus, elites have gone searching for a form of self-imposed restraint that does not fundamentally threaten their economic empires or profit motives — one that SAI may provide.
Solar geoengineering has the immense capacity to benefit corporations’ bottom line beyond simply eliminating renewable competitors. SAI companies have the unique opportunity to create permanent demand for their product. Aerosols injected into the stratosphere have a lifespan of about one to two years before falling back to the Earth. Therefore, to sustain the cooling effect of SAI, annual replenishment would be required. Furthermore, once wide-scale stratospheric injection begins, it will need to be consistently maintained against the threat of “termination shock,” a rapid rise in global temperature that would occur if injection suddenly stopped, threatening ecosystems and human civilization. The technology would thus create a permanent reliance on its proprietors, such as Stardust Solutions, who could effectively control the stability of our planet as resource extraction continues underneath.
Given the structural alignment between SAI and capital preservation, it is unsurprising that the technology has attracted a unique coalition of advocates. Conservative politicians such as Representative Randy Weber (R-TX) and former representatives Newt Gingrich and Lamar Smith have come out in support of geoengineering as an alternative to government regulation. Unlike other carbon policies, this climate technofix promises to preserve oil markets, protect consumer freedoms with regard to petro-based products, and ensure the profitability of fossil fuels — all core positions of modern conservative ideologues. Geoengineering is consistent with the right-wing cultural worldview that prioritizes controlling the environment and protecting personal liberties provided by free market capitalism.
Stratospheric aerosol injection is also championed by the very creators of the climate crisis. Those who have maximized their gains through this economic system are key contributors to academic geoengineering research — from the founders of highly influential technology companies to the leaders of hedge funds, including names such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Asana’s Dustin Moskovitz. A report from the Center for International Environmental Law noted that geoengineering research has become saturated by the interests of petroindustries, with funding sourced from oil companies such as Shell and Gulf. The Harvard Program on Climate Agreements, which heads Harvard’s solar geoengineering program, is directly funded by fossil fuel companies, including BP, Chevron, Enel, and Shell. Tycoons — including Canadian oil billionaire Norman Murray Edwards, who has a vested financial interest in developing the tar sands of Alberta — have also invested in geoengineering projects. Their “philanthropic” funding is strategic: The potential of SAI to mitigate global warming without systemically addressing the root causes of this crisis makes it an alluring venture for the wealthy elite.
By footing the bill for SAI research, conservatives and fossil industries reveal an internal recognition that global warming demands attention due to its threats to economic security. However, powerful calls for uprooting the petro-economy require that climate deniers acquiesce, at least partially, to prevent a complete shift in the contemporary global economic order. Solar geoengineering thus exists as an anomalous climate fix by which climate skeptics can resist a complete transition of the political economy. SAI projects appease both conservatives and petroindustries — the most politically-organized and financially-robust opponents of climate action — and could conceivably receive nonpartisan support, making the odds of its implementation considerably higher, especially as liberals, desperate for any climate measures, may acquiesce rather than risk the alternative of inaction. Geoengineering thereby becomes the only viable neutral solution, the implementation of which would bypass the political deadlock on climate action while satisfying states, economies, and political figures alike. This political consensus is precisely what makes SAI dangerous. The technology threatens to lock us into permanent atmospheric management, delaying climate change’s most visible harms without addressing the combustion of fossil fuels that drives them.
Thus, solar geoengineering is not simply a climate intervention, but a political-economic intervention, buying time for incremental shifts to decarbonization, slowing the devaluation of fossil capital, and reducing the impetus for overhauling the fossil-dependent infrastructures of the capitalist state. As a climate tactic, SAI can preserve the status quo of petro-dominance and forge an alliance between the fossil and climate factions of accumulation while upholding the legitimacy and power of both under the interests of capitalism. Moreover, SAI would effectively centralize atmospheric authority in the hands of a select few, rendering planetary stability dependent on our ability to fund these actors. The backing of solar geoengineering by capitalist classes and petroindustries is therefore a strategic choice to concurrently stave off energy alternatives and bolster their control of the global politico-economic order.
The stratosphere and varied animate and inanimate bodies that compose our planet must not become another laboratory for capitalist experimentation. At a moment when evidence points toward circular economies, systemic decarbonization, the dismantling of petroindustries, and a reimagined relationship with nature as some of the difficult yet necessary solutions to climate change, SAI offers a relatively cheap and politically acceptable alternative to such a substantial structural pivot. It is clear that SAI is possible — but will we permit the architecture of extractive planetary management it demands?