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Who’s Ready to Think About Blocking Out the Sun?
The idea of artificially lowering the planet’s temperature is gaining supporters and hitting political opposition.
By Alexander C. Kaufman
For years, the idea of geoengineering—artificially lowering global temperatures through technological means—has been met with skepticism. Only a handful of dedicated and much-criticized scientists have argued for researching it at all, and when others weighed in, it was generally to trash the idea. This September, in a study published in the journal Frontiers in Science, more than 40 experts in climate change, polar geosciences, and ocean patterns warned that geoengineering was extremely unlikely to work and likely to have dangerous consequences. Spraying reflective aerosols into the atmosphere to deflect the sun’s heat, could, for instance, “cause stratospheric heating, which may alter atmospheric circulation patterns, leading to wintertime warming over northern Eurasia,” they wrote.
Science fiction has more vividly imagined how humanity might try to reverse climate change and make a mess of it. This is the stuff of Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer, in which a failed geoengineering experiment has rendered the planet uninhabitably cold, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, in which the Indian government decides to unilaterally geoengineer the climate after a heat wave roasts millions of its citizens to death. In Robinson’s telling, though, the problem is not geoengineering itself but the risk humans might hastily deploy such technology to manipulate our atmosphere, before we have studied it enough to fully understand what it might do.
As the actual predictions for Earth’s future have become more dire, scientists are starting to agree. More than 120 of them signed on to a response to the Frontiers paper that argued that more research into geoengineering was, in fact, “urgently needed.”
“Within the scientific community, I don’t think there’s any question that there’s growing support for the research, just driven by the reality that climate change is progressing,” Philip Duffy, the former top science adviser in the Biden administration, told me. “There’s a very strong realization now that some amount of overshoot is inevitable, and that mitigation alone can’t fix this.” Hopes of cutting emissions quickly enough to limit the dangers of climate change are fading: This year’s United Nations climate summit concluded over the weekend with a final statement that avoided any mention of fossil fuels, in what was widely hailed as a victory for oil and gas producers. If the world cannot drastically, quickly overhaul global energy and agricultural systems before the planet reaches irreversible tipping points, then what?
In theory, geoengineering could mean brightening marine clouds, or encouraging heat to bounce back into space by mirroring light off polar ice. The term has also been used to describe technology that removes carbon from the atmosphere, which is now widely accepted as a necessary tool to limit global warming. The most vexing technology is what’s broadly referred to as solar-radiation management—those reflective aerosols that could prevent the sun’s heat from reaching the Earth.
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After years of being treated as fringe notions, all of these ideas are gaining traction. The billionaire Peter Thiel has backed geoengineering work. Elon Musk has expressed his support for start-ups pursuing the technology. One Silicon Valley-backed company, Make Sunsets, went as far as carrying out a rogue experiment in Baja California in 2022. Left-wing environmental circles have long criticized even researching these technologies; now some activists (who see climate change as its own form of unintentional geoengineering) argue that geoengineering technologies are a way of reversing capitalism’s climate sins. U.S.-government labs have been actively investigating what it would mean to pour sulfur dioxide into the Arctic atmosphere. Stardust Solutions, an Israeli-U.S. start-up that wants to commercialize reflective-aerosol technology, recently raised $60 million; the company’s aim, CEO Yanai Yedvab told me, is to give governments the information they need to weigh whether to deploy this technology. Bill Gates has publicly been arguing that the climate movement should worry less about emissions goals and more about improving life in a hotter future; at a private lunch I attended last month, he said that dramatic tools such as geoengineering technologies would be good to have “in the arsenal” of climate adaptations.
Like most geoengineering supporters, Gates meant only that we should understand these tools better. More research, after all, would not guarantee deployment. Virtually no advocates are publicly arguing for deploying geoengineering at present; they are arguing only for publicly funded (and therefore publicly accountable) programs.
But at the same moment that scientific and business leaders are softening to the idea of geoengineering, the political opposition in the U.S. is growing. “The politics are wildly bipolar,” Craig Segall, a senior adviser to the Federation of American Scientists and a former top lawyer at the California Air Resources Board, told me. In recent years, he himself has embraced the need to research geoengineering, but he has also watched opponents on both ends of the political spectrum dig in. On the left, the most extreme thinkers argue that the world should be talking only about mitigating emissions—that the solution to climate change is dramatically scaling back energy production. On the right, a contingent of MAGA leaders have become vocal adversaries to geoengineering research and are using it to feed conspiracy theories about government manipulation of the atmosphere.
On Dr. Phil’s show in April, for instance, a young woman asked Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, about the familiar conspiracy theory that the condensation trails of airplanes contain mind-altering chemicals designed to sicken or control the American people. The so-called chemtrails theory emerged in the 1990s on internet forums and late-night radio, where amateur sleuths presented the idea and used scientists’ rebuttals as evidence of how deep the conspiracy went. Rather than challenge the idea, Kennedy suggested that it was, in fact, a campaign carried out by the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
“That is not happening in my agency. We don’t do that. It’s done, we think, by DARPA,” he said, before explaining that the chemicals that the woman had mentioned—bromium, aluminum, strontium—might be coming from jet fuel. He promised to “do everything in my power to stop it,” adding that “we’re bringing on somebody who’s gonna think only about that, find out who’s doing that and hold them accountable.” (Kennedy did not respond to my request for comment.)
In July, after deadly floods in Texas killed more than 130 people, Fox News aired an interview in which the chief executive of Rainmaker, a start-up aiming to seed clouds, was asked whether its experiments had spurred the floods. (This notion has been widely debunked.) Few geoengineering experts consider cloud-seeding to be geoengineering; it’s now commonly used in drought-parched places such as Dubai and the Tibetan Plateau as part of China’s efforts to ensure the continued flow of glacial water. But Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene soon piled on. Two months after the floods, the Georgia Republican held a hearing, called “Playing God With the Weather,” that conflated weather modification with geoengineering.
These public officials are responding to a broader movement. In 2020, Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy, called geoengineering research “a template for both hubris, hypocrisy and risk.” President Donald Trump’s ex-wife Marla Maples has become a prominent activist against both vaccines and geoengineering. Nicole Shanahan, the Silicon Valley lawyer who was Kennedy’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election, has said geoengineering should be “a crime.”
On the left, Craig Segall told me, the opposition to geoengineering has been mostly moral signaling. But on the right, millions of dollars are going toward blocking geoengineering before it ever starts in earnest. More than two dozen states have introduced legislation, mainly sponsored by Republicans, to block any geoengineering efforts. Bills have passed into law in at least two states, Tennessee and Florida.
Elsewhere in the world, the situation looks different. In a talk at the Paris Peace Forum last month, Ghanaian Foreign Minister Samuel Ablakwa hailed the research into solar-radiation management currently under way in Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa, and his own country. Developing countries, he said, must be “active architects of our own future.” China’s geoengineering efforts are still nascent, but John Moore, a scientist at the University of Lapland, in Finland, who has advised China’s research into geoengineering, told me that if Beijing does “decide to prioritize it, it will get done.” In other words, our world is looking more and more like the one Kim Stanley Robinson imagined, in which some country decides to try altering the atmosphere.
There’s an analogue for the moment we’re in now. Back in the early 2000s, many climate activists vocally opposed funding adaptation infrastructure—sea walls, raised streets, and other measures meant to mitigate the impacts of a changing climate. They argued that these undertakings would prove ineffective and, worse, would remove the will to decrease emissions. More than two decades later, emissions are still rising, and the cost of adapting to climate change has mounted by the billions each year. Now virtually no serious people involved in climate policy still oppose adaptation funding.
It’s easy to imagine a similar scenario playing out with geoengineering, which essentially amounts to a particularly potent and large-scale tool for adaptation. The arguments that scientists still make against geoengineering follow much the same logic as those against sea walls: In the Frontiers paper, the authors wrote that geoengineering technologies offered “false hope,” and risked sapping the will to address greenhouse gas pollution. They’re right that would-be geoengineers cannot guarantee that their ideas will work or that the intended benefits will outweigh the negative side effects. The barriers to exploring the possibilities of these technologies are rising, arguably more on the right than the left. But short of just going for it, the only way to find out how helpful or dangerous geoengineering might be is to let people ask.
The existential struggle between being a ‘we’ and an ‘us’
by Tris Hedges, postdoctoral fellow in philosophy
Sartre’s phenomenology reveals how a shift from subject to object (and back) is not merely a matter of grammar
You meet with a friend to take a walk. Together you stroll through the park, coordinating your movements and reciprocally engaging and communicating with one another. According to the British philosopher Margaret Gilbert, this is a paradigmatic case of experiencing oneself as part of a ‘we’: two people communicatively connected and joint in their commitment to take a walk and catch up.
But what happens when suddenly you become aware of someone staring at you, perhaps listening in on your conversation? In this moment, you may be pulled out of the intimately closed-off dyad as you are abruptly made aware that the two of you have become the object of someone else’s experience, either visually or auditorily. You now experience yourselves not as a private ‘we’ but as a ‘them’ in the eyes of the other.
What this brief anecdote illuminates is the phenomenological distinction between a ‘we’ and an ‘us’. First, we took a walk together and were unified from within, by our sharing in commitments, goals, communication and emotions. Then, we experienced ourselves being unified from the outside as we noticed someone looking at and listening to us.
This may sound like a mere grammatical distinction, but in this short article I want to draw on existential and social phenomenology to show that the distinction between a ‘we’ and an ‘us’ in fact points to an important experiential shift – a shift that reveals something deeper about how we live in a social world saturated with power relations, group markers, and social identities.
Phenomenology is a school of philosophical thought established by Edmund Husserl at the turn of the 20th century. This philosophical tradition enquires extensively into first-person experiences and thus a range of complex issues surrounding consciousness, selfhood, embodiment, perception, affectivity, temporality, and intersubjectivity. While phenomenology began with analyses into the first-person singular – how I experience the world through my embodied subjectivity – a great deal of phenomenologial work has since been dedicated to enquiries into the first-person plural.
When nationalism was on the rise in Europe in the early 20th century, phenomenologists began exploring forms of experience at communal and societal levels. This yielded comprehensive investigations into collective and shared experiences, affective sharing, social participation and group identity. After the Second World War, phenomenologists then engaged rigorously with questions of group-based oppression, marginalisation, exclusion, and how hierarchical distinctions become sedimented into the fabric of our social world.
One shortcoming is that their analyses of the ‘we’ and ‘we-experiences’ are abstract and idealising
A central tenet of this research in social phenomenology pertains to the conditions of going from a first-person singular to a first-person plural perspective. In other words, the transition from an ‘I’ to a ‘we’; from an experience being singularly mine to collectively ours. This transition has also taken centre stage in wider philosophical investigations within social ontology, the field of philosophy that investigates how things come to be through social interaction.
One shortcoming of many of these mainstream philosophical accounts – both from the phenomenological tradition and from contemporary social ontology – is that their analyses of the ‘we’ and ‘we-experiences’ are abstract and idealising. Abstract in the sense that the plural subject is shorn of any sociohistorical situation, and idealising because the ‘we’ is characterised by cooperation, consensus, equality and reciprocity.
But what about those moments in which we situate a collective of people in the world – a world not only inhabited by other people, but one that is saturated with power relations, conflict and historically instituted hierarchical distinctions? To do this, I turn to existential phenomenology, a branch of phenomenology that foregrounds how historically contingent institutions affect lifeworld-specific variations of basic structures of human existence. One thinker who was interested in adopting such an existential-phenomenological social ontology was Jean-Paul Sartre.
In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre elaborates on the existential and philosophical importance of what he calls ‘the Look’. Unlike earlier accounts that emphasised how the first-person plural emerges out of the relation between I and you, Sartre is interested in how they relates to me as an object. ‘The Look’ groups us together from the outside into an objectified and homogenous ‘them’, pulling us out of the self-contained and self-created ‘we’ that was unified from within.
In extending the existential and phenomenological importance of ‘the Look’ to collective (rather than individual) experience, Sartre draws a distinction between the ‘we-subject’ (le nous-sujet) and the ‘we-object’ (le nous-objet). Since nous in French is used for the first-person plural, in English we could translate Sartre (as his American translator Hazel Barnes did) as drawing a distinction between the ‘we’ and the ‘us’. Sartre himself was wary of deriving theoretical insights from mere grammatical categories, especially when many languages do not even use or differentiate between a first-person plural pronoun. But, as the philosopher Sarah Pawlett-Jackson argues in The Phenomenology of the Second-Person Plural (2025), pronouns came into use precisely in order to capture a particular form of lived experience, a particular phenomenological standpoint.
In many languages, the first-person plural pronoun can take on both a subjective (or, nominative) and objective (or, accusative) form. In English, ‘we’ is used when referring to the plurality as the subject (of an action, belief, judgment, emotion, perception, etc). We saw a movie at the cinema. We need to move the table. We are indignant. However, when that plurality becomes the object, it is referred to instead with the pronoun ‘us’. The cinema didn’t let us in. That table is too heavy for us. They were indignant towards us.
In other words, whereas a we-experience is a plurality of subjects who are jointly conscious of an object, an us-experience involves a double consciousness. Not only are we conscious of each other and a shared object of experience, but also of us as an object that stands in relation to them, the external Third. It is Sartre’s introduction of ‘the Third’ onto the scene that resists the collapsing of the first-person plural into the ‘we’, instead introducing the ‘us’ as something phenomenologically distinct.
Double-consciousness refers to ‘measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’
So, what does it mean to have a ‘we-experience’ in comparison to an ‘us-experience’? Anglophonic philosophical discussions around the first-person plural have almost entirely focused on the ‘we’. By taking the subjective form of the first-person plural as the modus operandi of their investigations, phenomenologists have been predominantly concerned with how we do things together in reciprocal and communicative face-to-face interaction. In order to experience the world from a ‘we-perspective’, certain basic criteria need to be met. First of all, there must be a plurality of subjects who are undergoing the experience. If I am the only person enjoying the sunset, my enjoyment is felt by me as an individual subject, rather than by we as a plural subject. Secondly, the subjects must be unified in some sense. If a stranger sitting near me is enjoying the same sunset, it would be presumptuous to say that we experienced it together unless our enjoyment has been communicated to one another. We haven’t created the necessary unity.
An experience of oneself as a member of an ‘us’ rather than a ‘we’ can be understood to have a distinct phenomenology in two important respects. First, whereas a we-experience can take place between a dyad, an us-experience is necessarily triadic in its structure. A felt sense of ‘us-ness’ can arise only in relation to an external Third element. It is important not to delimit the Third to face-to-face encounters; the Third can be represented through various forms of media, from political posters to radio announcements to graffiti, and thus the Third is encountered with varying degrees of mediation. One can be made reflectively self-aware through ‘the Look’ of the Third by hearing a rustling of branches, the sound of footsteps, or a CCTV camera turning to face your direction.
This foregrounding of being-seen through the Other is reminiscent of the notion of ‘double-consciousness’, first introduced by W E B Du Bois in his essay ‘Strivings of the Negro People’ (1897). For Du Bois, double-consciousness refers to ‘this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’ – a commonplace experience for Black people living in a white supremacist society. This understanding of double-consciousness influenced early work in existential phenomenology, especially that of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, through the work of their friend and collaborator, the African American author Richard Wright, for whom Du Bois was an important source of inspiration.
With us-experiences, one can speak of a plural or collective double-consciousness. The members of the ‘we’ are no longer singularly conscious of a shared object of experience, but are doubly conscious of themselves as an object of experience. In this sense, an us-experience arises because of a collective relation to an external Third.
Disentangling the ‘we’ from the ‘us’ is helpful in going beyond the idealising and abstract philosophical discussions in social ontology because it foregrounds the manifold ways in which we experience ourselves being categorised, grouped together, and stereotyped according to certain markers. Plural markings are often the result of sociohistorically instituted identity categories, groupings and hierarchical oppositions. For this reason, first-person plural experiences in terms of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, age and so on often take place in the register of the ‘us’ rather than the ‘we’. This is because these social-identity categories are instituted and policed according to visible markers. While they can be appropriated for emancipatory struggle – and in such cases we can speak of a we-experience at the level of race or gender, for example – they are more often externally imposed in stereotypical, prejudicial and derogatory processes of othering.
So, us-experiences can be less harmonious, consensual and self-endorsed than we-experiences since their constitution hinges on these external impositions. Of course, being part of a ‘we’ can also be negatively valenced, such as the ‘we’ that emerges out of an argument or fight, but to experience oneself as part of an ‘us’ bears no necessary link to feeling a positive sense of commonality with the other members.
Yet the ‘us’ is not simply the dark and depressing side of the ‘we’. As Sartre went on to show in his later work of existentialist Marxism, it is often from the alienated, marked and stereotyped ‘us’ that collective struggle, political action, and a coordinated and resistant ‘we’ emerges. In becoming conscious of one’s position in the social world, you, and others like you, can prompt a response of resistance to dismantle and overcome the social constraints that one collectively faces with others. An emancipatory transition from an ‘us’ to a ‘we’ takes place when the external Third loses salience in lieu of an internal unification and organisation that comes about to reclaim agency over ‘them’. Existential phenomenology, far from being an esoteric philosophical discipline, has crucial political importance in helping people collectively see themselves as agents of change.
Tris Hedges is a postdoc in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. They are on a three-year fellowship, the first two of which are being spent at the Affective Societies Research Centre at the Free University of Berlin in Germany.
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