Inevitable & Obvious

A planetary sunshade is one of those ideas that gets filed under science fiction and left there. A constellation of thin reflectors, parked at the gravitational balance point between the Earth and the Sun, shading the planet by a percent or so and buying us time on warming. The reason to take it seriously now is that the industrial base required to build one is the same base that SpaceX, NASA, and a handful of startups are already racing to stand up for entirely commercial reasons. Ross Centers and Morgan Goodwin of the Planetary Sunshade Institute have been working on this since before it was a field, and in this conversation we trace the whole path: from why even clean energy eventually hits a planetary limit, to how you’d manufacture forty-kilometer solar sails out of moon dust, to who would actually be in charge of the global thermostat once it exists.Guest introductionRoss 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. Get full access to Inevitable & Obvious at www.inevitableandobvious.com/subscribe

Iceland is the first country to formally declare a potential AMOC collapse a national security threat. Páll Gunnarsson, founder of the Reykjavík Institute, has been close to the political process that produced that declaration. He explains why a country of 400,000 people moved faster than larger Atlantic-rim nations, what made the declaration possible, and why he believes intervention capability research has to advance in parallel with climate science rather than after it. We also dig into his case against the standard moral hazard argument (the idea that climate interventions undermine decarbonization ambition) which he reframes as enforced vulnerability, the position of telling the most vulnerable people in the world to remain vulnerable so that wealthier societies feel pressure to act. And we talk about what comes next: a September pledging event in the EU around the OceanEye initiative, an emerging coalition-of-the-willing approach to research governance, and what happened the first time Reykjavík civil society sat down to discuss climate interventions in public.Subscribe for free and get more detailed show notes at inevitableandobvious.com Get full access to Inevitable & Obvious at www.inevitableandobvious.com/subscribe

Luke Iseman is putting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere with high-altitude balloons and selling cooling credits to pay for it. And he doesn’t care if you approve.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’tNotable Quotes* “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* “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* “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* “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)* “Every day that we wait to do solar geoengineering is needless lives lost, species extincted, and tipping points flirted with.” — Luke IsemanLinks 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. Get full access to Inevitable & Obvious at www.inevitableandobvious.com/subscribe