Planetary Sunshade Institite

Thanks for the response, Ted. I'd be very glad to take this deeper on a call, or on the podcast I host through my Substack, if you're game. On your points: 1. On real versus fake emergencies: most of us working on this are trying to move away from emergency framing entirely. It's neither helpful nor accurate, and it's hard to measure. Where I see people converging instead is on risk. If food systems fail in specific regions, how does that play through financial systems, then migration, then the populist reaction and democratic erosion that follow migration shocks? That's the human systems side. On the Earth systems side, the honest answer is that the field is small, the research is thin, and people disagree about whether tipping points are even knowable in advance. But IMO there's enough evidence to make the risk serious and non-zero, and the timing is the trap. You don't want to wait too long. If we're going to prepare for this, the sooner the better. 2. On technocratic presumption: this is where we may overlap more than the thread suggests. I'm skeptical of large centralized bureaucratic authority too, and I'd guess we share more priors than not. That skepticism is a lot of why I got involved. No one is designing the actual governance insitutions for this yet. It's being debated, and there isn't even agreement on what governance means here, which is why participating now matters: the outcome is still open, and I'd rather it get shaped toward human flourishing and human freedom than toward the institutions we presumably both distrust. Abstaining leaves it to whoever shows up anyway. 3. On the IMO: agreed it should keep everyone's confidence in check. But the whole episode ran outside any climate conversation. The rule was about air pollution, nobody owned the forcing, and there was no constituency for the cooling because it was never acknowledged as a program. A deliberate program is the opposite. Its entire reason for existing is its climate function, and its operators would know from day one that an abrupt stop is obviously unallowable. I'd also say 2026 is a different world from 2020. We're in overshoot, Earth energy imbalance is monitored and argued about in public now, and a forcing change of that size couldn't slip past unowned the way it did then. 4. On Europe: your scenario is the moral hazard worry running in reverse, cooling used as leverage to force decarbonization instead of as an excuse to skip it. That’s definitely interesting and valid, and I haven’t seen anyone articulate that before. I take it seriously because I share the concern underneath it. Leverage that forces costs onto developing countries, harming people on net, is a bad outcome no matter what the context for it. This is of course genuinely difficult to balance. Decarbonization and carbon removal are critical in the long-term, and yet the ideology of "emissions management only" is one I oppose. Regarding the EU nature of things, what matters more is that no single bloc ends up positioned to run this alone, and the people thinking about operational capability are deliberately broadening who's involved, with Global South researchers funded through the Degrees Initiative and India, Ghana, and other countries increasingly engaging on their own terms. All the serious players in this space want more of that distributed leadership capacity developed. I'd love to chat further with you on this!

The newest episode of Inevitable & Obvious is live, with Ross Centers and Morgan Goodwin of the @SpaceSRM Planetary Sunshade Institute. Last month I attended the first-ever Planetary Sunshade Workshop in Nottingham, and I learned a lot about where this field is right now. I came away convinced that building a sunshade is genuinely feasible. Ross and Morgan sit at the center of this field, and across the episode they work through what it would take to build a sunshade, how you'd do the lunar metallurgy needed to manufacture large structures in space, and the argument that SpaceX is fundamentally a Dyson Swarm company, whose industrial base is also exactly what a sunshade for Earth would require. From there we get into why even fully renewable energy hits a planetary heat limit, how you'd make forty-kilometer solar sails out of moon dust, and who governs the climate once we can steer it. This was super fun, and easily the most hardcore, in-the-weeds episode of the show so far. If you want a glimpse of where all this is heading over the next two decades, don't miss this one! Link to the episode below. 👇

Best overview of the state of sunlight reflection as a field/movement/poliical topic I’ve seen yet theatlantic.com/science/2025…