Economic interests and ideologies behind solar geoengineering research in the United States
Andrew Lockley
https://www.solargeoeng.org/economic-interests-and-ideologies-behind-solar-geoengineering-research-in-the-united-states/
Economic interests and ideologies behind solar geoengineering research in the United States
- October 27, 2022
Solar geoengineering research – also discussed as solar radiation management or stratospheric aerosol injection – is often thought of as a futuristic climate emergency measure, or as a tool of the fossil fuel industry to push back energy transitions as much as possible. In this post, we show that solar geoengineering is mostly now supported by interests aligned with technology and financial sectors, and advanced by researchers as a key part of near-term climate policy. This blog is based on a recent paper by the authors, which can be found here, with pdf here: Whose climate intervention? Solar geoengineering, fractions of capital, and hegemonic strategy.
There is a persistent false dichotomy animating the politics of solar geoengineering. On one hand, proponents of research and development argue that solar geoengineering could serve as both a near-term intervention to reduce climate impacts for the most vulnerable, and a way to “buy time” for mitigation, adaptation, and carbon removal to take effect. On the other hand, critics tend to couch solar geoengineering as nothing but a smokescreen to perpetuate fossil fueled business-as-usual. The truth lies somewhere in between (though critics are much closer to the mark). That is, solar geoengineering is not a humanitarian endeavor, nor is it a direct ploy by the fossil fuel industry. It is being advanced – funded, researched, and governed – by institutions and individuals broadly aligned with or connected to Silicon Valley and Wall Street, so-called green capitalists within the technology and financial industries operating under ideologies of philanthrocapitalism (or effective altruism) and ecomodernism. Solar geoengineering is being advanced by these interests as a way to “buy time” for the same staid, gradual, neoliberal climate policies that have failed for decades: market mechanisms, policy tweaks, and technological innovations. There appears to be a faction within climate politics willing to push for extreme, potentially dangerous, likely centuries-long technological interventions to alter the climate system so that we can ultimately change…nothing at all. Or, more accurately, to actively save capitalism from a climate crisis of its own making.
We explore this paradox in a recent paper examining the funding sources, political-economic alignments, and ideologies driving the development of solar geoengineering in the United States. Between 2008 and 2018, total global funding for solar geoengineering remained relatively low, with European governments (e.g. the EU, Germany, and the UK) spending US$ 31.3 million on early research efforts, and private funding (primarily in the U.S.) reaching approximately US$ 20 million in this time frame (growing in the last several years with the expansion of the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program (HSGRP), new federal funding, and recent grants from the NGO SilverLining). We note a marked shift in the geographical center of research beginning in 2016 with the U.S. coming to dominate the field, and with it a proliferation of funding from private, philanthropic, and venture capital sources (Figure 1). This constitutes a shift not just internationally, but within the U.S. solar geoengineering landscape as well. Whereas early political interest in solar geoengineering emanated from climate-denying think tanks and politicians backed by the fossil fuel industry, recent funding and support derives from foundations and individuals with ties to technology and financial firms, many of which have a demonstrated record of environmental philanthropy. Philanthropic funding for solar geoengineering in the U.S. revolves around a core group of seven organizations that have funded two or more solar geoengineering research projects in recent years. Table 1 lists these seven organizations, their key corporate connections, and solar geoengineering initiatives they fund.
Figure 1. The global network of solar geoengineering fundingColor key: Blue = United States, Red = Canada, Orange = United Kingdom, Green = Germany, Yellow = India, Pink = China, White = undetermined.
Shapes key: Circle = solar geoengineering research project, Diamond = philanthropic foundation, Up triangle = private firm, Down triangle = think tank, Hourglass = NGO or university research center, Square = state, Box = individual.
Shape size: Number of projects funded.
Sources: Necheles et al. and authors’ data.
Table 1. Leading private funders of solar geoengineering
| Funding organization | Description/Background | Solar geoengineering initiatives fundeda |
| Open Philanthropy Project | Founded by Dustin Moskovitz (billionaire co-founder of Facebook) with partner Cari Tuna, and Holden Karnofsky, formerly of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates. Board includes Divesh Mahkan, founder of ICONIQ Capital, formerly of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley | – Forum on Climate Engineering Assessment (FCEA) – HSGRP ($4.5M 2016-17) – Solar Radiation Management – Governance Initiative (SRMGI) – DECIMALS Fund – UCLA Emmett Institute Total amount: $5.76M |
| SilverLining | Funded by venture capital firms LowerCarbon Capital and First Round Capital; staff and board include former executives from Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase Co. | – GLENS (NCAR) – Marine Cloud Brightening Project (MCB – Cornell Climate Engineering – GeoMIP – SRMGI Total amount: $3M |
| Bill Gates/ FICER | FICER is Bill Gates’ personal fund for energy and geoengineering research, administered by geoengineering researchers Ken Caldeira and David Keith | – HSGRP ($7.65M 2013-18) – MCB ($150K) – SRMGI ($100K) |
| Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) | Environmental NGO, many corporate ties on board; corporate partnerships, e.g. Citigroup, GE, McDonald’s, Shell, Tyson, Walmart | – Cornell Climate Engineering – SRMGI |
| Pritzker Innovation Fund | Rachel Pritzker, an heir to the multi-billionaire Pritzker family, founders of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation | – HSGRP – SilverLining |
| VK Rasmussen Foundation | Family foundation founded by the Swedish inventor and businessman Villum Kann Rasmussen; funds a range of environmental groups, some opposed to geoengineering; raises funds from investment capital | – Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative (C2G) ($5.55M) – FCEA – National Academies |
| Alfred P. Sloan Foundation | Founded by Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors; claims $1.9 billion in assets; raises funds from investment capital | – HSGRP ($90K) – CSPO Arizona State University ($300K) |
To understand the alignment of these organizations with various economic sectors (e.g. industrial, technological, financial, commercial), we trace board-level interlocks with the corporate community – governance-level connectionsformed when corporate directors sit on the boards of multiple organizations. One of the board’s roles is to decide on the broad orientations of a foundation, including the main areas which will receive funds. Hence, in general terms, foundation boards are charged with distributing philanthropic capital.
Data about board members’ interlocks to different economic sectors thus show which sector(s) of the economy solar geoengineering funders are most closely embedded. As shown in Table 2, among the 91 directors of the top seven solar geoengineering funders, we count a total of 62 corporate interlocks: the financial sector comprises 38.7% of the links, the commercial and services sector 24.2% and the high-tech sector 19.4%. Among all corporations, 20 interlocks (32.3%) are to high-tech related firms, including financial or consulting firms providing services specifically to the high-tech sector. A mere five interlocks (8.1%) connect solar geoengineering funders to fossil fuel extractive firms and to carbon-linked sectors such as automotive industries, aviation, steel production and chemical manufacturing (Table 2).
Table 2. Board-level interlocks between top solar geoengineering funders and different economic sectors
| Economic sector | N | % |
| Finance, investment and real estate | 24 | 38.7% |
| Commercial, advisory and misc. services | 15 | 24.2% |
| Technology, equipment, software, communications | 12 | 19.4% |
| Other industrial, mediated relation to fossil fuels | 6 | 9.7% |
| Carbon-linked industrial | 4 | 6.5% |
| Carbon extraction, processing, distribution | 1 | 1.6% |
| Total | 62 | 100.0% |
Another key feature of solar geoengineering funding in the U.S. is the number of billionaires and billionaire-founded philanthropies involved in the field. A large part of these individuals’ wealth comes from high-tech firms including Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Google and Skype; only one of 11 billionaires acquired their fortune through the carbon extractive sector, former Enron trader John Arnold. In addition to individual billionaires, several high net-worth individuals also fund solar geoengineering research. For example, key funders of the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program include: G. Leonard Baker, Jr., partner at Sutter Hill Ventures (Silicon Valley VC firm); Howard Fischer, founder of Basso Capital Management; Ross Garon of Millennium Capital; The Tansy Foundation, founded by Eric Wepsic, an executive at hedge fund D. E. Shaw; and Teza Technologies, founded by Misha Malyshev, formerly of hedge fund Citadel Investment Group and McKinsey & Co, among others.
Solar geoengineering funding is thus comprised of a core group of individuals and organizations with multiple ties to corporate power either directly or via their boards of directors, primarily in the financial and technology capital sectors. Among this group, we find at least 11 billionaires or billionaire-founded philanthropies, as well as a slew of wealthy individuals with direct ties to venture capital firms and billionaire-led hedge funds. Solar geoengineering research funding is the province of the financial and high-tech sectors of the corporate elite, which are interrelated to but ultimately distinct from the fossil fuel fraction. Hence, we conceptualize solar geoengineering as a potential strategy for compromise among climate and fossil capital: solar geoengineering is being mobilized by the actors outlined above explicitly to “buy time” for gradual, market-driven climate and energy transitions. This is of obvious financial interest to the fossil fuel industry, but also to the banks and financial institutions that continue to invest in fossil fuel expansion, as well as wealthy individuals and big corporations interested in maintaining the political and economic status quo.
The big picture discussions of funding and economic sectors above can be fleshed out by examining the economic rationales mobilized by leading solar geoengineering researchers as they sell this idea to elite economic and political institutions. As an illustrative example, take a recent paper by David Keith – perhaps the leading solar geoengineering researcher in the world – and his co-author John Deutch. Keith is Director of the Harvard geoengineering program, which, as noted above, is funded largely by billionaire philanthropies and wealthy individuals. Deutch is Institute Professor of Chemistry at MIT, former Director of the CIA, former Deputy Secretary of Defense, has been or is currently on the board of Cheniere Energy, Citigroup, Raytheon, and Schlumburger (an oil services company), and serves as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Petroleum Council, the Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board, and the Trilateral Commission. Keith and Deutch’s paper was written for the Aspen Institute’s Economic Strategy Group. The Aspen Institute is an influential economic and foreign policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., with a well-connected board. More specifically, Aspen’s Economic Strategy Group is co-chaired by former Treasury Secretaries, and comprised of CEOs or CFOs from leading financial corporations.
The paper, titled “Climate Policy Enters Four Dimensions,” is the concluding chapter of the Economic Strategy Group’s 2020 book, Securing our Economic Future, wherein Keith and Deutch analyze climate policy as primarily a question of costs. They begin by arguing that the purpose of mitigation is to “lower emissions without reducing economic growth” (p. 267, emphasis added), and adaptation aims to “protect communities, commerce, and environments.” Dealing with climate change cannot threaten economic growth, and adaptation must attend to the needs of commerce equally alongside communities and environments. From this perspective, they argue that decarbonization is best accomplished through the private market, acknowledging that government policy to create market incentives is necessary, but should not venture too far into economic processes in the form of “industrial policy:” “the government record in advancing innovation is mixed; the government does not have the expertise that is necessary to make uncertain investment decisions, and the political system has little tolerance for the failures that inevitably occur with R&D projects” (p. 284). Hence solar geoengineering becomes rational in a situation where the “low-carbon economy will require massive amounts of capital and a very long period of market adjustment until the benefits of decarbonization are realized (p. 269). In this view, while the market figures out how to reduce emissions while expanding growth, we need solar geoengineering as a bridge technology until large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) comes online. In their models “an optimal policy deploys emission reduction early and uses carbon removal at large scale only after emissions have been substantially reduced while [solar geoengineering] is used for an intermediate period while carbon concentrations are high and is then phased out as concentrations are reduced by CDR” (p. 282).
They argue that this engineered-Earth approach has clear economic value. Running various integrated assessment models, they suggest that the added value derived from including solar geoengineering in near-term climate policy ranges between US$ 39 trillion and US$ 58 trillion (p. 283). Given this modelling exercise, they note the following: costs of solar geoengineering appear to be “quite small, with the global annualized costs perhaps under $20 billion per year well into the latter half of the century. By comparison, the damage-reduction benefits could be 100 times this amount. It seems reasonable that the favorable cost-benefit potential of [solar geoengineering] justifies a vigorous public R&D effort …” (p. 287). In other words, these are elite scientists and policymakers connected in various ways to both fossil and climate capital making an argument for the “rational” inclusion of solar geoengineering in current climate policy not as a future emergency measure, as is often assumed – based on narrow goals of economic efficiency and maintaining market-driven growth, presented to leading figures and institutions within the economic and political elite. While many proponents of solar geoengineering frame it as a global humanitarian intervention on behalf of the poor and climate vulnerable, it is being developed through an extremely narrow, deeply ideological lens that caters to dominant interests.
With funding from tech and finance-linked philanthropists, a political-economic logic that pushes management of the climate crisis via interventions into the climate system, rather than the economy (thus avoiding direct economic planning), and policy proposals demonstrating tremendous cost efficiency, the appeal of solar geoengineering to corporations, hegemonic states, and all manner of elites becomes clear. Solar geoengineering is not a humanitarian endeavor: it would constitute a massive, potentially dangerous, likely centuries-long intervention into the climate system in order to maintain the economic system at the root of the crisis.
Kevin Surprise is a Lecturer in Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke College. He researches the political economy of climate change, with a focus on the politics of solar geoengineering proposals, and serves as co-chair of the Politics of Geoengineering Working Group with the Climate Social Science Network.
J. P. Sapinski is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Université de Moncton, in New Brunswick, Canada. He is interested in how the structures of capitalism and corporate power mediate the social metabolism between human societies and the ecosphere, and how we can transform and decolonize this relationship to make it just and sustainable. He is co-editor, with Holly Jean Buck and Andreas Malm, of Has It Come to This? Promises and Perils of Geoengineering on the Brink (Rutgers University Press, 2020).
Dr. Maiken Winter
Wow, what a depressing paper! I thought geo-engineers truly had
the survival of humankind in mind with the employment of
geo-engeneering as the very last straw to try to save us from
catastrophe in case we are just too stupid to change in time
(which we seem to be, unfortunately).
I am interested what the community here says to that paper. Is it true that the main interest is to prolong the time to go on as usual?
Thanks!
Maiken
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Daniele Visioni
I look forward to a correction in the blog and a Corrigendum in the published paper by the authors.
Best,
Daniele
Daniele Visioni
Dr. Maiken Winter
Thanks for the clarficiation!
Such a weird difficult time right now. Sometiems it´s hard to
keep track of what is right and wrong.
Best,
Maiken
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Simone Tilmes
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kevin lister
Everything the article says may be correct, but that’s not the issue. The issue is what happens at the current level of CO2 concentrations if we do not proceed with SRM and how much worse the prognosis will be at the higher levels that are unable to stop the planet moving towards.
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Douglas MacMartin
GLENS took place before SilverLining funded anyone!
Cornell was never funded by EDF or PNNL (though I’ve coauthored papers with people from both). We’ve had funding over the years from a number of philanthropic donors, mostly from tech sector.
Highly entertaining that someone would write a paper about funding for SG research and then just make stuff up about the funding…. If the authors had actually cared, they could have asked; I think we’re all transparent about our funding if anyone wants to know (and it’s generally listed in acknowledgements of papers too.)
It is true, of course, that most funding comes from philanthropic interests, from people who fund broadly in approaches to reduce CO2 emissions, including CDR, and then recognize that in addition to that, it may be valuable to consider SRM as a way to reduce suffering.
I understand that the authors don’t agree with that framing of SRM and view that anything short of smashing capitalism is a failure of imagination and/or ethics, and they are of course entitled to express their ideological viewpoint. Though in doing so they shouldn’t misrepresent the views and values of those they disagree with.
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Ken Caldeira
Ken Caldeira
I tend to believe any of you that you didn’t receive grants from shady sources. But it is a bit ridiculous to suggest that they can ask you about your funding before making things up and publish it — while i, as a scientist, agree that things should not be made up. I think we should accept the possibility that some of us are funded by shady players. It would totally make sense. So, we don’t need to say that “I’m clean”. It’s like MP's in Westminster should not call each other “right honorable gentleman” while the guy might be a rapist if not a tax-evader. The facts are enough: MP, member of parliament.
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Janos Pasztor
I would like to clarify and correct some information in the article by Kevin Surprise and J.P. Sapinski that concerns the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative - C2G, the initiative I lead.
First and foremost, C2G’s mission is strictly impartial and focused on catalyzing the governance of both CDR and SRM. We do not take a position on whether these approaches are good or bad, but instead raise awareness with governments, the intergovernmental actors and CSOs around the world on the need to develop effective governance for them.
Our original funder, as noted, was the VK Rasmussen Foundation (VKRF), a Danish family foundation which, in addition to supporting C2G, has also funded other actors, some of whom strongly oppose SRM.
The article does not make clear if their use of the term geoengineering refers to SRM alone or both SRM and CDR, and what time period it covers. C2G will remain in existence through the end of 2023, and then deliberately close shop, true to its role as a catalyst for encouraging governance discussions among policymakers and those who advise them – not an advocate or implementer of any governance. In that light, it is misleading to list funding for C2G in a table entitled “Funding for Solar Geoengineering”.
In addition to VKRF and Oak Foundation, since 2018 C2G has secured funding from several other major international climate philanthropies – all of whom are listed with their funding levels – on our website, including, among others, the IKEA Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation.
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Janos Pasztor
Thank you – and I liked it too, and with minor edits, sent it off…
Janos
Kevin Surprise
Hello Everyone,
Kevin Surprise and J.P. Sapinski here. Andrew brought this discussion to our attention and we wanted to take a moment to address you all directly. First, thank you for so vigorously engaging with our blog post and longer paper, even if we do come from different perspectives on solar geoengineering research and its potential role in climate policy. Our papers don’t often get this level of attention! We do very much appreciate the additional details provided by many of you. We certainly did our best in assembling that dataset (which is in some ways an update of the 2019 piece by Necheles and colleagues on the HSGRP blog), but as academic researchers, we all understand well that some small mistakes might appear even in the most carefully curated datasets.
On some of the points raised:
On SilverLining funding GeoMIP, and PNNL funding Cornell - we are going back through our data to see where these connections originally emerged for us. This will take some time, but one thing to note is that GeoMIP has many integral and longstanding connections to RISCI (which SilverLining directly funds), e.g. GeoMIP emerged out of RISCI, is still (according to the website) steered by Alan Robock, and the RISCI website states "In addition of continuing to support GeoMIP, we are now focused on the impacts of SAI climate intervention…” So SilverLining indirectly supports GeoMIP via Rutgers (according to how we’re thinking about connections in the field). We may decide to correct that line in the table to note that SilverLining funds RISCI, which in turn supports GeoMIP, but we note that the main arguments we make in the paper are not at all affected by these individual connections.
Similarly, on SilverLining and GLENS, it was our interpretation that GLENS was the basis for NCAR’s new modeling project with Amazon Web Services, with recent publications from NCAR researchers using GLENS (within the SilverLining funding period), and hence our understanding of current NCAR solar geoengineering modeling as based on and using/expanding GLENS - the most well known solar geo research output from NCAR (who are funded by funded by SilverLining).
On EDF and Cornell, it’s our understanding that Cornell Climate Engineering is under the umbrella of and supported by the Atkinison Center for Sustainability, which has a significant partnership (financial and otherwise) with EDF. Given that EDF is one of the leading Big Greens advancing solar geoengineering conversations, we find this connection significant.
On FICER, is it indeed lumped with its funder Bill Gates in the table, but no line appears between FICER and HSGRP in figure 1. We thus are in agreement with Ken Caldeira that FICER does not fund HSGRP. We had to 1. keep the table simple, 2. find a way to show what Gates has funded and that he is the largest single funder of solar geoengineering research - a significant fact, we think, and 3) note that FICER is a personal fund of Gates to differentiate it from the Gates Foundation, which is how it is phrased on Harvard’s FICER webpage.
On C2G, we greatly appreciate Janos’ concerns and engagement - we are in agreement with his specifications of C2G’s funding sources. In the larger paper we define solar geoengineering research as any scientific or governance effort that advances solar geoengineering - initiating high-level governance conversations certainly does that, even if an organization claims neutrality. In the larger paper we discuss funding and C2G clearly (i.e. we only examined funding organizations that have given to two different SG initiatives in recent years, so VKRF is discussed but not, say, Children’s Investment Fund (CFI), though incidentally CFI is founded/run by yet another billionaire hedge fund manager … ).
Finally, in case someone would like to engage on the argument we are making: the paper shows that despite the fact that many prominent critics present solar geoengineering as supported by the fossil fuel industry, it is actually funded by individuals and philanthropies from the high-tech and financial sectors (e.g. billionaires, Silicon Valley VC’s, hedge fund people). From this empirical finding,* we argue that solar geoengineering is poised to play a strategic, compromise role among the fossil fuel industry and what we call “climate capitalists.” That is, solar geoengineering can potentially buttress the fossil fuel industry’s interest in a gradual, long-term energy transition (not SRM research but the promise of SRM as a strategy), and it is now being turned to by key segments within liberal** climate politics also interested in/dependent upon a gradual, market driven response to climate change. The unique qualities of solar geoengineering (speed and scale) make the strategy of gradual change amidst a rapidly unfolding crisis possible, indeed makes the survival of capitalism possible in the face of climate crisis, which is the underlying interest of both the fossil fuel industry and the high-tech/financial sectors of the capitalist class.
* One would think this finding, clearly demonstrated by solar geoengineering critics (us), would be welcome. We certainly feel that we can only have a real debate on SRM once those more open and those more skeptical are starting from the same place.
**As in centrist, corporate, market-driven status quo climate action. We’re both (broadly) Marxists, and we published this paper in a Marxist journal to talk about class power, so it’s great to be engaging with scientific researchers here!
We are happy to follow up on any of this, here, or directly via email (ksur...@mtholyoke.edu, and I’ll forward to J.P.)
Thank you,
Kevin and J.P.
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Jessica Gurevitch
Jessica Gurevitch
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY 11794-5245 USA
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david....@carbon-cycle.co.uk
I think you guys are giving yourselves an unfair hard time. Finding funding for this area of research is difficult to say the least. Take the money where you find it and publish your results for all to see. The research may someday be difference between disaster and not.
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Alan Robock ☮
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Hello Everyone,
Kevin Surprise and J.P. Sapinski here. Andrew brought this discussion to our attention and we wanted to take a moment to address you all directly. First, thank you for so vigorously engaging with our blog post and longer paper, even if we do come from different perspectives on solar geoengineering research and its potential role in climate policy. Our papers don’t often get this level of attention! We do very much appreciate the additional details provided by many of you. We certainly did our best in assembling that dataset (which is in some ways an update of the 2019 piece by Necheles and colleagues on the HSGRP blog), but as academic researchers, we all understand well that some small mistakes might appear even in the most carefully curated datasets.
On some of the points raised:
On SilverLining funding GeoMIP, and PNNL funding Cornell - we are going back through our data to see where these connections originally emerged for us. This will take some time, but one thing to note is that GeoMIP has many integral and longstanding connections to RISCI (which SilverLining directly funds), e.g. GeoMIP emerged out of RISCI, is still (according to the website) steered by Alan Robock, and the RISCI website states "In addition of continuing to support GeoMIP, we are now focused on the impacts of SAI climate intervention…” So SilverLining indirectly supports GeoMIP via Rutgers (according to how we’re thinking about connections in the field). We may decide to correct that line in the table to note that SilverLining funds RISCI, which in turn supports GeoMIP, but we note that the main arguments we make in the paper are not at all affected by these individual connections.
Again you got it wrong. GLENS was finished before NCAR got any Silverlining funds. The current simulations are called ARISE and are not GLENS.2. Similarly, on SilverLining and GLENS, it was our interpretation that GLENS was the basis for NCAR’s new modeling project with Amazon Web Services, with recent publications from NCAR researchers using GLENS (within the SilverLining funding period), and hence our understanding of current NCAR solar geoengineering modeling as based on and using/expanding GLENS - the most well known solar geo research output from NCAR (who are funded by funded by SilverLining).
On EDF and Cornell, it’s our understanding that Cornell Climate Engineering is under the umbrella of and supported by the Atkinison Center for Sustainability, which has a significant partnership (financial and otherwise) with EDF. Given that EDF is one of the leading Big Greens advancing solar geoengineering conversations, we find this connection significant.
On FICER, is it indeed lumped with its funder Bill Gates in the table, but no line appears between FICER and HSGRP in figure 1. We thus are in agreement with Ken Caldeira that FICER does not fund HSGRP. We had to 1. keep the table simple, 2. find a way to show what Gates has funded and that he is the largest single funder of solar geoengineering research - a significant fact, we think, and 3) note that FICER is a personal fund of Gates to differentiate it from the Gates Foundation, which is how it is phrased on Harvard’s FICER webpage.
On C2G, we greatly appreciate Janos’ concerns and engagement - we are in agreement with his specifications of C2G’s funding sources. In the larger paper we define solar geoengineering research as any scientific or governance effort that advances solar geoengineering - initiating high-level governance conversations certainly does that, even if an organization claims neutrality. In the larger paper we discuss funding and C2G clearly (i.e. we only examined funding organizations that have given to two different SG initiatives in recent years, so VKRF is discussed but not, say, Children’s Investment Fund (CFI), though incidentally CFI is founded/run by yet another billionaire hedge fund manager … ).
Finally, in case someone would like to engage on the argument we are making: the paper shows that despite the fact that many prominent critics present solar geoengineering as supported by the fossil fuel industry, it is actually funded by individuals and philanthropies from the high-tech and financial sectors (e.g. billionaires, Silicon Valley VC’s, hedge fund people).
From this empirical finding,* we argue that solar geoengineering is poised to play a strategic, compromise role among the fossil fuel industry and what we call “climate capitalists.” That is, solar geoengineering can potentially buttress the fossil fuel industry’s interest in a gradual, long-term energy transition (not SRM research but the promise of SRM as a strategy), and it is now being turned to by key segments within liberal** climate politics also interested in/dependent upon a gradual, market driven response to climate change. The unique qualities of solar geoengineering (speed and scale) make the strategy of gradual change amidst a rapidly unfolding crisis possible, indeed makes the survival of capitalism possible in the face of climate crisis, which is the underlying interest of both the fossil fuel industry and the high-tech/financial sectors of the capitalist class.
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Ken Caldeira
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JP
Dear colleagues,
Thanks so much for these further details, much appreciated. I'll
do my best to fix the graphs and tables on the blog post
accordingly. We certainly are not trying to spread misinformation.
And thanks to Alan Robock for commenting on the argument of the
paper. Of course no SRM is taking place now or in the near future.
We're looking into the interests served by the "promise" of
geoengineering, i.e. the implications of the fact that SRM may be
possible in the future (see, e.g., Markusson et al's 2017 paper in
Energy Research & Social Sciences).
All best,
JP Sapinski
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Tamas Bodai
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