Another argument supporting a “first movers” coalition for testing and piloting polar SAI?

[Ron Baiman]

Dear Colleagues,

Your thoughts on the point below stimulated by the excellent discussion after Ted Parson’s (excellent!) HPAC presentation yesterday?

Musk starred commercial Starlink satellite broadband service in 2021 that by 2025 

was powered by more than 8,000 low earth orbit (400 miles up) satellites launched by Falcon 9 SpaceX rockets (in 2025 SpaceX accounted for 95 percent of US and more than half of all global launches). In that same year Reuters reported that Musk crippled a planned  Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson by cutting Ukrainian Starlink service in eastern Ukraine (Muskism by Slobodian and Tarnoff p. 51-55).  So Musk has effectively colonized Earth’s lower space without much of a peep from anyone and used this power to support

one side in a  specific  war on earth, something that you (and HPAC in our cooling paper) have pointed out would be basically impossible with SAI. 

Doesn’t this example  suggest that if a first-movers coalition similarly acted to begin testing, piloting and hopefully deploying (initially polar) SAI that would be broadly beneficial for global civilization the world might not actively support this but would largely tolerate it - as in Light’s description of a possible”first movers” scenario?

Best,

Ron

Sent from my iPhone

Begin forwarded message:

From: Ron Baiman <rpba...@gmail.com>
Date: April 28, 2026 at 3:20:26 PM CDT
To: healthypl...@gmail.com
Cc: Michael MacCracken <mmac...@comcast.net>, H simmens <hsim...@gmail.com>, Dennis Garrity <D.GA...@cifor-icraf.org>
Subject: Excellent Session on Planetary Engineering Governance!



Dear Colleagues,

I highly recommend viewing this March

27, 2026 CSPO DC session on “Building Community Capacity for Planetary Engineering Technology Part II”!:

https://youtu.be/w-4XhppYe3c 

Of particular interest:

Comments by Andrew Light that Mike and Dennis have been talking about (WH Climate advisor and Deputy Secretary Obama and Biden Admins): 26:00 - 39:00

Then two excellent (imho 😊) questions and responses to them:

One on urgency by 

Herb:  1:19:30 - 1:25:30

And second related on decision-making by Mike (who was BTW given shout-outs by multiple panelists during their presentations): 1:30:13 - 1:38:33

The issues raised at this forum, particularly by Andrew Light, Herb and Mike, I think get to the core of the two latest documents (see links below) and proposed conference, that we (HPAC) have been working on:

RFF Workshop Proposal:

OOCC submission under review: 

Best,

Ron 

Sent from my iPhone

[Ron Baiman]

*something that Ted Parson points out in his HPAC presentation (and HPAC*

Sent from my iPhone

On May 1, 2026, at 1:27 PM, Ron Baiman <rpba...@gmail.com> wrote:



[Ron Baiman]

A further refinement.

Musk started “consistently proclaiming right wing views in 2022 expressed for example in his May 2022 tweet: “Unless it is stopped, the woke mind virus will destroy civilization and humanity will never reached [sic] Mars” and his Dec 2022 tweet: “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters”.  His political following a run-in with California authorities in Spring 2020 over the Fremont Tesla factory lock-down during Covid that he ended up defying causing the plant to become the center of a 450 person Covid outbreak (a confrontation supported by Trump on Twitter), Black Lives Matter protests in summer 2020, and Biden admin anti-trust  push and antipathy to the Tesla’s union busting and alleged discrimination against asylees and refugees, and his daughter Vivian coming out as trans in 2020 (Muskism pp. 111 - 120).

The  Starlink Ukrainian service shutdown also  occurred in 2022. 

Here’s an expert from the Reuters reporting on it:

“Maryna Tsirkun, a drone expert at Aerorozvidka, an aerial reconnaissance organization that works closely with the Ukrainian military, was also in southern Ukraine at the time. Starlink signals failed as Ukrainian troops began to push toward terrain seized by Russia, she told Reuters. “When we started to proceed there was not a connection,” she said. The outage she and colleagues experienced lasted several days. 

On October 3, Musk angered Zelenskiy and other Ukrainian officials by tweeting a suggestion that locals in regions annexed by Russia vote on whether they should remain a part of Ukraine. A day later, Musk tweeted his concern about the conflict spiraling. “I still very much support Ukraine,” he tweeted, “but am convinced that massive escalation of the war will cause great harm to Ukraine and possibly the world.”

Three days later, following one media report about a Starlink outage, Musk tweeted that “what’s happening on the battlefield, that’s classified.” He added that SpaceX by the end of 2022 was on track to spend $100 million on Ukraine. Although the Polish and U.S. governments by then had begun donations of their own, the billionaire complained about the cost of the equipment and services SpaceX was providing.

SpaceX “cannot fund the existing system indefinitely,” Musk wrote in a mid-October post. The next day, in another tweet, he reversed course. “To hell with it,” he wrote, “we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.”

From all of this it does not seem inreasonable to speculate that Musk’s Ukrainian Starlink shutdown was not entirely unrelated to his newly solidified hard right fascist world view, albeit Biden was still in power so he couldn’t push this too far without jeopardizing very lucrative US gov contracts. 

So we have warming “termination shock” from well intended but not adequately thought through IMO regulation, and a brilliant/ruthless entrepreneur turned fascist, master of the universe using his unprecedented private power in  near space to “weaponize” Starlink. Both  inaccurately (see HPAC docs and Parson talk) viewed as “worst case” feared risks of near-term global cooling deployment already happening.  This seems to be further evidence for the “symbolic” and not rational “evidence based” opposition to emergency cooling )borrowing from Parson characterization).

Best,

Ron

Sent from my iPhone

On May 2, 2026, at 9:25 AM, Ron Baiman <rpba...@gmail.com> wrote:

*something that Ted Parson points out in his HPAC presentation (and HPAC*

[Ron Baiman]

Dear Colleagues,

I just finished the book—an eye-opening tour de force on Musk: what he represents, his evolution, and where he might go—and thought I'd try to give this some closure for those interested in how it might relate to what we (HPAC) are trying to do.

In the final chapter of their book, Slobodian and Tarnoff identify four possible Musk future trajectories: Carbon Musk, Contractor Musk, Compound Musk, Cyborg Musk. 

Of these Carbon Musk (the Tesla and X-Prize Musk before he publicly pivoted to fascism) is relevant to HPAC, the others increasingly promote violent, racist, misogynist, Transphobic, anti-immigrant, etc. ways to establish a techno-fascist tyranny to "save western civilization" from "the woke mind virus" and "the empathy bug".   

Slobodian and Tarnoff write that as Musk's pioneering work on electrification (Cars and battery systems) are what made him most famous and the XPRIZE Foundation has been one of the largest recipients of his philanthropy (including Brian's work) p. 157-8): 

"One can imagine Musk making a hard charge into geoengineering and similar technologies to transform the earth's climate to make it more hopitable to human life. If critics have long pointed out that even a radically degraded planet is still far more comfortable than any version of transformed Mars, maybe Musk will come to this sensible conclusion, too."

For a bit more elaboration see p. 156-159 of the book in these two links: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a3_5VGO77sAl1g7F2Fw5KBr2iBbeKRVT/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xlwVubpbqc6HgAQm_-eGqDgx-0LiI6Yn/view?usp=sharing

I think the question is whether Musk's understanding of science and technology will ever trump (pun intended) his increasing endorsement of fascist fanaticism and brutality.

And of course, as the book and many other have noted, Musk is part of ecosystem of similarly minded Silicon Valley billionaire techno entrepereurs with similar (but not identical) views (many of them originally from S. Africa. 

My deeper dive on all this this is the lack of attention to morality, practical reason, social discourse and democracy- a kind of anti-intellectualism that pervades these views. 

Here's an excerpt from the 2026 version of the "Ethical Humanist Haggadah" that goes into this a bit 🙂 - apologies for length!:

"(Reader) Many other wise people including Greek philosophers and the founders of the Ethical Culture Movement have added to the lesson of the Passover story. They teach us that ethics is not a matter of obeying the commandments of an all-powerful patriarchal God, but rather of finding beauty and happiness by living a virtuous human life and “bringing out the best in others”, through personal relationships, art, science, politics, raising children, and everyday life.

 

(Reader)  Similarly, Sam Harris, in his book, The Moral Landscape, points out that human morality, or the pursuit of “human well-being”, is no more of an amorphous or evolving goal than “human health”, and should not be left to religion or cultural tradition, but, at least in broad outline, engaged in scientifically using reason and evidence following enlightenment values. Modern moral philosophers have expanded on this to note that “practical reasoning”, unlike “instrumental reasoning”, emerges from free social discourse.

 

(Reader)  Enlightenment “contractarian” philosophers like Locke (1632–1704) and Rousseau (1712–1778) whose ideas in-part laid the basis for the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, postulated a framework for democratic governance that would be based on moral principles derived from: “original position” or “state of nature”, idealized reflection devoid of personal interest and status considerations.

 

(Reader)  The American John Rawls (1921-2002), one of the foremost political philosophers of modern times, was also a “contractarian” who postulated a similar “veil of ignorance” as a starting point in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice.

 

(Reader) The Ethical Culture movement was also based on a version of this kind of thinking, with an effort to replace traditional religious morality with Kantian (1724–1804) inspired universal principles like the (FOU) “formula of universal law”: “Act only according to the maxim that you at the same time will that it should become universal law”.

 

(Reader)  And this was also the starting point for Jurgen Habermas (1929 – March 14, 2026), whose version of this principle is embodied in his procedural discourse ethics principle (U):”A norm is valid if and only if the foreseeable consequences and side effects of its general observance for the interests and value orientations of each individual could be freely accepted jointly by all concerned.”

 

(Reader)  Habermas’ thinking draws on modern pragmatist philosopher and sociologist G.H. Meade (1863–1931) who states that: “Moral behavior is a matter of modifying one’s own interests in the light of one’s understanding and recognition of the interests of everyone else, a process that leads to the development of a “larger self”, a self that identifies with the interests of others and is wont to adopt ‘the attitude of the whole community.”

 

(Reader)  And on development psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s (1927–1987) “stage theory of moral development” that, expanding on Piaget’s (1896-1980) “stages of cognitive development” theory, postulated six stages of human development, the last two being a “Social-contract, legalistic orientation” and finally a “Universal ethical principle” orientation.    

 

 (Reader) Habermas also draws from Marx 1818–1883) in his  reformulation of Marx’s historical materialist theory of social evolution to include the development of both "instrumental action" (with labor/production) and "communicative action”, or practical moral-ethical reasoning (with social interaction/dialogue), and argues that emancipation comes not just from economic development, but from developing “justice qua morality”, communicative rationality.

 

(Reader)  Finally, contemporary American political philosopher, Danielle Allen (b. 1971), has partially integrated and elaborated upon the thinking of Rawls and Habermas in her modern pluralistic democracy theory of “difference without domination” that insures that: “…a)basic rights protects nondomination, b)equal access to the instruments of government, c) epistemic equalitarianism, d) a culture of reciprocity, and e) a co-ownership conception for political institutions..” (Difference Without Domination, p. 41, alpha bullets added, U. of Chicago Press 2020).

 

(Reader) Allen notes that “..scholars of social capital distinguish among three kinds of social ties: bonding, bridging and linking. Bonding ties are those (generally strong) connections that bind kin, close friends and social similars to one another; bridging ties are those (generally weaker) ties that connect people across demographic cleavages (age, race, class, occupation, religion and the like); finally, linking ties are the vertical connections between people at different levels of the status hierarchy as in for instance, the employment context.”(Op cit. p. 47), and that pluralist democratic “difference without domination” depends on bridging ties.

 

(Reader)  Needless to say, these are the ties that are nurtured and fostered by liberal and pluralist voluntary associational communities like the Chicago Ethical Humanist Circle.   

 

(Reader)  And one more question that is not directly addressed by Allen or Habermas. How should humanity proceed in the face of the urgent need to address the human civilization threatening “golem of our times”, the climate crisis"

Will Musk ever benefit from the rich accumulated trove of "human wisdom" and turn his dystopian, paranoid - and frankly apparently chillingly lacking in humanity and culture that make life worth living - mindset, to turn his powers toward saving the world from climate disaster?  This is the question. I'm not holding my breath, but if he could somehow be induced to read this book with an open mind this might do the trick!

Best,

Ron 

Sent from my iPhone

On May 4, 2026, at 4:02 PM, Ron Baiman <rpba...@gmail.com> wrote: