By Steve Milloy
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin acted this week to stop a dubious, if not dangerous, idea: blocking sunlight with air pollution to cool the planet.
Make Sunsets is private company in South Dakota that launches balloons containing sulfur dioxide particles into the stratosphere. When the balloons reach the proper altitude they burst and release the particles. In the sky, these particles reflect sunlight so that it doesn’t reach the Earth and contribute to global warming. Or so they claim. (RELATED: STEVE MILLOY: The Interior Department Must Enforce Trump’s Offshore Wind Ban)
Make Sunsets’ business model is to sell “Cooling Credits” for as little as a dollar each. Every Cooling Credit is supposed to counteract the warming caused by one ton of carbon dioxide emissions. Purchasers receive an email notifying them of a successful balloon burst including video of the burst.
There are potential problems with what Make Sunsets is doing and Administrator Zeldin is rightly concerned about at least one of them – the sulfur dioxide particles are a form of conventional air pollution. Their reflectivity is temporary. They will eventually fall to Earth, likely caught up in rain. To maintain or increase the claimed effect, balloons would need to be continually launched. It sounds like a great business model on paper.
But sulfur dioxide particles were a major contributor to the mid-20th century problem called “acid rain,” caused by the burning of high-sulfur coal without smokestack emissions controls. All rain is acidic, but the addition of sulfur dioxide makes it significantly more acidic. During the 1950s, Pittsburgh residents reported stinging sensations on their skin during rainfall. Under certain windless weather conditions called temperature inversions that trap and concentrate air pollution, sulfur dioxide particles were deadly to vulnerable people during a few major 20th century air pollution events.
The acid rain phenomenon in the US was largely fixed by the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. Electric utilities and other coal burning facilities were required either to buy air pollution control equipment or stop burning high-sulfur coal.
On the one hand, Make Sunsets is far from the sort of industrialization that caused acid rain. On the other hand, people can’t just launch potentially dangerous air pollutants into the sky without some sort of guidelines and monitoring.
Could Make Sunsets stop what some call “global warming”? We know from historic volcanic eruptions that reflective particles in the sky can block out sunlight. The 1815 Mt. Tambora eruption is thought to have caused 1816 to be the “year without a summer.” More recently, the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo caused noticeable global cooling.
Last May, a study published in Nature reported that 80 percent of the “global warming spike” of 2023-2024 was attributable to global shipping that had transitioned to cleaner (lower sulfur) diesel oil. The study concluded that fewer reflective emissions allowed more sunlight to reach and warm the Earth.
The notion of altering the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth for purposes of climate control is called “geoengineering.” Skeptics of the notion of catastrophic global warming don’t think it’s necessary, cost-effective or controllable. Global warming activists don’t like geoengineering because it short-circuits their basic goal of advancing the left’s political agenda. And everyone should be concerned about the unknown and untested effects of random efforts to block out the Sun that is necessary for life on Earth. A final caution on attempts to learn how to manage the weather by controlling sunlight is the potential for its weaponization. Imagine if China could control sunlight in the US.
At present, Make Sunsets is a small-time novelty company providing harmless anxiety relief for a relatively small number of gullible climate fretters. But more serious players with deeper pockets and more serious intentions are looking to get into the game, including climate fretter Bill Gates and other left-wing philanthropists. The Biden administration spent $22 million on solar geoengineering projects. It is time to shut down these more serious efforts before they make the Sun go down on all of us.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer, publishes JunkScience.com and is on X @JunkScience.
