Making sense of solar engineering

What this episode covers

Dan Visioni, a climate modeler at Cornell University, explains the technical mechanisms and governance challenges of solar geoengineering, specifically stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening, and space mirrors. He argues that while these methods are significantly cheaper than Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), they carry unknown ecological risks and raise critical ethical questions about who controls the planet's temperature. Visioni suggests that solar geoengineering could serve as a temporary 'peak shaving' tool to buy time for emissions reductions and CDR scaling, provided robust international governance frameworks are established to prevent rogue deployment.