The White House & Billionaires
Are Getting Serious About Blocking Out The Sun
Solar Radiation Management (SRM) is gaining more momentum
as a potential solution for the ‘unquestionable’ doomsday narrative
of climate change.
We are constantly hammered with the idea that the catastrophic perspective of “man-made global warming” and/or climate change represents an unquestionable scientific “consensus.”
This comes regardless of the fact that, as explained by renowned climate change scientist Roy Spencera,
“The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.”
There are a plethora of climate scientists and experts in the field who do not agree with the picture that’s being painted, but their voices continue to be drowned, unheard and unacknowledged within the mainstream. They are not suggesting we aren’t harming our environment, but take issue with the politically motivated doomsday predictions.
The unquestionable doomsday narrative has permeated mainstream culture for decades as absolute truth. This allows for drastic measures to be justified under the guise of goodwill. Geo-engineering, unfortunately, could be one of them.
Geoengineering refers to a set of emerging technologies that could manipulate the environment and partially offset some of the impacts of climate change. One of these methods is called stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), which would dump substances like black carbon, sulphur dioxide, metallic aluminum, aluminum oxide, barium titanate and more into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth.
Just last year, The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that it is coordinating a five-year research plan to study ways of modifying the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth. The idea is getting more urgent attention in the unquestionable ‘worsening climate crisis.’
Not many details about the plan have been released, but it comes as a result of researchers wanting the U.S. government to put together a bigger solar geoengineering research program than what was already in place.
“It’s increasingly clear that putting a bunch of aerosols in the stratosphere could decrease the global average temperature,” said Chris Field, the director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. He chaired a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) committee that recommended in 2021 that the Biden administration fund a federal research program into the technology.
“The future really depends on getting an ambitious response to the climate crisis put in place. And we just need to be really open to recognizing that some kinds of approaches that are fraught with downsides might still deserve to be considered just because the alternatives are so serious.”
For the new program, funding is likely going to increase significantly over the next few years and involve multiple federal agencies. In 2021 NASEM recommended a $200 million research program.
Over 60 researchers from prominent institutions recently published a letter calling for a more rigorous study into the strategy, as well as small-scale field experiments, while a U.N. report suggested the time had come to start investigating whether SAI could help to combat the climate crisis.
But this type of thing is not new. As far back as 2011 the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank released a national strategic plan on “the potential effectiveness, feasibility and consequences of climate remediation techniques.” That year U.N. climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa debated the topic heavily.
In 2010 the World Meteorological Association explained,
“In recent years there has been a decline in the support for weather modification research, and a tendency to move directly into operational projects.”
Does this mean that geoengineering has actually been “operational” already for a number of years?
A United States government document printed at the request of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in November of 1978 states:
“In addition to specific research programs sponsored by Federal agencies, there are other functions related to weather modification which are performed in several places in the executive branch. Various federal advisory panels and committees and their staffs – established to conduct in-depth studies and prepare comprehensive reports, to provide advice or recommendations, or to coordinate Federal weather modification programs – have been housed and supported within executive departments, agencies, or offices.”
Strange.
Billionaires Are In Too
As far as billionaires go, Bill Gates backed a project by Harvard University scientists to test an idea to spray calcium carbonate into the atmosphere in the skies over Sweden in 2021. Thankfully the project was halted after local Indigenous groups and environmentalists made enough of a buzz. Gates has long been a proponent and supporter of geoengineering.
Jeff Bezos used Amazon’s supercomputer by modelling the effects of plans to inject huge amounts of sulphur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere later that year.
Dustin Moskovitz, the founder of Facebook, put $900,000 into funding for scientists in Mali, Brazil, Thailand, and other countries to study the potential effects of solar geoengineering.
At the Munich Security Conference in February 2022, George Soros spoke about the existential risk that climate change poses to human civilization, as well as his support for stratospheric aerosol injection over the Arctic to reflect the sun’s light away from Earth.
When the former CIA director John Brennan brought up the topic at a Council on Foreign Relations conference in 2016, the subject also received widespread attention,
“Another example is the array of technologies, often referred to collectively as geoengineering, that potentially could help reverse the warming effects of global climate change. One that has gained my personal attention is stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI: a method of seeding the stratosphere with particles that can help reflect the sun’s heat in much the same way that volcanic eruptions do. An SAI program could limit global temperature increases, reducing some risks associated with higher temperatures, and providing the world economy additional time to transition from fossil fuels.”
The good news is that a large portion of the mainstream scientific community is extremely hesitant about even attempting this. Countless scientific publications have outlined the dangers that could be associated with such activity, many of them creating an even more toxic environment by littering large parts of our planet with even more toxic chemicals. The health consequences for both animals and humans could be catastrophic, not to mention the environmental ones.
More than 400 climate scientists are firmly against proliferating calls for solar geoengineering research and its potential development. They’ve warned in an open letter that the increasing normalization of SRM technologies as a possible climate fix is a cause for alarm — one that could have dangerous and unexpected consequences.
“We call for immediate political action from governments, the United Nations, and other actors to prevent the normalization of solar geoengineering as a climate policy option. Governments and the United Nations must assert effective political control and restrict the development of solar geoengineering technologies at planetary sale. Specifically, we call for an International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering.”
It’s good to see such resistance in what appears to be the continual normalization of exploring geoengineering as a solution. It’s frustrating to fathom that this type of activity could one day be normal, especially given the fact that there is a plethora of science and evidence that calls into question our current perspective of climate change and what causes it.
As stated earlier in the article, this conversation is not allowed to be had, similar to how so many scientists, doctors and experts in the field were not allowed to question government policy for all things COVID.
In that open letter, the scientists also state that,
Given the increasing normalization of solar geoengineering research, a strong political message to block these technologies is required. An International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering is needed now.
My only concern here is that we continue to ask big politics and government to change and hear our voices. We continue to rely on these forces to implement change as if we live in a democracy. The systems we have in place represent nothing more than the illusion of democracy. They’re an oligarchy.
Political policy regarding major issues that plague our planet today is in the hands of a few oligarchs. Over time, they try their best to influence the collective mind to support initiatives they desire, which are not often used for what they claim to be solving.
What’s The True Motive?
Call me conspiratorial but this begs the question, are there ulterior motives involved in geoengineering that put more power and control into the hands of the global elite? Are there geopolitical advantages to controlling the weather of some nations, and does it come at the expense of others?
Around the world a growing number of researchers are exploring what solar engineering might mean for their regions, even if their home countries are unlikely to deploy the technology.
Other nations are already doing it. China announced that it’s planning a rapid expansion of its weather modification program. Most people probably didn’t know that China even had a weather modification program. The changes include modifying the climate in an area that is more than one and a half times the size of India, covering an area of over 5.5 million square kilometres (2.1 million square miles).
I’ve been looking into this topic for more than a decade, and despite its more recent popularity and “legitimization,” I believe geoengineering at a large scale has been occurring for decades. It’s not easy to acknowledge that much of our weather, and perhaps some major weather events/disasters may have been artificially created, but that’s a topic for another article.
A 1996 report conducted by top military personnel in the U.S., titled “Weather as a Force Multiplier; Owning the Weather in 2025,” reveals the supposed urgency to implement these programs:
“Current demographic, economic, and environmental trends will create global stresses that provide the impetus necessary for many countries or groups to turn this weather-modification ability into a capability.
In the United States, weather-modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications. Our government will pursue such a policy, depending on its interests, at various levels.”
Because this is a national security issue, if large-scale geoengineering is and has been occurring, it may be under the realm of Special Access Programs. These programs are considered so sensitive that they are exempt from reporting requirements to Congress.
In other words, they are probably highly classified, not to protect national security, but more likely to protect the fact that what is happening is extremely controversial, unethical and not necessary.
Arjun Walia
