(Article by Ramin Skibba republished from Wired.com)

An Israeli–U.S. startup called Stardust “intends to patent its unique aerosol technology for temporarily cooling the planet.”

Formed in 2023, Stardust wants to develop “proprietary geoengineering technology that would help block sun rays from reaching the planet.”

The company is based in Israel but incorporated in the United States.

Instead of universities and federal agencies, Stardust wants private companies to drive the development and deployment of “technologies that experts say could have profound consequences for the planet.”

The company seeks a “deliberate transformation of the atmosphere” that “has never been done.”

Wired points out that if Stardus’s geoengineering technology goes live, “it will affect the whole world.”

The news outlet emphasizes the danger: “If a geoengineering project went awry, for example, it could contribute to air pollution and ozone loss, or have dramatic effects on weather patterns, such as disrupting monsoons in populous South and East Asia.”

Stardust has kept its plans largely secret and “the company has not publicly released details about its technology, its business model, or exactly who works at its company.”

The secretive organization also wants to sell its “proprietary geoengineering technology to governments that are considering making modifications to the global climate—acting like a kind of defense contractor for climate alteration.”

Stardust is moving forward despite “few national and international rules and limited oversight.”

In fact, “a recent report by the company’s former climate governance consultant, Janos Pasztor, called for the company to increase its transparency, engagement, and communication with outsiders,” according to Wired.

Pasztor says Stardust doesn’t have a “social license” for geoengineering activities, meaning the company has apparently not been open to public or peer scrutiny about its intentions.

It hasn’t published any of its research and has no code of conduct.

Stardust’s CEO and cofounder Yanai Yedvab is a former deputy chief scientist at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, an agency that “oversees the country’s clandestine nuclear program.”

Stardust has 25 physicists, chemists, and engineers.

Its chief product officer Amyad Spector is a physicist and a former employee of Israel’s nuclear research program.

Stardust plans include distributing proprietary aerosol particles “through a machine mounted on an aircraft.”

The company is currently “engineering the particle and a prototype of the aircraft mount, as well as developing a system for modeling and monitoring the climatic effects.”

It plans to test those particles in the stratosphere in the coming year.

The Wired report confirms there’s “little data showing how well they might work” and that “it’s going to be much harder to be confident about knowing what its risks are.”

There are no “clear international rules and oversight for geoengineering,” meaning there aren’t any “limits on this kind of work.”

“As a result, an individual company or government can take dramatic gambles with the climate, in ways that could affect billions of lives, and it doesn’t have to get permission from anyone to do it,” according to the technology news outlet.

The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) says Stardust’s efforts could even “violate the Convention on Biological Diversity’s de facto moratorium on geoengineering activities.”

Representatives for CIEL say Stardust “is accelerating a reckless race” and that its project would likely “be controlled by a handful of major powers and corporations.”

Stardust’s clients appear to be mostly government-related, as it believes solar geoengineering “will play a critical role in addressing global warming in the coming decades.”

The company is attempting to patent its geoengineering technology.

Shuchi Talati, founder of The Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit, claims Stardust isn’t adhering to any principles of governance.

She says Stardust hasn’t done “any public consultation for its outdoor field tests, nor has it released any data or other information about them,” making it “much harder for people to trust” the company.

“They are operating in a vacuum, in the sense that there is no social license to do what they are trying to do,” she says.

Benjamin Day, senior campaigner on geoengineering for environmental group People at Friends of the Earth, says geoengineering is a “dangerous distraction.”

Day argues that because there’s no private market for geoengineering technologies, Stardust will only make money if it’s deployed by governments, meaning “they’re kind of trying to hold governments hostage with technology patents.”

Stardust is funded by “an estimated $15 million in venture capital funding, primarily from Awz Ventures, a Canadian-Israeli VC firm, in addition to a small investment from SolarEdge, an Israeli energy company.”

Wired points out that Awz’s partners and strategic advisers “have strong ties to Israeli military and intelligence agencies, including former senior directors of agencies like the Mossad, Shin Bet, and Unit 8200, as well as of the CIA and FBI, according to its website.”

“Awz also invests in AI-based surveillance and security tech in Israel, such as through the company Corsight, which has provided face recognition tech for Israel’s war in Gaza.”

Duncan McLaren, a researcher with the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University, says geoengineering technology “tends to be a space in which public involvement in decisions is utterly sidelined.”

He states there is a real “potential for this to be a highly undemocratic process of moving us down a slippery slope to solar geoengineering.”

Read more at: Wired.com