'Private geoengineering comes at a cost, and that cost is public'

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fter close to two years of research and development, including initial field experiments, it was announced in late October that the Israeli-American start-up Stardust Solutions closed a $60 million funding round, led by venture capital investors from Silicon Valley.

The company also began secretly lobbying the US Congress, signaling an escalation from technical work to political influence.

However, Stardust is not just any company. It is a for-profit startup developing proprietary aerosols, dispersion technology, and monitoring capabilities for stratospheric aerosol injection, a form of solar geoengineering (also called solar radiation modification or SRM).

The sky is not a testing ground