One of the biggest challenges with technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions is that they require mass adoption. Solar radiation management (or SRM) has the opposite problem.

By Stardust Solutions’ estimate, dispersing three million tons of reflective particles into the stratosphere could cool the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius for the relatively small price of $30 billion; that’s less than the cost of a single hyperscale data center.

Despite concerns about such an endeavor, the company is building a proprietary particle injection system with the goal of being deployment-ready this decade. While Stardust says they won’t deploy without the explicit authorization of multiple governments, questions nonetheless remain around the safety and ethics of SRM.

In this episode, Shayle sits down with Yanai Yedvab, CEO and co-founder of Stardust, to unpack how the technology works, its potential risks, and when to deploy it.

Shayle and Yanai discuss topics like: