Climate Activists With Cheap Balloons Could Create a DIY Geoengineering Nightmare
That scenario poses new questions about the ability to regulate the technology
By James Temple
The scenario would go something like this. It’s the year 2051. A decade of drought, crop failure, and famine has killed millions across East Africa, sparking violent clashes over food and water. Similar scenes of death and devastation are playing out in other parts of the globe.
In response, an environmental group, or maybe a humanitarian one, or perhaps just some individual with a huge social-media following, calls for a radical response: every citizen should launch high-altitude balloons into the sky, each carrying a small payload of particles that could reflect heat back into space.
This kind of distributed, DIY geoengineering scheme appears technically feasible, which raises troubling questions about the ability to regulate such technologies, according to a white paper published on the website of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center late last year.
It notes that hobbyist kits for unmanned high-altitude balloons can already be purchased for as little as $25, and imagines that such a campaign could be coordinated using social media, blockchain, and…
