Dim the Sky, Save the Rich
By The Ghost of HST
May 12, 2025
Somewhere between the Book of Revelation and a DARPA grant, we decided to hack the sky.
This was always going to be the next move. We poisoned the air, baked the oceans, and paved over everything that once whispered. Ever since Al Gore stood up and pointed at a chart in 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, the world has been on notice that we’re in climate trouble. But if the 21st century has taught us anything, it’s this: the appetite for F-150s, cruise ships, superyachts, private jets — and most of all, natural gas and oil — is bottomless. And nobody making money from them wants to hit the brakes. So we’re left with sub-optimal options. And now, in a final act of techno-hubris, we’re turning our eyes upward and asking: what if we just… dimmed the sun?
Welcome to our second peek at the shimmering frontier of geoengineering — today, in particular, solar geoengineering, where science meets climate despair and billionaires meet their messiah complex. Forget carbon capture or clean energy transitions — those are fantasies for hippies, Democrats, and poor people. Besides, we’re past the tipping point already, so the doctors have ordered stronger medicine. The new fix is planetary Botox: inject some aerosols into the stratosphere and smooth out the worst climate wrinkles for a few decades while we keep doing donuts in our private jets. Consider our piece from yesterday, “The Grift: Vol. 2 – The Plane, the Prince, and the President-for-Hire”, which delves into the opulent air travel habits of the elite. This isn’t a new phenomenon; our previous installment, “Artificial Salvation: Vol. 1”, laid the groundwork for this ongoing saga of climate contradictions.
And real resources are going to investigate this possibility. In the UK, a secretive government quango has already begun quietly exploring sun-dimming tech as a tool of last resort. No votes, no public hearings, just shadow budgets and PowerPoint presentations about stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) — a fancy phrase for spraying sulfur into the sky to reflect sunlight like we’re all living inside a cracked snow globe. The UK government, through its Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), has committed £56.8 million (roughly $75 million) to fund 21 geoengineering projects, including small-scale outdoor experiments aiming to thicken Arctic sea ice and brighten clouds to bounce back more sunlight.
Overall, ARIA has been handed an £800 million war chest to throw at experimental climate fixes. The agency is operating like a VC-backed startup on the public dime — bold ideas, astronomic paychecks, and not much to show for it yet but ambition, opacity, and a glowing burn rate.
Harvard’s SCoPEx project continues inching toward small-scale test launches. Officially, they’re planning to release tiny amounts of calcium carbonate or sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere from a high-altitude balloon over the American Southwest, in order to measure how sunlight scatters — and how the particles behave at altitude. Nothing major yet — just weather balloons and speculative horror — but it’s enough to make the Swiss nervous and the rest of us sweat sunscreen from our nightmares. SCoPEx sounds like a defense contractor that sells panic in aerosol form. And maybe it is.
China, for its part, isn’t waiting around for the U.K., Harvard, and especially not the U.N. In 2023, it launched a state-backed geoengineering research program to explore “climate intervention technologies,” including artificial cloud seeding and stratospheric aerosol injections. According to Chinese climate official Li Junhua, “We cannot afford to rule out any method that could slow global warming — especially methods that are in our control.” Their stated goal? “Climate resilience.” Their real advantage? Not having to ask anyone’s permission. In a country where dissent is airbrushed and consensus is engineered, geoengineering fits like a piston in a turbocharged surveillance state. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement makes us think that if there’s a silver lining in all of this, it may be that at least China recognizes the problem and is engaging with it. If the West dithers, China may very well dim the sky first — and dare the rest of us to object after the sun sets. That’s not the best outcome for the West, but might it be better than paralysis?
Add to that the climate-modelling AIs, like the one from Andrew Ng’s lab that lets you tinker with atmospheric knobs like a SimCity god. You can play out different scenarios and watch Madagascar drown or Kansas turn into a beachfront. It’s addictive, precise, and absolutely unhinged.
Of course, that’s not the end of AI’s participation. As geoengineering projects scale, the same algorithms used to model risk are now being trained to recommend policy, adjust interventions in real-time, and even automate control systems in high-stakes climate experiments. The line between simulation and steering is blurring fast. As one recent piece put it, we’re now living on “the razor’s edge of geoengineering and AI oversight.”
Of course, geoengineering isn’t just risky. It’s potentially catastrophic. Scientists admit we don’t fully understand the long-term effects. Dimming the sun could weaken monsoons, shift jet streams, or trigger droughts in some regions while cooling others. It’s climate triage with a selfie stick and a prayer.
And let’s zoom out — way out — past the policy briefs and grant-funded optimism, into the geological time-lapse where Earth is mostly ice, ash, and silence. The Holocene, this warm nap we’ve been enjoying, is a blip between planetary mood swings. For most of history, the climate didn’t ask for our opinion. It flattened forests, froze continents, boiled oceans, and shrugged off extinction events like a dog shaking off fleas. And now here we are: a species with panic disorder and a God complex, floating aerosol bombs into the stratosphere to trick the sun. We’re not managing the climate — we’re rewriting the script of Earth’s deep-time story like a screenwriter on Adderall and Red Bull (stop staring at me). You could look at it less as geoengineering and more like graffiti tagging on a cosmic scale — and China plans to go all-city. Somewhere beneath all the machine learning models and optimistic TED Talks, a Pleistocene glacier is muttering, “I’ll be back.”
Machine learning has become the new priesthood, with teams of data scientists trying to out-predict chaos itself. Projects like ClimateChange.ai promise smart tools to navigate the fog ahead, but it all feels a little too much like asking a Magic 8 Ball for evacuation routes. For instance, NOAA scientists have used artificial intelligence to assess the warming effect of reduced pollution, aiding in the modeling of potential impacts of techniques like stratospheric aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening.
And that’s the thing: even if the science checks out, who gets to decide the global thermostat? It’s hard enough to get thermostatic agreement in a crowded office — much less on a planet where one hemisphere is melting, the other is starving, and half the boardroom thinks Greta Thunberg is a psyop.
Who’s in charge here, exactly? Who’s coordinating this planetary chemistry experiment — the U.N.? The World Economic Forum? Some rogue billionaire with a weather balloon and a god complex? Because if every nation (or hedge fund) launches its own sun-dimming campaign with no global framework, we’re not engineering stability — we’re crowdsourcing climate roulette. And if we overshoot? If the clouds thicken too much, or the aerosols hang too long?
We could tip the planet into a second Ice Age.
Winter is coming — or a scorching global summer. Who’s to say?
At its core, solar geoengineering isn’t a solution. It’s a stall tactic wrapped in an ethical minefield. It buys time for the rich and sells risk to everyone else. It’s climate triage for the ruling class — a global sunscreen slathered on from the top down, so Aspen stays cool while Karachi boils. The billionaires get more breathing room for beachfronts, bunkers, and biohacked longevity. Everyone else gets a memo about adapting.
That’s not salvation. That’s market-tested apocalypse control.
Filed from a bunker lit only by emergency LEDs and bourbon breath.
