Janos Pasztor was conflicted. Sitting in his home office in a village just outside Geneva, he stared into the screen of his computer, where a bizarre Zoom call was taking place. It was Jan. 31, 2024. The chief executive of an Israeli-U.S. startup, to whom Pasztor had only just been introduced, was telling him the company had developed a special reflective particle and the technology to release millions of tons of it high into the atmosphere. The intended effect: to dim the light of the sun across the world and throw global warming into reverse. The CEO wanted Pasztor, a former senior United Nations climate official, to help. The company called itself Stardust Solutions.
Pasztor, a deliberate and self-assured Hungarian with thick, arched eyebrows that give him the appearance of a mildly perturbed owl, was stunned by the seriousness of Stardust’s operation. He had long been expecting that some company would try this. But the emergence of a well-financed, highly credentialed group represented a shocking acceleration for a technology still largely confined to research papers, backyard debates and science fiction novels.
The Stardust CEO, Yanai Yedvab, was a nuclear physicist who was once deputy chief scientist at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, and he jumped straight to the point. He wanted Pasztor to advise him on how to build public credibility, which would be necessary to land the government contracts for sunlight reflection that the company and its investors were banking on. The CEO appeared keenly aware that Stardust had the potential for the kind of public image problems normally reserved for James Bond villains. Those challenges were likely not made easier by picking a company name that echoed Star Wars’ “Project Stardust” — the codename the bad guys in the Galactic Empire used for the Death Star, a weapon designed to destroy entire worlds.
For decades, scientists had theorized that lacing the atmosphere with a cloak of dust could temporarily reduce global warming. Few, however, had actually advocated researching the practice, and none could say how dangerously it might destabilize weather patterns, food supplies or global politics. Many scientists still warn it will take many years to know whether such technology would prove wise or disastrous. The terms for it — “solar geoengineering,” “stratospheric aerosol injection” or “solar radiation management” — sound deceptively anodyne. To most people, the idea of blotting out the sun still induces derision and disgust — a kind of planetary body horror.
