Cost and Scale: Sulfur Prices and Balloon Economics

Today I’m taking a rare break from AI doom to cover the dumbest kind of doom humanity has ever created for itself: climate change. We’re talking about a problem that costs less than $2 billion per year to solve. For context, that’s what the US spent on COVID relief every 7 hours during the pandemic. Bill Gates could literally solve this himself.

My guest Andrew Song runs Make Sunsets, which launches weather balloons filled with sulfur dioxide (SO₂) into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet. It’s the same mechanism volcanoes use—Mount Pinatubo cooled Earth by 0.5°C for a year in 1991. The physics is solid, the cost is trivial, and the coordination problem is nonexistent.

So why aren’t we doing it? Because people are squeamish about “playing God” with the atmosphere, even while we’re building superintelligent AI. Because environmentalists would rather scold you into turning off your lights than support a solution that actually works.

This conversation changed how I think about climate change. I went from viewing it as this intractable coordination problem to realizing it’s basically already solved—we’re just LARPing that it’s hard! 🙈 If you care about orders of magnitude, this episode will blow your mind. And if you feel guilty about your carbon footprint: you can offset an entire year of typical American energy usage for about 15 cents. Yes, cents.

Timestamps

* 00:00:00 - Introducing Andrew Song, Cofounder of Make Sunsets

* 00:03:08 - Why the company is called “Make Sunsets”

* 00:06:16 - What’s Your P(Doom)™ From Climate Change

* 00:10:24 - Explaining geoengineering and solar radiation management

* 00:16:01 - The SO₂ dial we can turn

* 00:22:00 - Where to get SO₂ (gas supply stores, sourcing from oil)

* 00:28:44 - Cost calculation: Just $1-2 billion per year

* 00:34:15 - “If everyone paid $3 per year”

* 00:42:38 - Counterarguments: moral hazard, termination shock

* 00:44:21 - Being an energy hog is totally fine

* 00:52:16 - What motivated Andrew (his kids, Luke Iseman)

* 00:59:09 - “The stupidest problem humanity has created”

* 01:11:26 - Offsetting CO₂ from OpenAI’s Stargate

* 01:13:38 - Playing God is good

Show Notes

Make Sunsets

* Website: https://makesunsets.com

* Tax-deductible donations (US): https://givebutter.com/makesunsets

People Mentioned

* Casey Handmer: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/

* Emmett Shear: https://twitter.com/eshear

* Palmer Luckey: https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey

Resources Referenced

* Book: Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson

* Book: The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley

* Book: Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

* Harvard SCoPEx project (the Bill Gates-funded project that got blocked)

* Climeworks (direct air capture company): https://climeworks.com

Data/Monitoring

* NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration): https://www.noaa.gov

* ESA Sentinel-5P TROPOMI satellite data

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