How conspiracy theories impact geoengineering efforts

Where there’s crisis, there’s potential for profit. The climate crisis is no different.On this season of “How We Survive,” we’re exploring the disaster economy. From prediction markets where bettors can make a buck off the weather and even hedge against climate risk, to insurance companies making record profits, and the ballooning disaster restoration industry, we’re finding out who’s making money from the increase in extreme weather and what it mean for climate progress.Join us for the new season starting Nov. 18.

From WBUR, here's a new kind of story, one that's all about the big questions and decisions we face. “The Midnight Rebellion” is a pick-your-own-path podcast set 100 years in the future, where the stakes are nothing less than the planet itself. It's fiction rooted in real science, built for the kids in your life (ages 7 and up) — and the whole family. You're listening to Chapter 1 of The Midnight Rebellion. Each chapter ends with a choice. YOU decide what’s next. Choose wisely. And if you liked what you heard, listen to the rest and follow The Midnight Rebellion wherever you get your podcasts.

This season, we explored large-scale climate interventions that could be our last hope. One intervention in particular, solar geoengineering, made a lot of listeners’ heads spin. (We’re right there with you.)This episode, we answer some of your most pressing questions about solar geoengineering. We get into whether solar sunshades could harm crops, what international efforts around solar geoengineering look like, and what would happen if a powerful country went rogue and put sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Plus, we look at a solution to some of these more extreme solutions: decarbonizing.

All season, we’ve been unpacking the controversial ways we’re messing with nature to save the planet. In this episode, we explore the wildest intervention to date: de-extinction. We take a tour of Colossal Labs, the $10 billion Dallas startup betting it can reverse-engineer extinction itself, to see how they plan to turn pigeons into dodos and Asian elephants into woolly mammoths. But whether it’s bringing back the woolly mammoth from extinction or shooting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, just because we can mess with nature, does that mean we should? After the tour, host Amy Scott chats with Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert to find out.

We can't avoid catastrophic warming without also capturing and storing carbon dioxide — both the carbon we've already emitted and the carbon we continue to emit through industries that are tough to decarbonize, like steel, petrochemicals, and cement.Europe is a leader in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), with a goal of storing at least 50 million tons of captured CO2 a year by the end of this decade.So this episode, we team up with Germany-based reporter Sam Baker from the DW podcast “Living Planet.” We follow carbon dioxide from its source at a cement plant, all the way to its final resting place under the North Sea. And we look beyond the hype to see if Carbon Capture and Storage could be a real climate solution. Or just another way for the fossil fuel industry to keep on drilling.

Across the country, anti-geoengineering bills are being proposed in state legislatures. These bills would ban the intentional release of chemicals into the atmosphere for the purpose of affecting sunlight or weather, and could impact future research into stratospheric aerosol injection — or even cloud seeding. But, unlike environmentalists that are advocating against the potential use of geoengineering as a climate solution, the bills’ proponents think that it’s already happening. Their proof? You can see it in the sky, they say: just look up.In this episode of “How We Survive,” Amy Scott talks with producer Rachel Kahn about how a once-fringe conspiracy theory could impact the future of geoengineering.

Can a technology used for war help prevent an environmental catastrophe in the making?Cloud seeding is a technique where particles, usually silver iodide, gets dispersed into clouds to help generate more rain or snow and it’s been around for 80 years. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. used cloud seeding in a top secret mission called Operation Popeye, to prolong the monsoon season in Vietnam. It’s since been deployed by state governments and private companies to bring more water to arid places. The only problem? It was hard to verify just how well it worked, which meant it was hard to make any money doing it. Until now. We tag along with a team of cloud seeders in Utah as they race to try to save the Great Salt Lake, and build a rainmaking empire.

Talk to enough experts about geoengineering and the conversation eventually turns to termination shock. That’s the idea that if we were to start cooling the planet and then suddenly stop, the resulting “shock” of heat could be catastrophic. It’s also the title of a novel by bestselling sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson, who explores the science, politics, and unintended consequences of trying to engineer the earth’s climate. In this episode, we sit down with Stephenson to talk about what sci-fi can teach us about real-world climate solutions. But first: a climate idea so ambitious it sounds like it came straight from the pages of science fiction.

Could dimming the sun be the key to cooling things down before the climate crisis worsens? Some scientists say yes, that we can cool the Earth by launching tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. It’s a type of solar geoengineering that was once seen as preposterous, meant to exist only in the pages of a sci-fi novel. But now, it’s a reality. To find out for ourselves, we travel to Northern California, where two entrepreneurs are launching sulfur-filled balloons from the top of stacked shipping containers. Later, we talk with scientists on both sides of this issue to find out if solar geoengineering could help prevent catastrophic tipping points or introduce a whole new slew of cascading consequences. Clarification (June 18, 2026): This episode has been updated to more accurately reflect David Keith's relationship to the carbon removal company he founded.

The climate crisis is escalating. We have to decarbonize our economy, but we’re moving too slowly. So, what’s the backup plan?This season of “How We Survive” is about engineering nature: large-scale interventions that could be our last hope. We’ll explore technology being developed that could alter our weather patterns, transform our planet, and possibly save us all from the worst outcomes of the climate crisis. Or lead to catastrophic, unintended consequences. On our hunt for solutions, we tag along with entrepreneurs trying to launch sulfur into the stratosphere, venture to the Utah mountains where there’s a serious endeavor to create more rain and snow, find out how (and why) scientists are trying to resurrect extinct animals. Join us for the new season of “How We Survive,” starting May 27.