11.02.2026 23:17
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I did a lengthy interview with the CEO of Stardust, in which he walked back the solar geoengineering startup's testing and deployment plans a bit. The company also intends to release details about its proprietary particles early next year and expects to open a US office soon.
"as extraordinary amounts of wealth have moved into private hands".
DAFs and replacing government funded science with philanthropy as "structurally beautiful"
honestly confirms my priors of why i don't like climate week
There’s a lot more research to be done in this space, and it requires an interdisciplinary approach. Check out the paper, in Climatic Change with the excellent Janet Yang and Prerna Shah - link.springer.com/article/10.1...
And while political violence was not widely supported in this study, there was some support (see table above), leading to questions of whether messaging that leads to climate doom may increase support for individualized or violent responses to climate change rather than prosocial, collective ones.
Second, on a society-wide level, the fact that over 1/3 of respondents report more-than-neutral agreement with the measure “Because of climate change, there is a high likelihood of human civilization coming to an end, starting in 2050” is alarming. People may respond by disinvesting in institutions.
What does this all mean? First, we should have more research on this relationship between social media use and climate distress / doom – if social media is a strong driver of these, we should be looking at interventions that deal with social media use.
One important finding for me was the overwhelming negative imagery that people have about climate change, when we asked an open-ended question about the first image that came to mind. We're missing positive imagery and narratives about the transition and climate action.
Climate doom was significantly related to support for radical action, but there was no relationship between time spent on social media and support for authoritarian policy, and there were some platform-specific effects you can read about in the paper. You can also see the basic prevalence of these.
There is a growing literature on right-wing authoritarianism and ecofascism. It’s not clear that climate doom would end up with prosocial politics.
What are the political implications of this? We were also interested in what political positions arise from the conjunction of social media use and climate doom – does climate doom push people towards transformative radical politics, or extremist action?
Mostly, climate anxiety has been studied at an individual, psychological level. But what happens on a collective, social level if people start to adopt beliefs about climate doom - that climate change will play a role in social collapse?
Climate doom also correlates with social media use.
Basically, there is a correlation, although we can't know from a survey like this if social media use causes climate anxiety. It is possible that people who experience climate anxiety are driven to spend time online.
📱Nearly half of US teens say they use the internet “almost constantly.”
😰 Climate anxiety is growing – in one study, more than 45% of young adults said that climate anxiety was impacting their daily life.
Is there a relationship between social media use and climate distress?
new paper on this 👇
That's a really interesting comparison; I hadn't thought about that!
How can the #IPCC navigate generative AI?
What does it mean for scientific assessment more broadly?
New working paper looks at scenarios for AI adoption & resistance, w/ @dralaaclimate.bsky.social @shinasayama.bsky.social and Oliver Geden
Reflections welcome!
www.swp-berlin.org/publications...
New biochar climatetech startup just dropped
Skeleton Capture Utilization and Storage
thanks to you both - very grateful for this conversation!! 💚
If you're interested in realities (&...un-realities) of cloud seeding & the conflation of facts, assertions, & kernels of truth surrounding extreme rainfall in warming climate--check out this BBC podcast! Perspectives from me & @hollyjeanbuck.bsky.social.
frankly, it has been an extremely normal gathering with a lot of conversations with local officials interested in mass transit and zoning reform. some talk about sewer socialism. i think the version of this in the internet's mind might be pretty divergent from the reality of it.
that's true about the publication. I just feel like a lot of the reporting focuses on "abundance bros".
my observations are too banal to merit a writeup. the Build American caucus wants government to work better for people. we need more transmission. the governor of Utah is building starter homes.
i get it, but if we give tweets by fascists more attention and gravity than carefully thought-out remarks by intellectuals (and give the fascists power to define what concepts are), it seems like it's going to be hard to create new movements or narratives
the actual programming at the conference today about immigration was a keynote from Jerusalem Demsas talking about how critical immigration is, including her own experience of migrating. the social media discourse on this site about abundance tends to erase the women who are positing abundance ideas
Earlier this year, I made two trips to Sudan, where a terrible civil war has displaced 14 million people. The state is absent, international institutions are weak.Outside powers, motivated by greed and nihilism, have stepped into the vacuum
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...
well it's more like reality remixed
this happened to me this week too, with a fake article titled "Solar geoengineering gold rush sparks outcry as elites muscle into climate policy." “This isn’t science—it’s a play to monopolize control of the skies,” said Professor Holly Buck of the University of Buffalo." dramatic!
People prefer that research be done by university scientists. These findings make it all the more critical to improve transparency in research, as we wrote about here www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
People are worried about the degradation of the environment, loss of biodiversity, etc., as well as about corporate control and lack of transparency, and there are many ways this gets expressed
In a survey, there is more opposition than support, and a lot of uncertainty about what is actually happening up in the sky