Cloud Seeding, Cooling Credits, and Custody of the Sky

A cooling credit, as Make Sunsets sells it, is a receipt for weather that has not happened yet.

In the spring of 2025, the company was a two-person operation whose founder openly described an RV as their corporate headquarters (McKenna, 2025). Their work was straightforward: fill weather balloons with under two kilograms of sulfur dioxide apiece, release them into the sky, and wait for them to reach the stratosphere. Each credit was priced as the cooling equivalent of offsetting one metric ton of carbon dioxide; by the time Inside Climate News reported on the venture, the company had sold 128,000 credits against 147 launches (McKenna, 2025).

That same month, the Environmental Protection Agency sent Make Sunsets a formal demand for information under Section 114 of the Clean Air Act (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2025). The agency’s public notice contained a quiet confession of bureaucratic helplessness: “It is unclear where the balloons are launched.” The administrative apparatus that monitors refineries down to parts-per-billion had no idea which empty field two men were standing in with a helium tank. Meanwhile, the agency was rolling back rules for heavy industrial polluters, whose sulfur dioxide emissions are permitted by the thousands of tons, while declaring that two kilograms in a balloon, sold as climate repair, was an intolerable threat to the air we breathe (McKenna, 2025).

Seventeen months later, there is still no enforcement action on record. Instead, Make Sunsets is expanding. In its September 2026 newsletter, the company reported delivering 20,015 credits in August alone, nearly two months of inventory sold in under a week, and casually mentioned it was preparing an application for federal small-business grants (Make Sunsets, 2026a). Its August issue had announced a new field lab in Dayton, Ohio (Make Sunsets, 2026b). The firm the EPA targeted with an enforcement inquiry in 2025 is now soliciting seed capital from the same government.

At the heavily capitalized end of the trade sits Stardust Solutions, backed by $75 million in venture funding. In May 2026, Stardust revealed its proprietary aerosol designs in preprints: amorphous silica, and a calcium carbonate core wrapped inside a silica shell. That is antacid and eggshell mineral, engineered into climate tech (Levitan, 2026; Paddison, 2026). Stardust has laboratory trials underway, a patent pending, and an operational pitch of roughly $10 billion a year for every million tons of particles injected into the sky (Paddison, 2026). Its chief executive, Yanai Yedvab, told CNN that deployment decisions belong “solely in governments” (Paddison, 2026). The phrase is revealing: the private firm designs the particle, files the patent, and sets the ten-billion-dollar price tag. The only choice left for sovereign governments is whether to sign the purchase order.

The Bargain at Morena

The commercial ancestor of this arrangement is not modern atmospheric physics. It is Charles Hatfield.

In the winter of 1916, Hatfield signed a contract with the city of San Diego. A traveling “moisture accelerator” who evaporated proprietary chemical cocktails from a twenty-foot wooden tower, Hatfield agreed to fill the Morena Reservoir to overflowing for $10,000, payable only on delivery (Fleming, 2010, Chapter 3). The skies opened. Relentless January storms filled the reservoir, but they also breached the Lower Otay Dam, washed out rail lines, submerged downtown, and killed dozens of people (Fleming, 2010, Chapter 3).

When Hatfield presented his bill, the city attorney answered that the deluge had been an Act of God. Hatfield sued, and the dispute languished in the courts for two decades over two inescapable questions: Could Hatfield prove the rain was his? And if it was his, was the flood his too? (Fleming, 2010, Chapter 3).

Whenever a private vendor sells a causal claim on the open sky, the intervention merges seamlessly into the weather it joins. You cannot stamp a serial number on a rainstorm or an August cooling trend. When disaster follows, the fight is never over the physics; it is over billing and liability, fought by attorneys while the atmosphere remains indifferent.

Modern solar geoengineering borrows its physical credibility from catastrophic volcanic eruptions like Tambora in 1815 and Pinatubo in 1991, and its operational logic from state weather programs like Operation Popeye, the cloud-seeding campaign over the Ho Chi Minh Trail that eventually forced the negotiation of the 1976 ENMOD treaty (Fleming, 2010; Wood, 2014; United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, n.d.). But the commercial solar geoengineering startup transposes Hatfield’s bargain directly onto a planetary scale, swapping the wooden tower for a carbon offset and an intellectual property portfolio.

The Physics and the Trade

Physicists who defend solar geoengineering would likely take offense at the rainmaker comparison. David Keith’s case begins from the observation that humanity is already altering the climate through unchecked emissions, that decarbonization has been dangerously slow, and that refusing to research stratospheric aerosols is itself an irresponsible moral choice whose costs fall first on hot, impoverished nations (Keith, 2013). On this view, Hatfield was a charlatan with a cauldron, whereas solar radiation management rests on peer-reviewed climate models and empirical volcanic analogs: Mount Pinatubo injected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and cooled the Earth’s surface by roughly half a degree Celsius.

The physics is real, but it does not resolve the contractual trap. Keith himself has been publicly critical of Stardust’s proprietary particles, warning that private patent portfolios sit badly with the democratic transparency planetary intervention demands (Levitan, 2026; Paddison, 2026). Research is one matter; commercial deployment contracts are another.

The moment stratospheric cooling becomes a market service, it inherits the San Diego problem. Small-scale field trials cannot show how the Earth system will respond to full deployment, a limitation Raymond Pierrehumbert has pressed repeatedly (Paddison, 2026). If a vendor diminishes solar radiation and a catastrophic drought hits the Sahel or a monsoon fails across India three years later, the causal dispute cannot be settled against a control planet.

Ulrich Beck diagnosed this dilemma in Risk Society: “the sources of danger are no longer ignorance but knowledge; not a deficient but a perfected mastery over nature” (1986/1992, p. 183). The more precisely scientists map atmospheric mechanics, the harder it is to write off catastrophe as an Act of God. Beck termed this the “latent side effect,” a bureaucratic mechanism that “simultaneously confesses to, selectively distributes and justifies undesirable consequences” (1986/1992, p. 34). Latent side effect is the modern administrative synonym for an Act of God: it allows an operator to choose the intervention while insisting that nobody chose the collateral damage.

Dirt and System

While startups engineer aerosols, a fierce political immune response is spreading across the American states. Between 2024 and 2026, Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana, and Iowa enacted statutory bans on weather modification (Executive Office of the Governor, 2025; Koons, 2026; Louisiana Legislature, 2025).

These statutes make no legal distinction between peer-reviewed stratospheric experiments, local cloud-seeding flights, and the “chemtrail” lore of internet conspiracy culture. When Florida’s governor signed SB 56, which makes the atmospheric release of weather-modifying agents a third-degree felony, he announced it alongside a ban on municipal water fluoridation (Executive Office of the Governor, 2025). Iowa’s HF 2640 bans any chemical emission intended to alter temperature, sunlight, or climate, while explicitly exempting agricultural aerial pesticide spraying (Koons, 2026).

The exemption exposes the logic of the law. Spraying toxic pesticides on crops is treated as ordinary property commerce, while releasing inert mineral particles into the sky is treated as contamination. As Mary Douglas observed in Purity and Danger, “Where there is dirt there is system” (1966/2001, p. 36), and “Attributing danger is one way of putting a subject above dispute” (p. 41).

Because there is no coherent federal or international law governing the upper atmosphere, state legislatures rely on pollution taboos to enforce territorial borders: “Where, humanly speaking, the outrage is likely to go unpunished, pollution beliefs tend to be called in to supplement the lack of other sanctions” (Douglas, 1966/2001, p. 133). The Government Accountability Office pointed out this governance vacuum in 2026, noting that state bans create legal chaos because the physical movement of stratospheric air respects no state lines (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2026a). Louisiana’s Act 95 went so far as to repeal its state weather-modification licensing board and replace it with a citizen reporting portal, inviting residents to scan the sky and report suspicious aircraft to environmental regulators (Louisiana Legislature, 2025). A regulated trade was replaced by citizen surveillance.

The Working Precedents

Historians of technology like Joel Mokyr might read these bans as predictable institutional resistance to radical innovation: incumbents erecting barriers to protect existing monopolies against heterodox ideas (Mokyr, 2016, pp. 19, 165). But that narrative assumes the open, competitive exchange of ideas that characterized the Republic of Letters (Mokyr, 2016, p. 340). Stardust’s approach, filing confidential patent claims while dropping preprints on its own corporate timetable, is the Republic of Letters behind a paywall. As atmospheric scientist Daniele Visioni put it, “Transparency is not about releasing PDFs when it suits you” (Levitan, 2026).

David Edgerton offers a soberer corrective: beware the historical boosterism that mistakes novel marketing claims for genuine material breakthroughs (2006/2008, p. 4). Weather modification is not an uncharted frontier; it is a dull, working service industry with eighty years of invoices behind it. Small outfits like SOAR in Texas fly twin-engine planes to seed clouds for county water districts, pulling in roughly $300,000 a year from a single municipal client (Mayyasi, 2024). Western Weather Consultants used ground generators to seed snow for water districts and maintained a 44-year contract with Vail Resorts before the resort terminated the agreement during the pandemic (Mayyasi, 2024). Weather Modification Inc. of North Dakota holds long-term contracts with foreign states like Saudi Arabia (Mayyasi, 2024).

The entire commercial weather-modification sector in the United States generates under $10 million annually, operating under reporting rules set out in the Weather Modification Reporting Act of 1972, a framework the GAO notes already covers solar geoengineering firms on paper (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2026b).

Crucially, those working contractors learned from Hatfield’s mistake. They do not sell guaranteed rainfall. A 2015 Los Angeles County cloud-seeding contract was structured as a fixed annual fee of $550,000 with periodic renewal options (SCV News, 2015), and SOAR bills by flight hours and flares burned (Mayyasi, 2024). They sell the flight time and leave the actual weather to nature.

The modern cooling credit does the opposite: it resurrects Hatfield’s gamble and runs it through a spreadsheet. It takes the voluntary carbon offset market, where independent assessments indicate that less than 16 percent of credited projects produce real, measurable emissions cuts (Probst et al., 2024), and applies that same broken arithmetic to the upper atmosphere. Make Sunsets invents a synthetic conversion rate (a few grams of sulfur equals one ton of carbon dioxide) and sells the promised planetary cooling upfront, trading in an effect that no auditor or registry on Earth can measure.

The contrast becomes clearer when compared to legitimate aerospace energy contracts. Star Catcher, a startup backed by $65 million in venture funding and a $30 million Space Force award, aims to beam concentrated sunlight via orbital lasers directly to the solar panels of customer satellites (Kahn, 2026). Its Protostar demonstration mission launched in October 2026 specifically to measure received power against theoretical predictions (Kahn, 2026; Star Catcher is about to beam power…, 2026). When the customer has a power meter on their solar array, attribution is simple. But you cannot place a meter on the open sky.

What geoengineering firms are commodifying is what James C. Scott identified as synoptic state simplification (1998, p. 15). By collapsing the chaotic, living atmosphere into a single operational metric, global mean surface temperature, startups create an artificial abstraction they can bill against, because “for capitalists, simplification must pay” (Scott, 1998, p. 8). It is the ultimate exercise in what Beck called “sub-politics,” where transformative social and ecological changes are set in motion without democratic authorization (1986/1992, pp. 186, 214). Mike Hulme concluded that the whole project is fundamentally ungovernable (2014).

Custody

The ultimate problem is not attribution. It is custody.

If a ski mountain cancels its cloud-seeding contract, it simply returns to natural winter weather. But stratospheric aerosols precipitate out of the atmosphere after a year or two. If an operator masks one or two degrees of global heating for a decade and then suddenly stops, whether from bankruptcy, supply-chain embargoes, war, or political whiplash, the trapped greenhouse heat hits the planet all at once (Paddison, 2026). Climatologists call this “termination shock.” It would trigger rapid warming rates far more destructive than gradual climate change.

A stratospheric cooling service is not a seasonal purchase; it is a permanent hostage situation. It requires indefinite, uninterrupted maintenance. As Edgerton reminds us, maintenance is the invisible labor societies depend upon but consistently neglect in favor of the dazzle of initial invention (2006/2008, pp. 77–79). The commercial cloud-seeder sells flight time to a local water board that can walk away at will. The geoengineering startup is proposing to hold the planetary thermostat: an ongoing, non-cancelable obligation that cannot be priced by an offset credit, sold by an RV startup, or governed by a venture-backed Delaware corporation.

When San Diego offered to pay Charles Hatfield his $10,000 on the condition that he sign a release accepting legal responsibility for the flood damage, he walked away. If you comb through the pitch decks, patent filings, and newsletters of today’s solar geoengineering startups, you will find no shortage of language about saving the planet and partnering with governments. What you will not find is a single clause accepting liability for the possible floods.

References

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