Connect with us

Published

on

Full frame sun, Climate change, Heatwave hot sun, Global warming from the sun and burning

Chuchart Duangdaw | Moment | Getty Images

The White House is coordinating a five-year research plan to study ways of modifying the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth to temper the effects of global warming, a process sometimes called solar geoengineering or sunlight reflection.

The research plan will assess climate interventions, including spraying aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back into space, and should include goals for research, what’s necessary to analyze the atmosphere, and what impact these kinds of climate interventions may have on the Earth, according to the White House‘s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Congress directed the research plan be produced in its spending plan for 2022, which President Joe Biden signed in March.

Some of the techniques, such as spraying sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, are known to have harmful effects on the environment and human health. But scientists and climate leaders who are concerned humanity will overshoot its emissions targets say research is important to figure out how to balance these risks against a possibly catastrophic rise in the earth’s temperature.

Getting ready to research a topic is a very preliminary step, but it’s notable the White House is formally engaging with what has largely been seen as the stuff of dystopian fantasy. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction novel, “The Ministry for the Future,” a heatwave in India kills 20 million people and out of desperation, India decides to implement its own strategy of limiting the sunlight that gets to earth.

Chris Sacca, the founder of climate tech investment fund Lowercarbon Capital, says it’s prudent for the White House to be spearheading the research effort.

“Sunlight reflection has the potential to safeguard the livelihoods of billions of people, and it’s a sign of the White House’s leadership that they’re advancing the research so that any future decisions can be rooted in science not geopolitical brinkmanship,” Sacca told CNBC. (Sacca has donated to support research in the area, but has “zero financial interests beyond philanthropy” in the idea and does not think there should be private business models in the space, he told CNBC.)

Harvard professor David Keith first worked on the topic in 1989, and says it’s being taken much more seriously now. He points to a formal statement of support for research from a group he advises called the Overshoot Commission. The Environmental Defense Fund, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have also indicated support for research into the topic.

To be clear, nobody is saying sunlight reflection modification is the solution to climate change. Reducing emissions remains the priority.

“You cannot judge what the country does on solar radiation modification without looking at what it is doing in emission reductions, because the priority is emission reductions,” said Janos Pasztor, the executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative. “Solar radiation modification will never be a solution to the climate crisis.”

Three ways to reduce sunlight

The idea of sunlight reflection first appeared prominently in a 1965 report to President Lyndon B. Johnson entitled “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment,” Keith told CNBC. The report floated the idea of spreading particles over the ocean at a cost of $100 per square mile. A one percent change in the reflectivity of the earth would cost $500 million per year, which does “not seem excessive,” the report says, “considering the extraordinary economic and human importance of climate.”

The estimated price tag has gone up since then. The current estimate is that it would cost $10 billion per year to run a program that cools the earth by one degree Celsius, said Edward A. Parson, a professor of environmental law at UCLA’s law school. But that is remarkably cheap compared to other climate change mitigation efforts.

A landmark report released in March 2021 from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine addressed three kinds of solar geoengineering: stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening, and cirrus cloud thinning.

Stratospheric aerosol injection would involve flying aircraft into the stratosphere, which is between 10 and 30 miles up, and spraying a fine mist that would hang in the air, reflecting some of the sun’s radiation back into space.

“The stratosphere is calm, and things stay up there for a long time,” Parson told CNBC. “The atmospheric life of stuff that’s injected in the stratosphere is between six months and two years.”

Stratospheric aerosol injection “would immediately take the high end off hot extremes,” Parson said. And also it would “pretty much immediately” slow extreme precipitation events too, he said.

“The top line slogan about stratospheric aerosol injection, which I wrote in a paper more than 10 years ago — but it’s still apt — is fast, cheap, and imperfect. Fast is crucial. Nothing else that we do for climate change is fast. Cheap, it’s so cheap,” Parson told CNBC.

“And it’s not imperfect because we haven’t got it right yet. It’s imperfect because the imperfection is embedded in the way it works. The same reason it’s fast is the reason that it’s imperfect, and there’s no way to get around that.”

One option for an aerosol is sulfur dioxide, the cooling effects of which are well known from volcanic eruptions. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, for instance, spewed thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, causing global temperatures to drop temporarily by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

A giant volcanic mushroom cloud explodes some 20 kilometers high from Mount Pinatubo above almost deserted US Clark Air Base, on June 12, 1991 followed by another more powerful explosion. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo on June 15, 1991 was the second largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century.

Arlan Naeg | Afp | Getty Images

There’s also a precedent in factories that burn fossil fuels, especially coal. Coal has some sulfur that oxidizes when burns, creating sulfur dioxide. That sulfur dioxide goes through other chemical reactions and eventually falls to the earth as sulfuric acid in rain. But, during the time that the sulfur pollution sits in the air, it does serve as a kind of insulation from the heat of the sun.

Ironically, as the world reduces coal burning to curb the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming, we’ll also be eliminating the sulfur dioxide emissions that mask some of that warming.

“Sulfur pollution that’s coming out of smokestacks right now is masking between a third and a half of the heating signal from the greenhouse gases humans have already emitted into the atmosphere,” Parson said.

In other words, we’ve been doing one form of sunlight reflection for decades already, but in an uncontrolled fashion with terrible warming effects, explains Kelly Wanser, the executive director of SilverLining, an organization promoting research and governance of climate interventions.

“This isn’t something totally new and Frankenstein — we’re already doing it; we’re doing it in the most dirty, unplanned way you could possibly do it, and we don’t understand what we’re doing,” Wanser told CNBC. 

Spraying sulfur in the stratosphere is not the only way of manipulating the amount of sunlight that gets to the earth, and some say it’s not the best option.

“Sulfur dioxide is likely not the best aerosol and is by no means the only technique for this. Cloud brightening is a very promising technique as well, for example,” Sacca told CNBC.

Marine cloud brightening involves increasing the reflectivity of clouds that are relatively close to the surface of the ocean with techniques like spraying sea salt crystals into the air. Marine cloud brightening generally gets less attention than stratospheric aerosol injection because it affects a half dozen to a few dozen miles and would potentially only last hours to days, Parson told CNBC.

Cirrus cloud thinning, the third category addressed in the 2021 report from the National Academies, involves thinning mid-level clouds, between 3.7 and 8.1 miles high, to allow heat to escape from the surface of the earth. It is not technically part of the “solar geoengineering” umbrella category because it does not involve reflecting sunlight, but instead involves increasing the release of thermal radiation.

Known risks to people and the environment

There are significant and well-known risks to some of these techniques — sulfur dioxide aerosol injection in particular.

First, spraying sulfur into the atmosphere will “mess with the ozone chemistry in a way that might delay the recovery of the ozone layer,” Parson told CNBC.

The Montreal Protocol adopted on September 16, 1987, regulates and phases out the use of ozone depleting substances, such as hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) which were commonly used in refrigeration and air conditioners, but that healing process is still ongoing.

Also, sulfates injected into the atmosphere eventually come down as acid rain, which affects soil, water reservoirs, and local ecosystems.

Thirdly, the sulfur in the atmosphere forms very fine particulates that cause respiratory illness.

The question, then, is whether these known effects are more or less harmful than the warming they would offset.

“Yes, damaging the ozone is bad, acid deposition is bad, respiratory illness is bad, absolutely. And spraying sulfur in the stratosphere would contribute in the bad direction to all of those effects,” Parson told CNBC. “But you also have to ask, how much and relative to what?”

The sulfur already being emitted from the burning of fossil fuels is already causing environmental damage and is already killing between 10 and 20 million people a year due to respiratory illness, said Parson. “So that’s the way we live already,” he said.

Meanwhile, “the world is getting hotter, and there will be catastrophic impacts for many people in the world,” said Pasztor.

“There’s already too much carbon out there. And even if you stop all emissions today, the global temperature will still be high and will remain high for hundreds of years. So that’s why scientists are saying maybe we need something else, in addition — not instead of — but maybe in addition to everything else that is being done,” he said. “The current action/non action of countries collectively — we are committing millions of people to death. That’s what we’re doing.”

For sunlight reflection technology to become a tool in the climate change mitigation toolbox, awareness among the public and lawmakers has to grow slowly and steadily, according to Tyler Felgenhauer, a researcher at Duke University who studies public policy and risk.

“If it is to rise onto the agenda, it’ll be kind of an evolutionary development where more and more environmental groups are willing to state publicly that they’re for research,” Felgenhauer told CNBC. “We’re arguing it’s not going to be some sort of one big, bad climate event that makes us all suddenly adopt or be open to solar geoengineering — there will be more of a gradual process.”

A man waits for customers displaying fans at his store amid rising temperatures in New Delhi on May 27, 2020. – India is wilting under a heatwave, with the temperature in places reaching 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) and the capital enduring its hottest May day in nearly two decades.

Jewel Samad | Afp | Getty Images

Research it now or be caught off guard later?

Some environmentalists consider sunlight relfection a “moral hazard,” because it offers a relatively easy and inexpensive alternative to doing the work of reducing emissions.

One experiment to study stratospheric aerosols by the Keutsch Group at Harvard was called off in 2021 due to opposition. The experiment would have “threaten the reputation and credibility of the climate leadership Sweden wants and must pursue as the only way to deal effectively with the climate crisis: powerful measures for a rapid and just transition to zero emission societies, 100% renewable energy and shutdown of the fossil fuel industry,” an open letter from opponents said.

But proponents insist that researching sunlight modification technologies should not preclude emissions reduction work.

“Even the people like me who think it’s very important to do research on these things and to develop the capabilities all agree that the urgent top priority for managing climate change is cutting emissions,” Parson told CNBC.

Keith of Harvard agrees. His goal is “simply that we learn more and develop better mechanism[s] for governance,” he told CNBC.

Doing research is also important because many onlookers expect that some country, facing an unprecedented climate disaster, will act unilaterally to will try some version of sunlight modification anyway — even if it hasn’t been carefully studied.

“In my opinion, it’s more than 90 percent likely that within the next 20 years, some major nation wants to do this,” Parson said.

Sacca put the odds even higher.

“The odds are 100 percent that some country pursues sunlight reflection, particularly in the wake of seeing millions of their citizens die from extreme weather,” Sacca told CNBC. “The world will not stand idly by and leaders will feel compelled to take action. Our only hope is that by doing the research now, and in public, the world can collaboratively understand the upsides and best methods for any future project.”  

How nuclear power is changing

Continue Reading

Technology

Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish files to go public on NYSE

Published

on

By

Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish files to go public on NYSE

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, holds hundred dollar bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 Conference at Miami Beach Convention Center on April 7, 2022 in Miami, Florida.

Marco Bello | Getty Images

The Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish filed for an IPO on Friday, the latest digital asset firm to head for the public market.

The company, led by CEO Tom Farley, a veteran of the finance industry and former president of the New York Stock Exchange, said it plans to trade on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “BLSH.”

A spinout of Block.one, Bullish started with an initial investment from backers including Thiel’s Founders Fund and Thiel Capital, along with Nomura, Mike Novogratz and others. Bullish acquired crypto news site CoinDesk in 2023.

“In the first quarter of 2025, Bullish exchange executed over $2.5 billion in average daily volume, ranking in the top five exchanges by spot volume for Bitcoin and Ether,” the company said on its website. The prospectus listed top competitors as Binance, Coinbase and Kraken.

The IPO filing says that as of March 31, the total trading volume since launch has exceeded $1.25 trillion.

Read more CNBC tech news

The filing is another significant step for the cryptocurrency industry, which has fought for years to convince institutions to embrace digital assets as legitimate investments.

It’s already been a big year on the market for crypto offerings, highlighted by stablecoin issuer Circle, which has jumped more than sevenfold since its IPO in June. Etoro, an online trading platform that includes services for crypto investors, debuted in May.

Novogratz‘s crypto firm Galaxy Digital started trading on the Nasdaq in May, moving its listing from the Toronto Stock Exchange. And in June, Gemini, the cryptocurrency exchange and custodian founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, confidentially filed for an IPO in the U.S.

Meanwhile, investors continue to flock to bitcoin. The digital currency is trading at over $117,000, up from about $94,000 at the start of the year.

President Donald Trump, on Friday, signed the GENIUS Act into law — a set of regulations that establish some initial consumer protections around stablecoins, which are tied to assets like the U.S. dollar with the intent of reducing price volatility associated with many cryptocurrencies.

In its filing with the SEC, Bullish says its mission is partly to “drive the adoption of stablecoins, digital assets, and blockchain technology.”

Crypto industry players, including Thiel, Elon Musk, and President Trump’s AI and Crypto czar David Sacks spent heavily to re-elect Trump and have pushed for legislation that legitimizes digital assets and exchanges.

WATCH: Trump’s crypto plan

Trump's crypto reserve plan is 'incredibly bullish' for crypto as a whole, asset manager says

Continue Reading

Technology

Microsoft stops relying on Chinese engineers for Pentagon cloud support

Published

on

By

Microsoft stops relying on Chinese engineers for Pentagon cloud support

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella (L) returns to the stage after a pre-recorded interview during the Microsoft Build conference opening keynote in Seattle, Washington on May 19, 2025.

Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images

Microsoft on Friday revised its practices to ensure that engineers in China no longer provide technical support to U.S. defense clients using the company’s cloud services.

The company implemented the changes in an effort to reduce national security and cybersecurity risks stemming from its cloud work with a major customer. The announcement came days after ProPublica published an extensive report describing the Defense Department’s dependence on Microsoft software engineers in China.

“In response to concerns raised earlier this week about US-supervised foreign engineers, Microsoft has made changes to our support for US Government customers to assure that no China-based engineering teams are providing technical assistance for DoD Government cloud and related services,” Frank Shaw, the Microsoft’s chief communications officer, wrote in a Friday X post.

The change impacts the work of Microsoft’s Azure cloud services division, which analysts estimate now generates more than 25% of the company’s revenue. That makes Azure bigger than Google Cloud but smaller than Amazon Web Services. Microsoft receives “substantial revenue from government contracts,” according to its most recent quarterly earnings statement, and more than half of the company’s $70 billion in first-quarter revenue came from customers based in the U.S.

In 2019, Microsoft won a $10 billion cloud-related defense contract, but the Pentagon wound up canceling it in 2021 after a legal battle. In 2022, the department gave cloud contracts worth up to $9 billion in total to Amazon, Google, Oracle and Microsoft.

ProPublica reported that the work of Microsoft’s Chinese Azure engineers is overseen by “digital escorts” in the U.S., who typically have less technical prowess than the employees they manage overseas. The report detailed how the “digital escort” arrangement might leave the U.S. vulnerable to a cyberattack from China.

“This is obviously unacceptable, especially in today’s digital threat environment,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a video posted to X on Friday. He described the architecture as “a legacy system created over a decade ago, during the Obama administration.” The Defense Department will review its systems in search for similar activity, Hegseth said.

Microsoft originally told ProPublica that its employees and contractors were adhering to U.S. government rules.

“We remain committed to providing the most secure services possible to the US government, including working with our national security partners to evaluate and adjust our security protocols as needed,” Shaw wrote.

WATCH: Microsoft Security VP Vasu Jakkal talks cybersecurity with Jim Cramer

Microsoft Security VP Vasu Jakkal talks cybersecurity with Jim Cramer

Continue Reading

Technology

The investor behind Opendoor’s 190% run nearly shut down his fund

Published

on

By

The investor behind Opendoor's 190% run nearly shut down his fund

Courtesy: Opendoor

On June 6, online real estate service Opendoor was so desperate to get its beaten-down stock price back over $1 and stay listed on the Nasdaq that management proposed a reverse split, potentially lifting the price of each share by as much as 50 times.

The stock inched its way up over the next five weeks.

Then Eric Jackson started cheerleading.

Jackson, a hedge fund manager who was bullish on Opendoor years earlier when the company appeared to be thriving and was worth roughly $20 billion, wrote on X on Monday that his firm, EMJ Capital, was back in the stock.

“@EMJCapital has taken a position in $OPEN — and we believe it could be a 100-bagger over the next few years,” Jackson wrote. He added later in the thread that the stock could get to $82.

It’s a long, long way from that mark.

Opendoor shares soared 189% this week, by far their best weekly performance since the company’s public market debut in late 2020. The stock closed on Friday at $2.25. The stock’s highest-volume trading days on record were Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week.

Jackson said in an interview on Thursday that the bulk of his firm’s Opendoor purchases came when the stock was in the 70s and 80s, meaning cents, and he’s bought options as well for his portfolio.

Nothing has fundamentally improved for the company since Jackson’s purchases. Opendoor remains a cash-burning, low-margin business with meager near-term growth prospects.

What has changed dramatically is Jackson’s online influence and the size of his following. The more he posts, the higher the stock goes.

“There’s a real hunger for buying the next big thing,” Jackson told CNBC, adding that investors like to find the “downtrodden.”

It’s something Jackson’s firm, based in Toronto, has in common with Opendoor.

Watch CNBC's full interview with Social Capital's Chamath Palihapitiya

When Opendoor went public through a special purpose acquisition company in 2020, it was riding a SPAC wave and broader gains driven by low interest rates and Covid-era market euphoria. Investors pumped money into the riskiest assets, lifting money-losing tech upstarts to astronomical valuations.

Opendoor’s business involved using technology to buy and sell homes, pocketing the gains. Zillow tried and failed to compete.

Opendoor shares peaked at over $39 in Feb. 2021 for a market cap just above $22.5 billion. But by the end of that year, the shares were trading below $15, before collapsing 92% in 2022 to end the year at $1.16.

Rising interest rates hammered the whole tech sector, hitting Opendoor particularly hard as increased borrowing costs reduced demand for homes.

Jackson, similarly, had a miserable 2022, coinciding with the worst year for the Nasdaq since 2008. Jackson said his key client withdrew its money at the end of the year, and “I’ve been small ever since.”

‘Epic comeback’

While his assets under management remain minimal, Jackson’s reputation for getting in early to a rebound story was burnished by the performance of Carvana.

The automotive e-commerce platform lost 98% of its value in 2022 as investors weighed the likelihood of bankruptcy. In the middle of that year, with Carvana still far from bottoming out, Jackson expressed his bullishness. He told CNBC that April that he liked the stock, and then promoted its recovery on a podcast in June. He also said he liked Opendoor at the time.

Investors willing to stomach further losses in 2022 were rewarded with a 1,000% gain in 2023, and a lot more upside from there. The stock closed on Friday at $347.52, up from a low of $3.72 in Dec. 2022, and almost triple its price at the time of Jackson’s appearance on CNBC in April of that year.

After Carvana’s 2022 slide, “then obviously began an epic comeback,” Jackson said. Opendoor, meanwhile, “continued to roll down the mountain,” he said.

Jackson said that the fallout of 2022 led him to pursue a different method of stockpicking. He started hiring a small team of developers, which is now four people, to build out artificial intelligence models. The firm has experimented with several models —some have worked and some haven’t — but he said the focus now is using what he’s learned from Carvana to find “100x” opportunities.

In addition to Opendoor, Jackson has been promoting IREN, a provider of power for bitcoin mining and AI workloads, and Cipher Mining, which is in a similar space. He’s seen his following on Elon Musk‘s social media site X, which he said was stuck for years between 32,000 and 34,000, swell to almost 50,000. And after a lengthy lull, investors are reaching out to him to try and put money into his fund, he said.

Jackson has a lot riding on Opendoor, a company that saw revenue and number of homes sold slip in the first quarter from a year earlier, and racked up almost $370 million in losses over the past four quarters.

In early June, Opendoor announced plans for a reverse split — ranging from 1 for 10 to 1 for 50 — to “give us optionality in preserving our listing on Nasdaq.” With the stock now well over $1, such a move appears less necessary, as shareholders prepare to vote on the proposal on July 28.

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” said Jackson. “Those things usually further cement a company’s move into oblivion rather than hail some big revival.”

Opendoor didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Banking on growth

Analysts are projecting a more than 5% drop in revenue this year, followed by 20% growth in 2026 and 12% expansion in 2017, according to LSEG. Losses are expected to narrow over that stretch.

Jackson said his analysis factors in projections of $11.5 billion in revenue for 2029, which would be well over double the company’s expected sales for this year. He looked at the multiples of companies like Zillow and Carvana, which he said trade for 4 to 7 times forward revenue. Opendoor’s forward price-to-sales ratio is currently well below 1.

With Zillow and Redfin having exited the instant-buying home market, Opendoor faces little competition in allowing homeowners to sell their property online for cash, rather than going through an extended bidding, sales and closing process.

Jackson is banking on revenue growth and increased market share to lead to a profitable business that will push investors to value the company with a multiple somewhere between Zillow and Carvana. At $82, Opendoor would be worth about $60 billion, which is roughly 5 times projected 2029 revenue.

Jackson said his model assumes that “like Carvana, Opendoor can prove that it can permanently turn the tide and get to sustained profitability” so that the “market multiple would get reassessed.”

In the meantime, he’ll keep posting on X.

On Friday, Jackson wrote a thread consisting of 11 posts, recounting the challenge of having “99.5% of my AUM” disappear overnight after his primary investor pulled out in 2022.

“Translation: he fired me for losing him too much money,” Jackson wrote. He said he almost shut down the fund, and was even encouraged to do so by his wife and accountant.

Now, Jackson is using his recent momentum on social media to try and attract investor money, while still reminding prospects that he could lose it.

“All I have is my reputation,” he wrote, “and, unless I keep picking good stocks, it will be gone.”

WATCH: Don’t yet know if IPO market is back to full health

Don't yet know if IPO market is back to full health, says Raymond James' Sunaina Sinha Haldea

Continue Reading

Trending