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Luke Iseman, the founder of Make Sunsets, is about to launch a weather balloon filled with sulfur dioxide and helium into the air in Nevada.

Photo courtesy Make Sunsets

The solar geoengineering startup that had to cease operations in Mexico after the government cracked down on the idea of putting chemicals into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth has reemerged to launch balloons in Nevada.

On Tuesday, Make Sunsets announced it had completed three balloon launches near Reno, Nevada, each of which contained less than 10 grams of sulfur dioxide, which is the most commonly sited aerosol particle discussed in conversations about solar geoengineering. Two of the balloons launched also had location trackers, and one had a camera, too.

The idea of solar geoengineering has been around for decades and generally refers to spraying aerosol particles into the upper atmosphere in order to reflect the sun’s rays away from earth and back to space, cooling the earth and temporarily mitigating the effects of climate change.

Essentially, solar geoengineering is mimicking what happens when a volcano erupts, and it’s known to work. When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines released thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere in the 1991 eruption, the global temperature of the earth was lowered on average by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Solar geoengineering is not a solution to climate change, and nobody who studies it rigorously suggests it should be. It’s a temporary stopgap measure.

In addition, while releasing sulfur dioxide particles will cool the earth quickly and relatively inexpensively, it’s also dangerous. Injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere could damage the ozone layer, cause respiratory illness and create acid rain.

But as the effects of climate change become more obvious, people are beginning to take the idea more seriously.

The White House is coordinating a five-year research plan into solar geoengineering, the quadrennial U.N.-backed Montreal Protocol assessment report included an entire chapter addressing stratospheric aerosol injection (more colloquially called solar geoengineering), and Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, is funding solar geoengineering research via his philanthropic organization, Open Philanthropy.

While momentum is building, there isn’t any international governance rules about how to study and potentially regulate the idea.

Luke Iseman, a serial inventor and the former director of hardware at Y Combinator, launched Make Sunsets in October in an effort to push that envelope. San Mateo-headquartered venture capital firm BoostVC invested $500,000 in the startup and Iseman brought in a co-founder, Andrew Song.

The launches in Nevada earlier in February occurred at the Rancho San Rafael Regional Park in Reno, , where an annual hot-air balloon festival takes place, Iseman told CNBC.

They chose Nevada “because it’s in the U.S., we’re very confident we know and followed all applicable rules, know the terrain well from past adventures, and, we didn’t want to interfere with a friend’s efforts to get a marine cloud brightening project permitted in California,” Iseman told CNBC.

The Nevada launch was previously detailed by Time reporters, who were there. It was a shoe-string MacGyver-ed event orchestrated out of a hotel room, with a grill and weather balloon equipment. But, as evidenced by the images embedded below, shared with CNBC by Make Sunsets, the balloons lifted off.

Make Sunsets team is filling sulfur dioxide in a bag preparing for launch.

Photo courtesy Make Sunsets

Make Sunsets team is weighing the bag filled with sulfur dioxide gas in a bag preparing for launch.

Photo courtesy Make Sunsets

Make Sunsets is filling the balloon with helium here.

Photo courtesy Make Sunsets

Here, founder Luke Iseman is preparing to release the weather balloon filled with sulfur dioxide and helium into the atmosphere. Make Sunsets says this is the first deployment of SAI, or stratospheric aerosol injection, another and more specific name for solar geoengineering.

Photo courtesy Make Sunsets

Luke Iseman, the founder of Make Sunsets, is about to launch a weather balloon filled with sulfur dioxide and helium into the air in Nevada.

Photo courtesy Make Sunsets

Make Sunsets launching a weather balloon filled with sulfur dioxide and helium into the air in Nevada.

Photo courtesy Make Sunsets

A view from the Make Sunsets balloon launched in Nevada.

Photo courtesy Make Sunsets

A view from the Make Sunsets balloon launched in Nevada.

Photo courtesy Make Sunsets

Iseman has both idealistic and practical goals.

“Most importantly: We need to cool earth to save millions of lives, hundreds of thousands of species, and buy the time we need to decarbonize,” Iseman told CNBC.

To make the business sustainable, Make Sunsets is selling cooling credits, which gives companies and individuals a way to offset the effects of their carbon emissions. But the startup has yet to deliver.

“We have 2,790 cooling credits ordered by 58 paying customers that we haven’t yet delivered,” Iseman told CNBC. “On one hand, we’re working hard on a controversial project to cool earth. On the other, we’re a startup with the same basic challenge as any other: get customers to pay more for what we’re selling than it costs to make it.”

Make Sunsets said it made the FAA aware that it was releasing a balloon.

The FAA provided the following statement: “The FAA has comprehensive regulations for safely operating unmanned free balloons. Among other things, the regulations require the balloon to be equipped so it can be tracked by radar, and the operator to notify the FAA prior to and at the time of launch, monitor and record the balloon’s course, make position reports to the FAA as requested, and notify the FAA when the balloon begins its descent and its expected trajectory.”

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated what the balloons contained. All three of them had sulfur dioxide.

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WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning says censorship is still ‘a dominant threat’

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WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning says censorship is still 'a dominant threat'

Chelsea Manning: Censorship still a dominant threat

Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning says censorship is still “a dominant threat,” advocating for a more decentralized internet to help better protect individuals online.

Her comments come amid ongoing tension linked to online safety rules, with some tech executives recently seeking to push back over content moderation concerns.

Speaking to CNBC’s Karen Tso at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, Manning said that one way to ensure online privacy could be “decentralized identification,” which gives individuals the ability to control their own data.

“Censorship is a dominant threat. I think that it is a question of who’s doing the censoring, and what the purpose is — and also censorship in the 21st century is more about whether or not you’re boosted through like an algorithm, and how the fine-tuning of that seems to work,” Manning said.

“I think that social media and the monopolies of social media have sort of gotten us used to the fact that certain things that drive engagement will be attractive,” she added.

“One of the ways that we can sort of countervail that is to go back to the more decentralized and distribute the internet of the early ’90s, but make that available to more people.”

Nym Technologies Chief Security Officer Chelsea Manning at a press conference held with Nym Technologies CEO Harry Halpin in the Media Village to present NymVPN during the second day of Web Summit on November 13, 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal. 

Horacio Villalobos | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Asked how tech companies could make money in such a scenario, Manning said there would have to be “a better social contract” put in place to determine how information is shared and accessed.

“One of the things about distributed or decentralized identification is that through encryption you’re able to sort of check the box yourself, instead of having to depend on the company to provide you with a check box or an accept here, you’re making that decision from a technical perspective,” Manning said.

‘No longer secrecy versus transparency’

Manning, who works as a security consultant at Nym Technologies, a company that specializes in online privacy and security, was convicted of espionage and other charges at a court-martial in 2013 for leaking a trove of secret military files to online media publisher WikiLeaks.

She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was later released in 2017, when former U.S. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.

Asked to what extent the environment has changed for whistleblowers today, Manning said, “We’re at an interesting time because information is everywhere. We have more information than ever.”

She added, “Countries and governments no longer seem to invest the same amount of time and effort in hiding information and keeping secrets. What countries seem to be doing now is they seem to be spending more time and energy spreading misinformation and disinformation.”

Manning said the challenge for whistleblowers now is to sort through the information to understand what is verifiable and authentic.

“It’s no longer secrecy versus transparency,” she added.

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SoftBank-backed fintech Zopa aims to double profit this year as it eyes 2025 current account launch

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SoftBank-backed fintech Zopa aims to double profit this year as it eyes 2025 current account launch

Jaidev Janardana, CEO of U.K. digital bank Zopa.

Zopa

LISBON, Portugal — British online lender Zopa is on track to double profits and increase annual revenue by more than a third this year amid bumper demand for its banking services, the company’s CEO told CNBC.

Zopa posted revenues of £222 million ($281.7 million) in 2023 and is expecting to cross the £300 million revenue milestone this year — that would mark a 35% annual jump.

The 2024 estimates are based on unaudited internal figures.

The firm also says it is on track to increase pre-tax profits twofold in 2024, after hitting £15.8 million last year.

Zopa, a regulated bank that is backed by Japanese giant SoftBank, has plans to venture into the world of current accounts next year as it looks to focus more on new products.

The company currently offers credit cards, personal loans and savings accounts that it offers through a mobile app — similar to other digital banks such as Monzo and Revolut which don’t operate physical branches.

“The business is doing really well. In 2024, we’ve hit or exceeded the plans across all metrics,” CEO Jaidev Janardana told CNBC in an interview Wednesday.

He said the strong performance is coming off the back of gradually improving sentiment in the U.K. economy, where Zopa operates exclusively.

Commenting on Britain’s macroeconomic conditions, Janardana said, “While it has been a rough few years, in terms of consumers, they have continued to feel the pain slightly less this year than last year.”

The market is “still tight,” he noted, adding that fintech offerings such as Zopa’s — which typically provide higher savings rates than high-street banks — become “more important” during such times.

“The proposition has become more relevant, and while it’s tight for customers, we have had to be much more constrained in terms of who we can lend to,” he said, adding that Zopa has still been able to grow despite that.

A big priority for the business going forward is product, Janardana said. The firm is developing a current account product which would allow users to spend and manage their money more easily, in a similar fashion to mainstream banking providers like HSBC and Barclays, as well as fintech upstarts such as Monzo.

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“We believe that there is more that the consumer can have in the current account space,” Janardana said. “We expect that we will launch our current account with the general public sometime next year.”

Janardana said consumers can expect a “slick” experience from Zopa’s current account offering, including the ability to view and manage multiple account bank accounts from one interface and access to competitive savings rates.

IPO ‘not top of mind’

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It’s ‘liquidity, stupid’: VCs say tech investing is tough amid IPO lull and ‘nuts’ AI hype

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It's 'liquidity, stupid': VCs say tech investing is tough amid IPO lull and 'nuts' AI hype

Edith Yeung, general partner at Race Capital, and Larry Aschebrook, founder and managing partner of G Squared, speak during a CNBC-moderated panel at Web Summit 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Rita Franca | Nurphoto | Getty Images

LISBON, Portugal — It’s a tough time for the venture capital industry right now as a dearth of blockbuster initial public offerings and M&A activity has sucked liquidity from the market, while buzzy artificial intelligence startups dominate attention.

At the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, two venture investors — whose portfolios include the likes of multibillion-dollar AI startups Databricks Anthropic and Groq — said things have become much more difficult as they’re unable to cash out of some of their long-term bets.

“In the U.S., when you talk about the presidential election, it’s the economy stupid. And in the VC world, it’s really all about liquidity stupid,” Edith Yeung, general partner at Race Capital, an early-stage VC firm based in Silicon Valley, said in a CNBC-moderated panel earlier this week.

Liquidity is the holy grail for VCs, startup founders and early employees as it gives them a chance to realize gains — or, if things turn south, losses — on their investments.

When a VC makes an equity investment and the value of their stake increases, it’s only a gain on paper. But when a startup IPOs or sells to another company, their equity stake gets converted into hard cash — enabling them to make new investments.

Yeung said the lack of IPOs over the last couple of years had created a “really tough” environment for venture capital.

At the same, however, there’s been a rush from investors to get into buzzy AI firms.

“What’s really crazy is in the last few years, OpenAI’s domination has really been determined by Big Techs, the Microsofts of the world,” said Yeung, referring to ChatGPT-creator OpenAI’s seismic $157 billion valuation. OpenAI is backed by Microsoft, which has made a multibillion-dollar investment in the firm.

‘The IPO market is not happening’

Larry Aschebrook, founder and managing partner at late-stage VC firm G Squared, agreed that the hunt for liquidity is getting harder — even though the likes of OpenAI are seeing blockbuster funding rounds, which he called “a bit nuts.”

“You have funds and founders and employees searching for liquidity because the IPO market is not happening. And then you have funding rounds taking place of generational types of businesses,” Aschebrook said on the panel.

As important as these deals are, Aschebrook suggested they aren’t helping investors because even more money is getting tied up in illiquid, privately owned shares. G Squared itself an early backer of Anthropic, a foundational AI model startup competing with Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

Using a cooking analogy, Aschebrook suggested that venture capitalists are being starved of lucrative share sales which would lead to them realizing returns. “If you want to cook some dinner, you better sell some stock, ” he added.

Looking for opportunities beyond OpenAI

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