After Mexican government cracked down on solar geoengineering, startup lets off balloons in Nevada
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.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta’s AI assistant now has 1 billion monthly active users across the company’s family of apps, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday at the company’s annual shareholder meeting.
The “focus for this year is deepening the experience and making Meta AI the leading personal AI with an emphasis on personalization, voice conversations and entertainment,” Zuckerberg said.
The artificial intelligent assistant’s 1 billion milestone comes after the company in April released a standalone app for the tool.
The plan is for Meta to keep growing the product before building a business around it, Zuckerberg said on Wednesday. As Meta AI improves overtime, Zuckerberg said “there will be opportunities to either insert paid recommendations” or offer “a subscription service so that people can pay to use more compute.”
In February, CNBC reported that Meta was planning to debut a standalone Meta AI app during the second quarter and test a paid-subscription service akin to rival chat apps like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“It may seem kind of funny that a billion monthly actives doesn’t seem like it’s at scale for us, but that’s where we’re at,” Zuckerberg told shareholders.
During the Meta shareholder meeting, investors voted on 14 different items related to the company’s business, nine of which were shareholder proposals covering topics such as child safety, greenhouse gas emissions and a proposed bitcoin treasury assessment.
Shareholder proposal 8, for example, was submitted by JLens, which is an investment advisor and affiliate of the Anti-Defamation League, and called for Meta to prepare an annual report detailing and addressing hate content, including antisemitism, on its services following January policy changes that relaxed content-moderation guidelines.
Early voting results on Wednesday showed the proposals that Meta’s board did not recommend were unlikely to pass, including one calling for the company to end its dual-class share structure, which gives Zuckerberg significant voting power. Meanwhile, the voting items that the board favored, including those pertaining to approving the company’s board of director nominees and an equity incentive plan, were likely to pass, based on the preliminary results.
Meta said final polling results will be released within four business days on the company’s website and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff participates in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 22, 2025.
Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Salesforce shares were volatile in extended trading on Wednesday after the sales and customer service software maker reported upbeat fiscal first-quarter results and guidance.
Here’s how the company performed relative to LSEG consensus:
- Earnings per share: $2.58 adjusted vs. 2.54 expected
- Revenue: $9.83 billion vs. $9.75 billion expected
Salesforce’s revenue grew 7.6% year over year in the quarter, which ended on April 30, according to a statement. Net income of $1.54 billion, or $1.59 per share, was basically flat compared with $1.53 billion, or $1.56 per share, a year ago.
President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on goods imported into the U.S. in early April. Co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff sounded positive about the company’s results for the quarter anyway, pointing to its plan, announced on Tuesday, to buy data management company Informatica for $8 billion.
It would be Salesforce’s priciest acquisition since the $27.1 billion Slack deal in 2021. Slack marked the top end of the buyouts Salesforce had made under Benioff. Activist investors raised concerns about all the spending, in addition to slowing revenue growth.
Salesforce sprung into action, slashing 10% of its headcount. Benioff proclaimed that the board’s mergers and acquisitions committee had been disbanded. The company’s finance chief at the time said it would reach a margin expansion goal two years early. And Salesforce started paying dividends to shareholders.
Initial reception to the Informatica announcement was generally favorable. “Salesforce is paying a reasonable multiple for the asset, in our view, and the deal should be more easily digested by investors than some of the company’s large deals in the past (i.e. Slack),” Stifel analysts led by J. Parker Lane wrote in a note to clients. The investment bank has a buy rating on Salesforce shares.
During the fiscal first quarter, Salesforce introduced the AgentExchange marketplace for artificial intelligence agents.
Management sees $2.76 to $2.78 in adjusted earnings per share on $10.11 billion to $10.16 billion in revenue for the fiscal second quarter. Analysts polled by LSEG had expected $2.73 in adjusted earnings per share on $10.01 billion in revenue.
Salesforce bumped up its full-year forecast. It called for $11.27 to $11.33 in adjusted earnings per share and $41.0 billion to $41.3 billion in revenue, implying revenue growth between 8% and 9%. The LSEG consensus included net income of $11.16 per share and $40.82 billion in revenue. The guidance in February was $11.09 to $11.17 in adjusted earnings per share, with $40.5 billion to $40.9 billion in revenue.
As of Wednesday’s close, the stock had slipped about 18% so far in 2025, while the S&P index was unchanged.
Executives will discuss the results with analysts on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET.
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
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