The Thermostat We're Building
How geoengineering research becomes deployment capability while we promise it never will
We’re building a planetary thermostat while promising never to adjust the temperature. This is geoengineering in 2025: fund the research, run the models, launch weather balloons carrying sulfur into the stratosphere, but call it “understanding risks” not “preparing for deployment.” The UK government says it is “not in favour of using solar radiation management and has no plans for deployment.” It’s also spending approximately £57 million on outdoor geoengineering experiments.
The distinction between understanding and preparing matters enormously in climate policy meetings. It matters not at all in terms of what we’re actually building.
This isn’t hypocrisy. It’s how we process control fantasies when facing systems we can’t control. We can imagine dimming the sun before we can imagine fewer cars. We can model stratospheric sulfur injection starting in 2025 before we can mandate building efficiency standards. Geoengineering will probably work. This reveals more about us than about the technology. Planetary intervention feels more feasible than behavior change.
Watch how this cognitive pattern plays out in policy.
How “Never” Becomes “Contingency Planning”
The progression follows a predictable path. Phase one: geoengineering is too risky, ungoverned, ethically fraught. It might distract from emissions cuts. We cannot do this. We won’t do this. Except.
Phase two: We’re not advocating deployment, but we should study it in models and labs. Just in case.
Phase three: We need outdoor tests to understand real-world effects. Small scale. Controlled. Milligrams of material on weather balloons. Marine cloud brightening in limited areas. Pumping water onto one square kilometer of Arctic ice.
Phase four, currently emerging: Researchers model sulfur injection beginning in 2025 under specific climate scenarios. Not decades away. Now. Policy papers explore who would deploy at scale, how to govern it, where to draw the line. The conversation shifts from “should we study this?” to “how to study it safely” to “who deploys under what rules.”
Nobody remembers authorizing the shift. That’s how it works. The modeling assumes a start year. The start year makes it concrete. The concrete feeling makes it seem achievable. Achievable becomes contingency planning. Contingency planning becomes deployment readiness.
Each step sounds prudent. Cautious. Responsible. Each step builds infrastructure for the thing we swear we’ll never do.
The Semantic Shield
The infrastructure rests on linguistic architecture. Consider what we call these experiments: “small-scale outdoor tests.” The phrase performs extraordinary psychological labor. Milligrams of material on weather balloons. Marine cloud brightening in limited areas. The language transforms planetary intervention into a high school science project.
ARIA’s programme involves weather balloons carrying milligrams of mineral dust into the stratosphere for “exposure testing.” Milligrams. Not deployment, just exposure. Not exposure, just data collection. We comfort ourselves with scale. It’s outdoor but controlled. It’s controlled but small. It’s small but real-world. By the time we’re injecting kilotons, we’ll have a decade of practice calling it something else.
The same pattern appears in terminology shifts. “Geoengineering” becomes “climate intervention.” “Solar radiation management” becomes “climate cooling.” “Deployment” becomes “application.” Each revision neutralizes the language. Planetary redesign starts sounding like management.
This isn’t spin. It’s how humans process choices we find uncomfortable. We rename them until they feel manageable.
The Insurance Policy Trap
Once the names feel manageable, we wrap it in metaphor. Researchers and policymakers frame geoengineering as an “emergency brake.” They describe it as a temporary measure until emissions fall. They call it insurance against overshoot scenarios.
The metaphor shapes what sounds possible. Insurance protects you from unlikely catastrophes. Having insurance is prudent. Nobody blames you for buying fire insurance even if you hope never to use it. The frame makes research feel responsible rather than risky.
But insurance policies don’t require decades of continuous operation once activated. They don’t risk termination shock if you stop paying premiums. They don’t shift monsoon patterns in countries that never consented to your coverage. The metaphor obscures more than it reveals.
The moral hazard problem remains polite background noise in governance debates. It should be the screaming center. If policymakers treat atmospheric intervention as available insurance, the urgency around emissions cuts evaporates. We know this. We’ve seen it with every “technological solution” that promised we could continue without changing. The technology doesn’t replace the behavior change. It replaces the motivation to change behavior.
What This Reveals About Us
The anthropological puzzle: We’ll redesign the stratosphere before we’ll redesign our commutes.
The UK can fund £57 million in atmospheric intervention experiments. It struggles to implement congestion pricing in London. The US can seriously discuss stratospheric sulfur injection. It can’t pass a carbon tax. China can investigate marine cloud brightening. But changing how anyone consumes? Impossible.
It’s not about technical capacity. It’s about what we can stand to face.
Reducing emissions means acknowledging limits. Changing behaviors. Accepting we can’t have everything we want. It means sacrifice with distant payoffs. Worse: it forces us to confront consumption. Status hierarchies. The stories we tell ourselves about progress and convenience.
Geoengineering requires none of that. It’s a technical problem with a technical solution. It lets us keep everything else the same. Even better: it concentrates decision-making in the hands of those who already have power. Only very large states can deploy stratospheric aerosol injection at scale. It doesn’t threaten status games. It doesn’t require examining who benefits from current arrangements. It doesn’t require admitting we should have acted thirty years ago. The science was already clear then.
Planetary intervention feels more feasible because it doesn’t threaten our consumption, our status games, our stories about progress. It only changes the composition of the stratosphere.
The Governance Theatre
While we build this technical capacity, we sketch governance frameworks. The frameworks address specific questions: who deploys, under what authority, how to define consent when one country’s cooling shifts another’s rainfall. They sketch scenarios where termination shock, the sudden warming if sulfur injection stops, becomes a hostage negotiation tool.
These are real questions. They’re also convenient distractions from what governance conversations avoid: whether we should build the capability at all.
The governance conversation presumes the technology will exist. It focuses on how to control it, not whether to create it. That framing has already conceded the essential point. Once you’re debating governance structures, you’ve accepted that deployment is thinkable. Once it’s thinkable, it becomes probable. Once it’s probable, it becomes contingency planning. Once it’s contingency planning, it becomes deployment readiness.
The UK position captures this perfectly: “not in favour of using SRM and has no plans for deployment” while funding the research that creates deployment capability. This isn’t contradiction. This is how institutions manage existential risk. They prepare for the thing they claim they’ll never do. Because if they don’t prepare and then need it, they’ll be blamed for negligence. But if they do prepare and then use it, they can say they were just being prudent.
The logic is impeccable. It’s also how you end up with a planetary thermostat nobody voted for.
Where This Goes
Here’s where this leads. Fast forward to 2035. Global temperatures hit 2.1°C above pre-industrial levels. Crop failures cascade across equatorial regions. A coalition of wealthy nations announces “temporary limited deployment” of stratospheric aerosol injection. They justify it as preventing catastrophic harm. Emissions reduction will scale up, they promise. Any day now.
The announcement will generate fierce debate, protests, international tension. Nations will fight over who benefits and who bears the cost.
What it won’t generate is surprise.
By then we’ll have fifteen years of “outdoor tests” and decades of modeling. We’ll understand the chemistry, the engineering, the delivery mechanisms. Governance frameworks will be sketched if not agreed upon. Materials research will show mineral dusts as potentially safer alternatives to sulfates. The engineering will be mature. The technical capacity will be proven. The infrastructure will be built.
Nobody will remember authorizing the shift. The question “should we do this?” will have been answered long before anyone asks it directly. It got answered when we funded the first research, moved from models to outdoor tests, treated 2025 deployment as a modeling parameter, built the thermostat while promising never to touch it.
That’s the pattern with existential technologies. Technical capacity precedes permission. Engineering precedes politics. Contingency planning becomes deployment readiness. We research the risks. We build the knowledge to deploy. Each step is defensible. The progression follows.
The Question We’re Not Asking
Which brings us back to the beginning. We’re not discussing whether to geoengineer the climate. We’re discussing how long to pretend we’re not.
The pretense matters. It lets us fund research without admitting we’re preparing for deployment. It lets us build capability without confronting the choice we’re making. It lets us maintain the fiction that this is prudent contingency planning, not the opening act of planetary redesign because we couldn’t manage the simpler task of not wrecking things to begin with.
Look at what we find more comfortable. Reengineering the stratosphere sounds easier than examining who consumes what. A planetary thermostat sounds more feasible than a carbon tax. “Small-scale outdoor tests” of atmospheric intervention sound more practical than emissions regulation.
It reveals we’ll choose almost any response to climate change. Except examining who benefits from current arrangements and who pays the costs. We’ll pump sulfur into the stratosphere before we’ll redistribute power, wealth, or convenience. We’ll risk termination shock, shifted monsoons, and permanent atmospheric management. Anything before the political upheaval of cutting emissions fast enough to matter.
That’s not a technology choice. It’s a values choice. The technology just makes the values visible.
We’re building the thermostat. Testing the components. Modeling deployment scenarios. Developing governance frameworks. We’re doing everything except admitting we’ve already decided to use it.
The only question left is what we’ll call it when we do. My money is on “responsible climate management.” Sounds better than “planetary intervention,” doesn’t it?
Research Notes: Geoengineering's Rhetorical Shift
In May 2025, the UK government announced approximately £57 million in funding for 21 climate cooling research projects, including outdoor experiments with stratospheric particles. But just weeks later, the UK government officially stated it’s “not in favour of using Solar Radiation Modification and has no plans for deployment.”