The United States should lead an international effort to prohibit the use of solar geoengineering, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Roger Pielke Jr., told members of Congress on Sept. 16.
Pielke testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Delivering Government Efficiency during a hearing on weather manipulation, specifically cloud-seeding and geoengineering.
While geoengineering is a broad category that covers processes to intentionally cool the Earth’s temperature—which could even include painting buildings a certain way—the subset known as solar geoengineering or solar radiation modification drew Pielke’s concern.
Those modification techniques involve the dispensing of reflective elements such as sulfur dioxide into layers of the atmosphere to prevent the sun’s rays from reaching the Earth’s surface….