Press Releases
SilverLining Statement on the Funding Announcement of Atmospheric Intervention Company Stardust Solutions
Washington, D.C. (October 29, 2025) — Last week's announcement of a $60 million venture capital investment in Stardust Solutions — the largest funding round ever for a company pursuing atmospheric interventions — is a significant escalation of activity in a challenging area for society. Both commercial and nonprofit organizations are now mobilizing substantial funds to pursue rapid paths to deploying specific approaches to disperse particles (aerosols) to influence the global atmosphere. We share the concerns expressed by scientists, policy experts and members of the public about the potential for private intervention efforts to outpace society's ability to understand and respond to them.
The critical issue is not whether to research atmospheric interventions, but whether society has the information needed to evaluate and respond to them to ensure safety. Today, we do not.
What's Missing
At present, society lacks sufficient information to responsibly pursue rapid or specific atmospheric interventions:
We cannot sufficiently project atmospheric effects. Current earth system models cannot project the specific regional and local impacts of atmospheric changes with the precision and confidence required for decision-making about global interventions. Modeling capabilities, and AI and other tools informed by them, have specific weaknesses that require improvement before society can evaluate how interventions would affect weather patterns, precipitation, agriculture and ecosystems in specific locations and compare them to future conditions without intervention.
We have not researched and assessed candidates for intervention. Society has not conducted the rigorous, independent exploration and comparative scientific assessment needed to surface and evaluate different approaches to atmospheric intervention — including their respective risks, benefits and side effects, and effective means of observing, constraining or reducing negative impacts. We cannot responsibly endorse or narrow the portfolio to any specific approach without this foundational work.
We have not developed protections to ensure safety. Lacking sufficient observations, projections and research on candidate interventions, we do not yet have the monitoring capabilities and information tools we need for regulatory guardrails to protect public and environmental safety. Risks range from threats to the world's protective ozone layer, to changes in global and regional weather patterns, to influences on ecosystems, agriculture, human health and security. Society requires evidence-based identification of the risks of proposed interventions and mechanisms for establishing and enforcing appropriate guardrails with respect to them.
What's Needed
The path forward requires rapidly expanding our knowledge base, not building scaled deployment capabilities.
This means rapid public investment in:
Sustained and expanded observations of the atmosphere to understand its baseline conditions, natural variability and responses to different influences
Concerted scientific study of atmospheric composition, chemistry and processes
Leveraging the above, improved models and analytical tools and a range of analyses to reduce uncertainties and improve projections of specific regional and local impacts
Comprehensive study of candidates for atmospheric intervention to enable rigorous evaluation and comparison for safety
Independent scientific assessment mechanisms separate from organizations, whether commercial or nonprofit, advocating for specific approaches
Private Acceleration of Specific Interventions is Not Objective
Private organizations promoting the acceleration of specific approaches to intervention face problematic incentives.
While private investment drives economic growth, fosters innovation and can provide operational efficiencies, private organizations advocating for particular atmospheric interventions, even where well intended, face structural pressures that conflict with the public interest in objective, comprehensive evaluation of safety.
For companies, these pressures are explicit. Commercial firms face fiduciary duties to investors and pressures to:
Advance their particular proprietary approach
Move quickly toward deployment to generate returns
Protect intellectual property and market position
Drive to scale technology and reduce costs, when the societal economics are not in direct cost, but in effectiveness and safety
We have spoken with the founders of Stardust, who are talented engineers with an expressed goal to help society. Yet they face the challenge of meeting growth targets along the aggressive timelines of a venture-backed company in a field where science, regulation and public trust are not established, but highly imperative. They cannot be disinterested regarding alternatives to their approach.
These challenges are compounded by the company’s current lack of transparency and highly concentrated set of stakeholders. For example, they have yet to publish scientific studies on the approach they propose for the world to adopt in just a few years. Just a handful of investors and company insiders have access to information on their solution, which in reality requires extensive, transparent and thorough study and review.
Private nonprofit organizations advocating for the acceleration of specific interventions face different but related pressures to advance the approaches they have championed and been funded to pursue.
The Timeline Matters
Claims that any specific technology will or should be 'ready to deploy' by the end of this decade outpace our current knowledge. Rushing toward the build out of scaled capabilities for any specific approach based on the current state of information risks:
Lock-in investment in inferior or unsafe solutions
Failure to pursue rapid innovation to drive better information and safer approaches
Premature and inadequately measured large-scale trials with environmental risks
Backlash that impedes societally valuable research
Geopolitical tensions over increased potential for unilateral actions
Ensuring a Safe Atmosphere Requires Fast Work
From our inception, SilverLining has worked with scientific, technical and governance experts, and taken input from a wide array of stakeholders and communities, to develop a roadmap for the research required to improve monitoring and projection of the future atmosphere and the impacts of proposed interventions. This experience has deepened our conviction: society has work to do to position ourselves for safety in a world of emerging interventions in the atmosphere.
Independent scientific assessment based on strong information is essential — assessment conducted by institutions free from the organizational pressures that affect both commercial ventures and nonprofits advocating for particular interventions. We need public institutions with adequate resources to expand atmospheric observations, improve predictive capabilities, rigorously study a portfolio of potential approaches and develop necessary protections.
We cannot prevent the development of interventions by everyone, everywhere in the world. The emergence of well-funded organizations marketing or advocating for rapid global atmospheric intervention makes public investment in science and information more urgent than ever. We need to work hard, and quickly, to ensure the safety and security of our shared atmosphere.
About SilverLining
SilverLining is a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring that society has the information and capabilities needed to ensure a safe and secure atmosphere. We support open research, science-based policy and broad stakeholder engagement to advance understanding and protection of the atmosphere in a world with emerging interventions in weather and climate. Our work focuses on advancing rigorous, independent science and evidence-based decision-making to promote public safety, economic prosperity and national security.
SilverLining currently leads critical efforts to sustain stratospheric observations. For information on how to support these efforts, please contact development@silverlining.ngo.
Read more about possibilities for regulating aerosol particles in the stratosphere in SilverLining’s most recent edition of Paper Cuts.
For more information, visit www.silverlining.ngo.