The World’s First Major Geoengineering Startup Unveils its Technology

Current conditions: Winds topping 60 miles per hour are howling through the mountains in Montana and the Dakotas • An early heatwave in the Central United States is driving temperatures in Texas and Oklahoma as high as 100 degrees Fahrenheit • Though it’s still early in the season, the Arctic is on track to experience its highest number of wildfire ignitions in 3,000 years.

THE TOP FIVE

1. A secretive geoengineering startup unveils its technology

Stardust Solutions, the startup led by former Israeli government physicians that’s promising technology that can reflect sunlight back into space and artificially cool the planet, has released information on the proprietary particle it wants to spray in the atmosphere. On Thursday, the company laid out blueprints for two separate particles, both nearly spherical and half a micron in size. The materials are made from natural compounds frequently used in toothpaste and food additives. The first-generation technology is amorphous silica, which the company called “fully bio-safe, manufacturable at scale today, and at a very advanced stage of validation.” The second-generation formulation adds a calcium carbonate core inside the silica shell. “The reason is straightforward: At high doses, any particle that absorbs a meaningful amount of the Earth’s outgoing infrared radiation will heat the stratosphere, which is a side effect you want to avoid,” the company said. “Gen 2 is as reflective to the incoming sunlight (visible light), but is more transparent to the outgoing infrared radiation, so it can be deployed at higher doses without that heating effect.”

Last month, Stardust put out the first ethical guidelines to which it plans to hold itself. Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer broke the news in October that the company was emerging from stealth with $60 million in funding to support its commercialization. “The idea that certain interventions could reduce the chance of really bad climate outcomes, like collapse of Antarctic ice sheets, isn’t new. The Stardust patents show that these ideas are now moving from the realm of the theoretical to the realm of the possible,” Hannah Safford, a climate expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said in a statement Thursday. “It’s time to take climate intervention strategies more seriously, and rigorously evaluate the risks of these strategies against the risks of failing to intervene.”

2. Cleveland blocks a $1.6 billion data center

Cleveland, Ohio’s second-largest city, has rejected a permit application for a $1.6 data center on a 35-acre lot in the Slavic Village neighborhood. The city, the Cleveland Signal reported, “offered no details about why it was rejecting it.” In a statement, Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb said he held “serious concerns about hyperscale, standalone data centers being placed in residential neighborhoods.” The Democrat said he was echoing voters’ concerns about the computer farms.

Roughly 25 data centers were canceled in the first quarter of this year due to mounting local opposition, Rob reported in an exclusive earlier this month. Polling from Heatmap Pro, meanwhile, shows that public support for data centers has nosedived from even its paltry position last fall.

3. Cuba just ran out of fuel

A man cooks with firewood during a blackout in Havana this week.Yamil LAGE / AFP via Getty Images

The Cuban government announced that it has run out of diesel and fuel oil as the Caribbean nation enters its fifth month without a large shipment of crude oil. “We have absolutely no fuel [oil] and absolutely no diesel,” Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said Wednesday in remarks carried on state-run broadcasters as protests gathered in Havana. “We have no reserves.” On Thursday, the Financial Times reported, Cuba’s national grid operator UNE said that much of the island’s eastern provinces were still without power after the latest blackouts. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January threatening tariffs on any country shipping fuel to Cuba. “The only thing we have is gas from our own wells, whose production has increased, and domestic crude oil, whose production is also rising,” de la O Levy said. “The situation is very tense.” In the country’s state-controlled newspaper Gramna, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel accused the U.S. of implementing a “genocidal energy blockade.” Still, he said, the U.S. has “had to acknowledge that, despite the brutal measures of economic and energy strangulation decreed by the U.S., Cuba remains standing; it is not a failed state.” As a result, the communist leader continued, Washington is “thereby admitting that the crisis gripping us is the result of the severe economic war they are waging against us and the energy persecution.”

Under the leftist regime of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela once served as Cuba’s main supplier of oil. Mexico’s left-wing President Claudia Sheinbaum has faced heavy U.S. pressure against sending shipments to the island. Just one large oil tanker, the Russian-flagged Anatoly Kolodkin, has brought crude oil to Cuba since December, The Guardian reported. “We are back in the stone age,” independent journalist Yoani Sanchez said in a broadcast Thursday, according to The Wall Street Journal.

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4. Bipartisan bill would prevent future presidents from blocking LNG approvals

Texas Republican John Cornyn and Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman introduced a Senate bill Thursday to block future presidential administrations from halting approvals of new liquified natural gas projects. Politico described the LNG Export Security Act as “a bipartisan rebuke of former President Joe Biden’s move in 2024 to free new export permits for natural gas” while the economic and environmental effects of selling more fuel overseas were being studied. A federal judge later halted the pause, but the pause nevertheless enraged Republicans, who later moved to crush the solar and wind sectors.

5. Clean energy financing startup Crux nets $500 million

The clean energy project finance startup Crux has received a $500 million debt facility from Nuveen Energy Infrastructure Credit as part of the company’s expansion. While New York-based Crux was initially built to facilitate the transfer of lucrative green tax credits, the financing from insurer TIAA’s investment manager will “help expand its role as a general partner for clean energy and manufacturing investments,” Bloomberg reported.

In the midst of congressional negotiations last year in the fate of the clean energy tax credits, Crux CEO Alfred Johnson described the company’s expansive vision to Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. “All parts of the capital stack are opaque, illiquid, bespoke and manual. These are private transactions that require a ton of documentation, models, advisory lawyers. But it doesn't have to be as bad as it is.”

THE KICKER

Once stagnant, the nuclear industry in North America is seeing a real revival. The region now has 90 projects under development across the continent, with eight already breaking ground, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute’s latest state of the industry report.