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[We originally sent the following to our mailing list subscribers 5/31/25. Added to website 6/5/25.]
Revenue: $9,414
Burn: $40,135
Cash: $969,009
Runway: ~20 months
A lot of words this month; arguably, too many.
We responded to the EPA, guided by 2 amazing lawyers who used to work there. Our favorite line: "Let's ensure American energy dominance as well as a safe and healthy environment by Making Earth Cool Again." Here's our full response. What happens next? Considering the EPA's own press release called Make Sunsets "unregulated" (whoops), we're fairly confident they don't have some obscure law up their sleeve that we're allegedly violating. Happy to talk anytime the Environmental Protection Agency would like, but we won't wait with baited breath. We predict they'll stay out of our way, and so far so good: we launched 5 balloons with a total of 5,895 Cooling Credits to the stratosphere this week, returning 2 of 3 payloads to target. Quite a view from 30km up:
Sales were slightly up from last month, though we’re still below our all-time high. We now have a fiscal sponsor; if being able to write off your Cooling Credits increases how many you can buy, please get started here.
Other major talking: we flew to South Africa and attended the Degrees Global Forum, the largest gathering of solar geoengineering folks yet. We had 2 posters: presenting our return-to-home service and analyzing who buys Cooling Credits. We included some quotes customers wanted to share with the scientific community in attendance:
At Degrees, we finally figured out why so many scientists want to talk about doing something rather than take action! First and foremost: many get paid to talk, not act. There's millions of dollars, dozens of tenured positions, and at least 5 nonprofits with far more funding than this humble startup being paid to study increasingly obscure "someday maybes" of solar geoengineering. Cooling the world .5C with sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere will save millions of lives, prevent extinctions, and reduce likelihoods of most climate tipping points. Do we really need another study on the potential impact to maize yield in Ecuador? You know what else hurts maize yields? Record-breaking temperatures, continent-sweeping fires, and longest-recorded droughts.
Even more obnoxiously: many scientists do not actually care about climate science enough to honestly confront reality. ~half of the attendees completed a survey at this conference, and about the same number did 8 years ago (CEC 17). Many live in a fantasy land:
(There is 25ppm more CO2 in the air than there was in 2017, global warming is already at 1.5C, and tropospheric aerosols (which will drop as we burn fewer dinosaurs) are masking something like .5-1C of additional warming. But you probably already knew most of this... because you're not being paid to stick your head in the sand:|)
If you are in the half of respondents who believe we'll hit net-zero globally by 2100, then of course solar geoengineering seems crazy:
If you are so uneducated as to share our pesky penchant for confronting reality, Vaclav Smil honestly confronts the enormity of the challenge that is any meaningful reduction in carbon emissions. Another attendee pointed out that the latter graph ignores the marine cloud brightening already occurring (and us!).
There were many good, smart, honest people in attendance, too. Some even gave us hope for the future, like our brave young friends at Operaatio Arktis.
Enough ranting... for now;)
This month, we will:
-Achieve $14k in sales
-Complete our first paid return-to-home flight
-Sign a client for localized cooling
With Less Hot Air & More Cooling,
Andrew & Luke