GoKawiilHe says he and his team have completed the initial designs and are now doing more detailed engineering and cost analyses. They intend to publish the findings when the effort is complete.
“We’d love to build a prototype of such an airplane and feel we could do so relatively quickly,” Langford says. “But that all depends on what David’s group wants to do.”
The program
David Keith’s group, CSEi, is still coming together. The University of Chicago unveiled the research initiative in 2024 and has committed to hiring 10 additional faculty members to advance scientific understanding of various forms of geoengineering and explore the thorny questions related to policy, ethics, and governance. It had hired two of them as of press time.
The university saw an opportunity to step up as a leader in a field that wasn’t getting adequate academic attention despite its potential to address the dangers of climate change, says Michael Greenstone, a climate economist and the founding director of the university’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth.
“Universities, as a whole, were committing academic malpractice by not investigating the technical, the social, the political, and the even kind of humanist elements of geoengineering,” Greenstone says. He helped recruit Keith to lead the initiative.
Keith, 62, previously spent nearly 13 years as a professor of applied physics and public policy at Harvard, where he led the establishment of the university’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program. More famously, he strove to carry out what could have been the first solar geoengineering experiment to release material in the stratosphere, known as SCoPEx. But after years of work and multiple delays, the research team finally scrapped the project in early 2024, following mounting criticism from environmental and Indigenous groups and the eventual intervention of the Swedish government.
Keith has long argued that researchers should seriously study geoengineering because it might substantially reduce the dangers of climate change, alleviating death, destruction, and suffering on massive scales.
He says that the overarching goal of the Chicago initiative is to expand the field by bringing together “enough independent professors and other research professionals” to “build a community around climate engineering as a broad field of inquiry.”
“Solar geoengineering certainly has complex and potentially dangerous political consequences, but so do a host of other emerging ideas and technologies.” David Keith, geoengineering researcher
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