A de facto moratorium on solar geoengineering will stay in place after heated talks at the United Nations Environment Assembly ended in a stalemate. The debate is over whether to let people launch particles into the sky that would reflect sunlight back into space, ostensibly cooling down the planet. It’s a hotly contested tactic for tackling climate change. Geoengineering does nothing to stop what’s actually causing the problem: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.
But if a more capable group or government decided to throw caution to the wind and try something similar on a larger scale, it could have consequences for the whole planet. There’s already a de facto global moratorium on large-scale geoengineering that was agreed on during a 2010 United Nations biodiversity conference. But it’s outdated and the language is vague. It doesn’t apply to small-scale experiments and might be limited to solar geoengineering efforts deemed harmful to biodiversity.