The first time I picked up a camera to begin making Plan C for Civilization was in 2010. Climate change was (finally) a part of the conversation. Four years earlier An Inconvenient Truth inspired thousands of volunteers to take action and millions more to take notice. In 2009 Congress passed a cap-and-trade bill to regulate carbon emissions. It died in the Senate, but, still. Today, in 2025, fifteen years later, I’m making my own small cinematic contribution to this ongoing conversation with the premiere of my film, Plan C for Civilization, at DOCNYC in November.
A lot can happen in fifteen years.
In that time profound changes have swept our planet and our politics. The Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 generated a global consensus to slow rising temperatures. The U.S. has abandoned and returned to and abandoned it again since. Climate change is a household term, though with different meanings in red and blue contexts. In most of the world solar power has become a cheaper source of energy than fossil fuels, but decarbonizing the global economy hasn’t happened quickly enough. By 2023 the earth’s average temperature had risen 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, much earlier than projected. And despite the near universal benefits of clean energy and a bottomless and accelerating demand for power, the United States government has surrendered energy innovation and climate leadership to other, more ambitious nations. But if the swings of history are any guide, this isn’t the end of the story.
Back in 2010 I traveled to the rocky coast of Pacific Grove, California to a gathering with the somewhat mysterious title of “the Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies”. But these “technologies” weren’t the ordinary ones designed to reduce emissions. Instead, the way I understood it they were more of the “break glass in case of emergency” variety in case we didn’t reduce our emissions quickly enough. Strange-looking ships funneling plumes of aerosol particles into clouds to make them brighter. Space mirrors surrounding the earth. Artificial plankton blooms absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It was a bit like a science fiction meet-up where the “fiction” was closer to “science” than one might expect. I listened as scientists, policy analysts, and humanitarian workers debated the risks and potential and how and whether to move research forward. The air felt thick with hubris and techno optimism. After all, we weren’t far from Silicon Valley. But everyone I met there was smart bordering on brilliant, thoughtful, serious, and generally cautious by nature. And there was one scientist in particular that seemed to have an aura of intrigue around him, whom everyone seemed to want to hear from. His name was David Keith.
In 2010 our atmosphere was composed of 390 parts per million of CO2, and emissions were steadily rising. But in many ways, hope was ascendant. An Inconvenient Truth had won the Academy Award and thrust Al Gore and climate change into the world’s spotlight. Suddenly, ordinary people were talking about the connection between CO2, fossil fuels and life on earth. Sanity was “in”. For the moment. Politicians - even the president - were pushing an ambitious climate agenda that included a tax on carbon emissions intended to accelerate the energy transition. The race to decarbonize finally seemed like it might happen fast enough to head off some of the more dire warnings of runaway planetary heating.
In the same year that An Inconvenient Truth created its cultural tsunami, a different ripple was spreading throughout the climate ecosystem. Nobel Prize winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen had quietly published an article in the prestigious journal Climatic Change. His reach was tiny compared to Gore’s, but he knew precisely who he was speaking to.
In the 1970s Crutzen was one of the scientists who identified that our emissions of nitrogen oxides and CFCs were eating away at the ozone in the atmosphere that protects all life on earth. Their research led to a global ban of CFCs, eventually a rebound of the ozone layer and in a broad sense, a greater understanding of humanity’s role in shaping the Earth’s systems. It was one of science’s greatest achievements.
But in his paper Crutzen suggested that we were far off-track from reaching a safe emissions trajectory. This was concerning coming from a scientist of his stature, but it’s not what made this paper unique. What was far more significant was in the title itself; “Albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulfur injection: A contribution to solve a policy dilemma”. The term “albedo enhancement” is likely unfamiliar to most, but for those who read Climatic Change it was clear what he was referring to; making the planet brighter. Crutzen, a preeminent scientist, savior of the ozone layer and Nobel Prize winner, was suggesting that it might be time to research the idea of injecting sulfur dioxide - a chemical known to degrade ozone - into the stratosphere to make the planet brighter, and cooler. He was sending a message to the researchers, policy makers and others who had hesitated to enter the field of solar geoengineering research for fear of being outcast, denied promotion, accused of being handmaids for the fossil fuel industry, or dismissed as cranks. In writing this paper he was announcing that it was ok to do this research, and that we should do the research. Crutzen had put his own legacy on the line to give cover to those who felt compelled to conduct research of their own in this controversial field. It was 2006, the year of An Inconvenient Truth, but he could see where we were headed and what knowledge might be needed when we got there.
The idea of reflecting sunlight back into space wasn’t new though. It was first described to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 in a report of the presidential Science Advisory Committee titled Restoring the Quality of Our Environment. At the time there was no such thing as “alternative” energy to run our economy; coal, oil and gas were it. So if, as the report suggested, carbon dioxide warmed the atmosphere (as we have known since the turn of the 20th century) and we could not wean ourselves quickly from fossil fuels, then perhaps there was an alternative. If we couldn’t reduce the warming from greenhouse gases, what if we could reflect sunlight away from the earth instead? This was the albedo enhancement that Crutzen was referencing. It has become known as solar geoengineering, and more recently, sunlight reflection.
But this radical notion was only mentioned on 1 page of the 1965 Presidential report, and it remained an obscure footnote for decades. By the time of the first Earth Day in 1970 the environmental movement was in full swing. Our attention was focused on cleaning up the obvious mess we had made in our waterways, on land and in the air. Organizers, activists and ordinary citizens focused on addressing and reducing what was at the root of the problem - the pollution that came from the industry and energy sources that powered our increasingly modern world. We believed we still had time to reduce those emissions and so the idea of putting more pollution into the environment in the form of sulfur dioxide just to offset the pollution we were already trying to eliminate…was understandably going nowhere.
For the next 40 years scientists, activists, environmentalists, policy makers, and concerned citizens forgot about solar geoengineering, if they ever knew it existed at all. They were fighting the full force and bottomless pockets of the fossil fuel industry’s sophisticated disinformation campaign about the consequences of their products. And it also happened to be true that the technologies needed to move away from fossil fuels would take time and money to develop, and if the public were led to believe there could be a “quick fix” for planetary heating that didn’t require a lifestyle change, it could undercut the urgency that was needed to decarbonize fast. And beyond that, the risks and consequences of dimming the planet were terrifying. What might happen to the weather and precipitation patterns? To plants and animals? To the ozone layer? Did we really think we were capable of being planetary stewards? Few scientists would put their reputation on the line to research or even to discuss it. Until Crutzen weighed in.
Crutzen’s paper cracked open the door to research - slightly. But solar geoengineering was and still is seen by many as either a naive techno-optimist fantasy, a sinister ploy to buy more time for the fossil fuel industry, or simply an ungovernable, irresponsible and dangerous false solution. And criticism doesn’t just come from the usual places. Legions of chemtrail conspiracists have grown to surround and often profit from disinformation about individual researchers, the government’s role in solar geoengineering and whether climate change even exists. And while NOAA and NASA did begin formal solar geoengineering research programs in the early 2020s, they were canceled this year. Sixty years after the report was delivered to President Johnson solar geoengineering research continues to languish in a dark corner of the scientific universe. At least in the United States.
Meanwhile, the concerns that prompted scientists to consider reflecting the sun have only grown more urgent. Warming was primarily still a fear 20 years ago. Today, the planet has already heated by more than 1.5°C and is poised to cross the 2°C threshold by mid-century. Likely much sooner. Carbon emissions seem poised to plateau but we’re still pumping 35+ billion tons of CO2 a year into the atmosphere that will remain there for centuries. And then there are the 2 1/2 trillion tons of CO2 that we’ve already deposited there, a hundred-year heat blanket that we’ll have to figure out how to suck down with as-yet unscaled technology. Some of those early-stage technologies also got a research boost from the federal government over the past few years, only to be abruptly canceled in 2025. Despite these setbacks we will eventually drive down emissions because whether for our own survival or simply to compete in the world’s economy we have no choice. We will also find ways to manage the carbon in our atmosphere, at least to some extent. Physics will trump disinformation, but what will happen in the meantime?
But is there anything we can we do to preserve all that will be lost between now and then? This is the question at the core of Plan C for Civilization. Cutting emissions alone will not return the earth to a previous state or prevent further warming. We can draw down the emissions in the atmosphere, but it will take many lifetimes. Reflecting the sun to cool the planet is not the solution. It’s not even a “good” idea. It won’t stop emissions from building up in the atmosphere and it won’t stop the oceans from acidifying. It will have consequences in the environment that we can anticipate and others that we won’t. International governance structures are clearly not up to the task. And yet there is no other way we know of to cool the planet on a human time scale.
So now what? This is the question that I’ve been trying to figure out for the past 15 years. I was asking it in Asilomar when I first met David Keith and as I traveled with him around the world as he advocated powerfully and passionately for research, Johnny Appleseed of a disruptive, risky but also hopeful idea. I watched his attempt to launch the first stratospheric solar geoengineering experiment as a researcher at Harvard and now in his role leading the University of Chicago’s Climate Systems Engineering Initiative. I’m deeply impressed by his intelligence and curiosity, intrigued by his ambitions and at the same time, I question some of his assumptions.
I’ve spoken to hundreds of experts and ordinary citizens about their perspectives as well. From those who fundamentally oppose this field of research and the worldview that comes with it to others who are wary but cautiously curious. Because ultimately this story is not about what David Keith thinks, and it is not about what I think. We may both know more than the average person about climate change and solar geoengineering, but the questions we face and the decisions that need to be made are not for either one of us to decide.
We don’t know what the precise sequence of actions should be to pull back from the brink but if we go about business as usual, comfortable in denial of one form or another, we’re cooked. Because at this moment we’re heating the planet for centuries to come. And as much as we must keep the overwhelming focus of our efforts on deep and rapid decarbonization, we can no longer stop there. We failed to take the steps needed to steer ourselves away from this new era of complexity and risk, and the future will look different than the past but we still have options, opportunities and choices to make. Each one of us. What’s going to be our Plan C?
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