The Danger of Performed Governance in SRM

Last week, Stardust Solutions — the most well-resourced private company developing solar radiation modification (SRM) technology — publicly released a set of self-authored "Guiding Principles" and a proposed safety and controllability requirements framework for sunlight reflection systems. This follows years of operating largely in stealth: conducting outdoor activity without public consultation, reportedly seeking to patent its proprietary particle technology, and disclosing very little about the substance of its research. The company has now raised $75 million in venture capital.

The documents are well-produced and use the “right” language — referencing transparency, independent validation, scientific integrity, and international cooperation. For anyone unfamiliar with the SRM governance landscape, they may look like governance.

They are not.

These are principles written by the entity they are meant to govern. There is no independent verification mechanism. There is no community engagement process behind them. There is no public comment or participatory input. And the actual research — including the composition of Stardust's proprietary particle, the results of its testing, and the details of their outdoor activity — remains undisclosed. Stardust has published principles about transparency while keeping its core technology secret. And they began developing and testing the technology well before publicly releasing these principles, meaning the principles were not used to guide the research but introduced retroactively after it was already underway. 

Any actor — public or private — benefits from independent oversight. But for-profit companies developing proprietary SRM technology face a specific structural problem: they have a financial incentive to find that their technology should be deployed, they hold intellectual property they cannot fully disclose, and they lack the democratic accountability structures that governments and public institutions are subject to. These conflicts of interest make corporate self-governance fundamentally inadequate to the task of earning public trust — regardless of how well-intentioned the effort.

Self-authored, ad-hoc principles, without independent verification, participatory input, or institutional accountability, do not meet the standard this field demands. In a field as politically sensitive as solar geoengineering, governance that is not credible does not merely fail to build trust — it can actively undermine the conditions under which trust could be built at all. The short history of SRM research already demonstrates that research conducted without credible governance risks triggering the very backlash that forecloses the possibility of responsible research going forward.

The danger of self-authored governance is not that it does nothing — it's that it does just enough to look like something. In the absence of credible, independent governance infrastructure, self-governance by well-resourced actors becomes the de facto benchmark. The conversation shifts from "what should governance look like and who should build it?" to "is this company meeting its own stated standards?" That shift forecloses the very space that genuine deliberation requires.

DSG's work has always been about making and defending the space for genuine deliberation on SRM — against actors who would foreclose it by moving too fast, and against actors who would foreclose it by preventing the informed inquiry that meaningful choice requires. Stardust's governance release demonstrates a third threat: the simulation of governance as a substitute for the real thing. When an actor races ahead while producing polished governance documents, the public may reasonably conclude that the governance problem has been addressed — but it hasn't. Principles without independent verification, engagement without affected communities, transparency without disclosure — these create a legitimacy mirage that makes genuine governance infrastructure look redundant.

The record from other domains is clear. In nuclear energy, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence, self-governance by the most resourced actors — no matter how sophisticated — has consistently failed to produce durable public trust. The governance that holds is built through inclusive, participatory processes that those being governed do not control. SRM will not be an exception.

This is why DSG, together with the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC),  and a growing coalition, is building the Solar Geoengineering Research Governance Platform: independent, voluntary co-developed governance infrastructure that makes responsible research easier to conduct, easier to trust, and harder to misrepresent. It is also why we are moving urgently. Every day that credible governance infrastructure does not exist is a day that actors with the most resources and the fewest accountability constraints define what "responsible" means by default.

The space for genuine deliberation on SRM is narrowing. Defending it requires not just opposing reckless action, but building the credible governance institutions that make responsible action possible. That work is underway — and developments like last week's underscore why it cannot wait.