Conversations with the researchers, founders, and strategists working on the most important climate question nobody's talking about: what do we do when emissions cuts and carbon removal can't work fast enough? <br/><br/><a href="https://www.inevitableandobvious.com?utm_medium=podcast">www.inevitableandobvious.com</a>
Inevitable & Obvious
Claim This Podcastby Paul Gambill
6 episodes
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Podcast Overview
Conversations with the researchers, founders, and strategists working on the most important climate question nobody's talking about: what do we do when emissions cuts and carbon removal can't work fast enough? <br/><br/><a href="https://www.inevitableandobvious.com?utm_medium=podcast">www.inevitableandobvious.com</a>
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Publishing Since
3/17/2026
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Recent Episodes
June 16, 2026
A Sunshade For Earth, And Who Controls It — Ross Centers and Morgan Goodwin
<p>A planetary sunshade is one of those ideas that gets filed under science fiction and left there. A constellation of thin reflectors, parked at the gravitational balance point between the Earth and the Sun, shading the planet by a percent or so and buying us time on warming. The reason to take it seriously now is that the industrial base required to build one is the same base that SpaceX, NASA, and a handful of startups are already racing to stand up for entirely commercial reasons. Ross Centers and Morgan Goodwin of the Planetary Sunshade Institute have been working on this since before it was a field, and in this conversation we trace the whole path: from why even clean energy eventually hits a planetary limit, to how you’d manufacture forty-kilometer solar sails out of moon dust, to who would actually be in charge of the global thermostat once it exists.</p><p>Guest introduction</p><p>Ross Centers founded what became the Planetary Sunshade Institute in 2018 and is the founder and CEO of Ethos, where he’s developed electrochemical metallurgy techniques on simulated lunar regolith. Morgan Goodwin is PSI’s executive director and has spent twenty years working in climate. The Institute recently convened the first planetary sunshade workshop in Nottingham, drawing more than eighty researchers, and is funded in part by the UK’s ARIA to baseline sunshade architectures. Learn more at <a target="_blank" href="https://planetarysunshade.org/">planetarysunshade.org</a>.</p><p>Key topics with timestamps (also use as YouTube chapter markers)</p><p>* <strong>04:37 — A field comes into being.</strong> How a single paper from the 1980s and a workshop of eighty-plus people in Nottingham turned the sunshade from an idea into a research field.</p><p>* <strong>07:52 — Welcome to climate.</strong> Morgan on what it’s like to enter climate work from the space world, and why the people closest to you often won’t engage.</p><p>* <strong>22:13 — What a Dyson Swarm actually is.</strong> Solar-powered data centers orbiting the Sun, and the Kardashev-scale logic that points there.</p><p>* <strong>27:09 — The planetary heat limit.</strong> Why even a fully renewable civilization eventually warms the planet through waste heat alone.</p><p>* <strong>28:59 — SpaceX as a Dyson Swarm company.</strong> Ross’s read on what the largest IPO in history is actually for.</p><p>* <strong>34:58 — Mining the Moon.</strong> Morgan’s Hoover Dam analogy and the economics of building from lunar material.</p><p>* <strong>47:06 — The Heliogyro.</strong> A forty-kilometer spinning solar sail made almost entirely from aluminum, walked through step by step.</p><p>* <strong>57:41 — Who governs the climate.</strong> Why only governments can deploy SRM, and what “the climate government” means.</p><p>* <strong>1:01:29 — Sunshade and SAI as complementary backups.</strong> Why having two cooling technologies beats having one.</p><p>* <strong>1:16:01 — Does a sunshade ever come down.</strong> The generational-memory question, and whether planetary management becomes permanent.</p><p>Inevitable & Obvious is where I work through the technologies and the politics of cooling the planet, with the people actually building the field. If conversations like this one are useful to you, subscribing for free at <a target="_blank" href="https://www.inevitableandobvious.com/">inevitableandobvious.com</a> gets you every episode plus the writing that goes deeper than the audio.</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Inevitable & Obvious at <a href="https://www.inevitableandobvious.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.inevitableandobvious.com/subscribe</a>
May 20, 2026
Plan C for Civilization — Ben Kalina
<p><strong>SRM Is Coming Faster Than You Think — Ben Kalina on 15 Years Filming Climate’s Most Controversial Idea</strong></p><p>Sunlight reflection has spent decades as an idea scientists batted around at academic conferences. Now venture-backed companies are racing to build deployment systems, state legislatures are passing bans on weather modification research, and the public still mostly thinks the contrails overhead are a government plot. Ben Kalina has been pointing a camera at this entire evolution for fifteen years. Plan C for Civilization, his documentary on the field’s emergence as serious research, is the closest thing we have to a real historical record of how this is unfolding. We talked about what changed Ben’s mind about the timeline, why average audiences leave his film more curious not less, the strange dynamics of venture capital entering a space that runs on trust, and what of the Stardust Solutions optics problem can and cannot be engineered away.</p><p>Ben Kalina is a documentary filmmaker and a professor at Drexel University. His new film Plan C for Civilization follows the emergence of solar geoengineering research, centered on David Keith, the SCoPEx experiment at Harvard, and the late entrance of Make Sunsets. The film is currently in festival distribution and screening tour. More at <a target="_blank" href="https://plancforcivilization.com">plancforcivilization.com</a>.</p><p>Key topics with timestamps</p><p>* <strong>(02:00) The fifteen-year project</strong> — How a film begun in 2009 ended up documenting a field that took most of that time to become real</p><p>* <strong>(05:30) David Keith, Ken Caldeira, and the 1998 Aspen meeting</strong> — The origin moment that drew two researchers in by trying to prove the idea ridiculous</p><p>* <strong>(07:40) Why SCoPEx mattered symbolically</strong> — A small experiment that did the work of declaring solar geoengineering research a legitimate field</p><p>* <strong>(09:20) The Make Sunsets entrance</strong> — Move-fast culture meets a field that desperately needs trust</p><p>* <strong>(13:30) The choice to go to Sweden</strong> — What the headline missed about the actual procedural reality</p><p>* <strong>(16:30) Time and the climate conversation</strong> — Why the carbon curve has changed how Ben thinks about decisions</p><p>* <strong>(19:50) From “scare them straight” to “help them grapple”</strong> — How a fifteen-year project changed its own purpose</p><p>* <strong>(23:00) What the focus groups show</strong> — Why average viewers come away wanting more research, not less</p><p>* <strong>(28:30) The fall tour</strong> — Taking the film to states with proposed weather modification bans</p><p>* <strong>(36:00) Storytelling and fiction</strong> — Why direct air capture, ocean iron fertilization, and SAI all need better cultural artifacts</p><p>* <strong>(46:30) Slow science versus move fast</strong> — The dichotomy the field is currently navigating</p><p>* <strong>(54:30) Stardust and the trust problem</strong> — Why isotopic markers cannot do all the work</p><p>* <strong>(58:00) Who is actually in this field</strong> — Fifteen years with the researchers</p><p>Notable quotes</p><p>“This stuff is coming at us, solar geo, much, much faster than most people realize. There’s probably some major decisions that are going to start getting made in the next few years. And the public has no clue. And if they do, they think they’re talking about chemtrails.” — Ben Kalina</p><p>“When you start talking about making the planet more reflective, that’s a ‘could possibly go wrong’ thought. That’s a classic ‘why the hell would we do that.’” — Ben Kalina</p><p>“We could have the science down to a T with solar geoengineering. You could have isotopic markers on the particles you’re putting up there, and there’s still going to be a big piece of this that is just trust.” — Ben Kalina</p><p>“Nobody in this field is a climate denier. They all come to this kind of as a career last resort, after having sort of figured out that there’s nothing else where they can contribute.” — Ben Kalina</p><p>“Stardust Solutions, in this moment, being an Israeli company of former nuclear scientists funded by Silicon Valley tech billionaires whose stated goal is to change the planet’s temperature, and accidentally, by the way, name themselves after the empire’s plan to build the Death Star.” — Ben Kalina</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Inevitable & Obvious at <a href="https://www.inevitableandobvious.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.inevitableandobvious.com/subscribe</a>
April 29, 2026
Iceland Declared AMOC Collapse a Threat — Páll Gunnarsson, Founder of Reykjavík Institute
<p>Iceland is the first country to formally declare a potential AMOC collapse a national security threat. Páll Gunnarsson, founder of the Reykjavík Institute, has been close to the political process that produced that declaration. He explains why a country of 400,000 people moved faster than larger Atlantic-rim nations, what made the declaration possible, and why he believes intervention capability research has to advance in parallel with climate science rather than after it. We also dig into his case against the standard moral hazard argument (the idea that climate interventions undermine decarbonization ambition) which he reframes as enforced vulnerability, the position of telling the most vulnerable people in the world to remain vulnerable so that wealthier societies feel pressure to act. And we talk about what comes next: a September pledging event in the EU around the OceanEye initiative, an emerging coalition-of-the-willing approach to research governance, and what happened the first time Reykjavík civil society sat down to discuss climate interventions in public.</p><p>Subscribe for free and get more detailed show notes at <a target="_blank" href="https://www.inevitableandobvious.com/">inevitableandobvious.com</a></p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Inevitable & Obvious at <a href="https://www.inevitableandobvious.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.inevitableandobvious.com/subscribe</a>
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