The SRM Conversation Is Growing: Nearly 100 Scientists, Advocates, and Skeptics Showed Up to Claim Their Seat

By Quentin Scott, Federal Policy Director, Chesapeake Climate Action Network

Not long ago, conversations about solar reflective methods (SRM) were dominated by one question: How do we stop it? At this year’s Climate Week NYC, we heard a different one: How do we make sure research into this emerging climate technology is done responsibly? 

Nearly 100 scientists, policymakers, advocates, students, skeptics, and supporters came together for Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN)’s SRM Research Hub Crawl to grapple with what responsible research into and governance of SRM could look like. The concerns haven’t disappeared, and they shouldn’t. But as climate impacts grow harder to ignore, people are increasingly willing to move beyond debating whether SRM should exist and start asking how we can responsibly explore its potential to help protect our planet.

That’s what happened on Wednesday, September 23, when CCAN hosted our SRM Research Hub Crawl: Building a Community for Responsible Research and Governance. People across sectors showed up to discuss responsible research into SRM techniques. Such an event would have been hard to imagine in years past, but it showed us how the public is hungry for oversight over responsible research into SRM as climate change becomes harder to ignore.

Why This Conversation Can’t Wait

Let me be clear about where CCAN stands: solar reflective methods are not a substitute for rapidly cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Full stop. We’re still fighting for clean energy alternatives, and against every rollback of climate progress.

Climate change is already forcing hard choices on communities, but policy isn’t keeping pace. Meanwhile, SRM research is growing—whether or not we’re comfortable with it. That doesn’t mean deployment is inevitable, and it certainly doesn’t mean it’s desirable. It means the public deserves a transparent, inclusive conversation about what research is happening, what we still don’t know, and what safeguards would be required if this technology ever were to be deployed.

If that conversation doesn’t happen, the public is left in the dark. With climate change making the road ahead even harder to see, the public needs to move back into the driver’s seat.

Not Your Typical Convening

Most SRM discussions happen in technical and academic settings, with the usual insiders. We wanted to open up the conversation, so we brought it to the bar with our first-ever “Hub Crawl.”

Participants moved between interactive hubs hosted by partner organizations. One hub dug into the science of SRM. Another explored emerging governance frameworks. Others tackled policy debates and what meaningful public engagement should look like. People with very different views on SRM—from supporters to skeptics—engaged directly with the research and the governance challenges around it.

Ben Kalina, director and producer of the Plan C For Civilization documentary, said the SRM field has always been “dangerously shrouded in mystery,” dominated by a small number of researchers and personalities. He called the event fun:“Standing on the roof, talking about the earth’s reflectivity, it was like a sci-fi mini-convention sharing what we’ve learned—and what we don’t know—with a curious and questioning Climate Week community,” he said.

I’ll take it. Serious doesn’t have to mean stuffy.

Different Perspectives, Shared Questions

This year’s Climate Week took place after a record-shattering summer, on the heels of the hottest month ever recorded and 12 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. Our co-host, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS),  pointed to urgency. Dr. Hannah Safford, FAS’s Associate Director of Climate and Environment, pointed to glacier collapse and flash flooding in the Himalayas and unbearable heat around the world. “We owe it to ourselves, our neighbors, and our kids,” she said, “to rigorously, responsibly explore tools like SRM that could help reduce climate risks, even as we continue to ramp up mitigation and adaptation.”

The organizations that joined us don’t all agree with one another, and that was the point: the Federation of American Scientists, University of Chicago, Reflective, Degrees Initiative, Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, Environmental Defense Fund, Plan C For Civilization Documentary, and SRM360. Thank you to every one of them who attended and shared their views. 

Research Is Not Deployment

I say this often, and I’ll keep saying it: CCAN does not support SRM deployment. We do support studying whether it could work, what the risks are, who would be affected, and who gets a say. Those are responsible questions, and we need answers before other nations or private companies make those decisions for us.

Decisions about whether, how, and under what conditions research proceeds should be shaped by rigorous science, strong safeguards, and public accountability. Most of all, they should be shaped by the people most affected by climate change, not by whoever has the most money or the loudest voices.

Earlier this year, we watched lawmakers in statehouses across the country push bills to ban even the study of these technologies, many built on conspiracy theories rather than evidence. Banning research doesn’t make the technologies disappear. It just ensures we won’t have the full picture if it ever comes time to make a decision.

Climate Week’s Hub Crawl showed an alternative path: a room full of people from all backgrounds, willing to ask hard questions in public, backed by scientific research.

What Comes Next

Responsible SRM research is no longer a fringe topic in the climate community. As the climate crisis intensifies and policy lags, SRM is moving onto the agenda. The real question is who will be in the room when decisions get made.

If scientists, advocates, and affected communities don’t show up, a small number of people who have their own agendas will fill that space.

CCAN will keep bringing people together and pushing for SRM research that is transparent, publicly accountable, and governed by strong safeguards. We’ll also keep fighting for the cuts in carbon pollution that nothing else can replace.

If you’re curious, skeptical, or both—good. Join us. We’d love to hear from you.

Sign up to volunteer with CCAN!

About the author: Quentin Scott (he/him) joined CCAN in January 2021 as part of the newly created CCAN Federal Team. He moved from Chicago specifically to build political will for groundbreaking national climate and climate justice policies. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he got a first-hand look at the two Americas and sought to bring the two Americas closer together through advocacy.

Before joining CCAN, Quentin was chief of staff for an Illinois State Representative and a legislative correspondent in the US House of Representatives, and has led numerous issue and candidate campaigns across the Midwest and East Coast. In his roles, he has stood with neighborhood groups to hold industrial polluters accountable in communities of color and looks forward to bringing that fight to the federal level.

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70 Bills, 29 States: Misinformation Fuels Campaign Against Climate Science

Policymakers Need Solar Reflective Methods Research — NOT Conspiracy Theories

 

By Quentin Scott, Federal Policy Director, Chesapeake Climate Action Network

What if scientists might one day have tools that could temporarily slow down the worst immediate effects of climate change, protect millions of lives, and buy us more time to advance the clean energy transition? 

What if those tools could help slow the melting of glaciers and sea-level rise in New Orleans, Miami, and low-lying cities across the country? What if we could reduce the number of dangerous heat events like the ones we experienced this month? 

Now, what if your elected representatives were actively trying to ban research into these tools that could save lives? That’s not a hypothetical. It’s what happened this legislative session in statehouses across the country.

Seventy Bills Built on Misinformation

In 2026, lawmakers introduced 70 bills across 29 states to ban or restrict research into a suite of technologies that could potentially cool the planet on a temporary basis and buy us more time to cut carbon pollution. Let that number sink in. That’s not a fringe movement: that’s a coordinated legislative campaign, largely driven by climate-denying, conspiracy-oriented right-wing networks, to ban even the possibility of learning if such technologies are viable options to save our planet.

At hearing after hearing, testimony relied on misinformation. In Alabama, witnesses claimed that tiny particles that reflect sunlight, a form of solar radiation management scientists are researching, were giving bees Alzheimer’s. In South Carolina, a key witness linked this climate research to Bill Gates “controlling populations.” And in New Hampshire, a witness showed pictures of “chemtrails,” pushing a debunked conspiracy theory that airplanes are secretly spraying chemicals. The witness testified that “they” — whoever “they” are — “are severely spraying.” 

None of these conspiracy theories are grounded in evidence. And there is one glaring hole in their argument: no geoengineering is currently deployed at climate‑relevant scale. We’re just talking about researching this new technology — not yet deploying it. Multiple bill sponsors, when asked directly, even admitted they had no firsthand knowledge of geoengineering occurring in their states – because it’s not. It’s not happening anywhere.

One Arizona sponsor acknowledged he didn’t have “specific knowledge” it was happening but said he had “testimony coming up that may lead to the conclusion that there might be some of that going on.” They won’t find anything because there isn’t anything to find. A Rhode Island sponsor described the topic as “the Wild West” and said, to his credit, that “most people, myself included, know very little about it.” And that’s exactly the problem: lawmakers are legislating based on confusion, not evidence.

Scientists, Farmers, and Agencies Push Back

Researchers, climate groups, business leaders, and even state agencies testified against these bad bills. In Maryland, I testified that the bill penalizes research and that “whatever the underlying concern, this bill doesn’t solve it.” Business groups expressed concerns that the broadly written language could capture everything from agriculture cloud seeding and snow-making at ski resorts to everyday farming equipment that emits sulfur dioxide. 

In South Dakota, the state’s Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources disagreed with sponsors’ ‘assurances’ that farmers would be exempt from the bill’s bans. This is what a legislative effort built on misinformation looks like: chaotic, technically incoherent, and disconnected from science.

What Happened When the Bills Faced Legislatures

How far did these bills actually get? Not very.

Of the 70 bills introduced, 60 are dead. One (Arizona’s HB2042) passed its legislature but was vetoed by the governor. Only one bill has been signed into law; it’s an add-on to a law Louisiana passed last year, expanding the list of prohibited chemicals. That’s it.

The volume of bill introductions and the energy behind this effort, and the picture it paints, become clear: for all the noise, these bills have almost no legs.

The pattern is consistent: bills are introduced, get a hearing, but once they run into simple questions — How do you enforce this? What counts as geoengineering? Would this affect farmers? Would this ban legitimate research? — they stall. The conspiracy theories don’t hold up to scrutiny. Neither does the policy.

Why Research Must Come Before Deployment

I’ve spent my career working on climate policy. I know how badly we need every tool in the toolbox. And solar reflective methods (SRM) research — not deployment, research — is one of those tools we cannot afford to kneecap before we even understand it.

Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) does not support SRM deployment. We do support studying whether it could work, what the risks are, who would be affected, and who would get a say. Those are responsible questions. And we need to know those answers—before other nations, private companies, and rogue billionaires make those decisions for us.

Banning SRM research does not make these technologies disappear. It only ensures that, if they are ever used, or if someone else proceeds without public oversight, we will be unprepared.

Here’s what I find especially troubling about this legislative trend: the bills that got the furthest weren’t necessarily the most scientifically coherent; they were the ones in states where the political environment made it easier to move fast and ask questions later. In some hearings, no substantive debate was held at all. A committee vote with no substantive discussion is not a policy process: it’s a vibe check.

Meanwhile, the federal government has shown more interest in restricting climate science than in building the governance frameworks we actually need. That vacuum creates space for state-level chaos like this. And it’s why groups like CCAN are pushing for transparent, publicly funded, equitably governed research. The alternative is to leave these decisions to private companies with no guardrails or to legislatures that openly admit they don’t understand the technologies they’re voting on.

The Fight is Not Over

The good news from this session is that when scientists, farmers, business groups, state agencies, and environmental advocates showed up to say “wait, have you thought this through?”, most of the bills collapsed. That matters.

The 2026 state legislative session is over in most states, which means the immediate threat from this wave is largely contained — for now.

But this threat isn’t going away. The same networks that drove this session’s bills will be back. Louisiana’s law will give advocates a new template to point to. As climate impacts worsen and SRM research receives more public attention, the political pressure around these technologies will only intensify.

The question for the climate movement isn’t whether SRM will be on the research agenda. It already is. The question is whether the people who care most about equity, transparency, and the future of the planet will be in the room when the decisions are made.

If scientists and climate advocates aren’t in the room, the room doesn’t just go away. It just gets populated with self-interested private actors and foreign governments instead. Declaring an outright ban on this research makes this outcome even more likely.

The Bottom Line

Seventy bills. Twenty-nine states. Zero new laws passed this year.

By the numbers, this legislative session was a failure for the anti-research effort. But we’re not ready to relax just yet. We know that the opposition to responsible climate research is organized, loud, and will be back next year.

CCAN will be watching. We hope you will be, too.

About the author: Quentin Scott (he/him) joined CCAN in January 2021 as part of the newly created CCAN Federal Team. He moved from Chicago specifically to build political will for groundbreaking national climate and climate justice policies. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he got a first-hand look at the two Americas and sought to bring the two Americas closer together through advocacy.

Before joining CCAN, Quentin was chief of staff for an Illinois State Representative and a legislative correspondent in the US House of Representatives, and has led numerous issue and candidate campaigns across the Midwest and East Coast. In his roles, he has stood with neighborhood groups to hold industrial polluters accountable in communities of color and looks forward to bringing that fight to the federal level.

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