March 2024

Harvard permanently terminates Gates-funded SCoPEx geoengineering experiment under public pressure

Harvard University announced it was permanently abandoning the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment — the small-scale stratospheric aerosol balloon experiment Gates had helped fund through FICER. Principal investigator Professor Frank Keutsch stated he was no longer pursuing the experiment, which would have released a tiny amount of calcium carbonate 12 miles above the Arctic. The cancellation came after years of public controversy, opposition from indigenous communities in Sweden where a test flight had been planned, and scientific debate about whether even small field experiments risked normalizing geoengineering before adequate governance frameworks existed.