The Download: China’s energy throwback, and choosing between love and immortality

—Gigi Kwik Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, explains the consequences of the Trump administration’s decision to force a health department focused on studying deadly infectious diseases to cease operating to Wired.

One more thing

The flawed logic of rushing out extreme climate solutions

Early in 2022, entrepreneur Luke Iseman says, he released a pair of sulfur dioxide–filled weather balloons from Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, in the hope that they’d burst miles above Earth.

It was a trivial act in itself, effectively a tiny, DIY act of solar geoengineering, the controversial proposal that the world could counteract climate change by releasing particles that reflect more sunlight back into space.

Entrepreneurs like Iseman invoke the stark dangers of climate change to explain why they do what they do—even if they don’t know how effective their interventions are. But experts say that urgency doesn’t create a social license to ignore the underlying dangers or leapfrog the scientific process. Read the full story.

—James Temple

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet 'em at me.)

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