Making its world premiere at DOC NYC, Ben Kalina’s PLAN C FOR CIVILIZATION is about the controversial topic of solar geoengineering. The film follows academic David Keith and the start-up Make Sunsets, both of whom are advocating for solar geoengeering as one way of addressing climate change. We spoke with Kalina about the film’s approach to the subject, its central character, and the possibility of changing the planet’s climate.
Science & Film: Do you consider the film like a call to action?
Ben Kalina: It's definitely a call to action, but it's not a call to action on solar geoengineering, per se. It's a call to move into a new mindset around climate change and how we respond to it. And it's about saying that, you know, 20 years after AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, I think the really inconvenient truth now is that we did not move quickly enough to cut emissions to avoid some harrowing climate change and global temperature rise. So while cutting missions is still fundamentally the most important and truly the only important thing we can do, we have to start looking at some other ideas. We've kind of missed the opportunity to do the simple thing, and now we have to figure out what it means to think through some complex choices. So to me, it's a call to action on sobriety, but it's also a little bit saying, like, look, there's still hope. We are not done. We still have things we can do, but we have to really be thoughtful and serious about it.
S&F: Can you tell me a little bit about wanting to have these two main characters, or two actors–one being the for-profit group and the other being David Keith.
BK: There's a lot of, like, really tricky narrative work in this film to make things as clear as we can without going too deep into the weeds. And, you know, just to be clear, David did have a financial stake in a company that he founded, which he sold, but it was outside of the realm of solar geoengineering research. It was in carbon removal. And so I think it is important to know that David has had dealings in the for profit world. It's part of the complexity of the story.
The film, for a long time, was focused on David and Frank's research at Harvard on Scopex. That was the narrative thread of the film and the arc that we sort of settled on after several years of poking around once they announced they were going to do this project. To me, it was clear that this project would be a really great way of getting at so many of the questions around the research into solar geoengineering: the ethics of it, all the questions and moral hazard and just how it lands in the world, and what it means to start thinking about this idea of changing the Earth's reflectivity. And so I followed that for a long time. As you see in the film it plays out over six or seven years since the first announcement of the project. And so we really hung with it and found our moments. Towards the end of the film, as sometimes happens in these kinds of projects, it was late 2022 and I heard about Make Sunsets popping up on the scene. The instant I saw them I knew that this potentially could be a really interesting kind of foil to David's story, in the sense that David is this very cautious, very thoughtful, and sort of more mainstream scientific researcher working within a lot more guard rails.
Basically, David's operating within the guidelines that are set out by federal research and academic research, and is just very cautious, because he's really careful about trying to manage the ways that people are understanding what he's doing, but he's also trying to put the idea out into the world. So it's this very slow process. And at the same time, you've got for profit entities that are popping up, like Make Sunsets and now others like Stardust and Sunscreen, who are for profit entities looking to enter this space. They're doing so in part because I think they see that the academic research is taking too long. Make Sunsets are almost like caricatures of tech bros. Just like, move fast, break things. It was an obvious way to kind of jump into this story, to find the contrast between what Dave is attempting to do in order to move this research forward, and how this specific Silicon Valley disruptive force might enter this scene. There's all the ways in which they're just actually kind of hilarious and fun, and they bring humor into the story. They do a lot of things that films like this don't normally get to do. I think it's really important for people to have fun. But the other thing about them is that they're not, in my mind, they're not really in this to make money. They are more like provocateurs. They're circus performers trying to get attention, because they really feel that this research needs to move forward more quickly. The research of people like David and others needs to continue to move forward, and they see their role as really provoking people to think more seriously about it.
And so there are a lot of reasons why it made sense to me to include them in this film. The other reason is just that, like, while they may be kind of funny and relatively harmless, there are other entities out there that are starting to get... I mean, Stardust just got $60 million in funding to do their work, and they are much more ambitious. I think that the role of for profit investment in this space is extremely problematic.
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David Keith
S&F: How long did the film take you to make?
BK: I picked up a camera at this conference at Asilomar in 2010 and filmed with David a little bit there, and then pursued some different directions. I filmed at the climate engineering conference in 2014 in Berlin, filmed for 10 days at COP 21. All of that was kind of experimental production until Scopex took off, and that's when I decided to make that the central narrative for us.
S&F: At what point did you decide that David would be your central character?
BK: I started looking into the ocean iron fertilization project that happened off of Haida Gwaii in 2012. Ocean iron fertilization is often mentioned in this bucket of geoengineering. It's a carbon removal idea, as opposed to being about reflectivity. But to me, it held a lot of the same kind of intrigue in the sense that it was rogue: a very risky intervention in terms of global climate-related technology. But it just didn't go where I wanted it to go, and it didn't feel to me like it had the kind of ingredients that this idea of solar geoengineering did, and so I kind of put it on the shelf for a while and continued poking around until Scopex surfaced.
S&F: And can you say any more about what ingredients you felt the film had to have?
BK: I was very inspired by John McPhee's book The Control of Nature. It really inspired my first feature, SHORED UP, which is about beach replenishment and coastal development on barrier islands. He writes about this idea: what are the limits of our capacity to shape the world to suit ourselves? This idea of solar geoengineering, to me, is kind of the ultimate [attempt to shape the world]. Some people will call it deeply hubristic, you know. Others will see it very pragmatically and as a response, a survival response, to what I think is almost an existential crisis. People debate that all the time. It's a huge harm multiplier– climate change–and we've been focused on one half of the equation for a really long time, which is greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere, and how that affects both the climate, but also ocean acidification and other things.
Luke Iseman
Until now, there hasn't been a lot of attention that people have paid seriously to the other side of the equation, which is the amount of sunlight that gets into the earth. There are risks, many risks involved. But this is a scientific problem. There is something you can do if you're worried about heat, and that is reduce the amount of sunlight that's coming into the earth. And to me, it really pulls together so many threads about what it means to like be a human on this planet, at this point in time when we have so much power over ecosystems. And so it's this question, ultimately, of just how far will we go in our quest to adapt the planet to the ways and the lifestyles and the need that we have as humans. This film really poses that question, which is, are there limits, and should there be, and are there things we can do if things get too hot?
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