At the Munich Security Conference last week, George Soros got onstage to talk about the existential risk that climate change poses to human civilization, as well as what appeared to be the 92-year-old Hungarian-American billionaire’s preferred method of addressing it: brightening the clouds over the Arctic to reflect the sun’s energy away from the melting ice caps. But questions aside as to whether Soros—ludicrously maligned in conspiracy-minded right-wing circles—is the best advocate for solar geoengineering, he’s not the only billionaire who’s recently become interested in bouncing the sun’s rays back into space. Among the world’s ultra-rich, plans to swat back the sun’s rays like they’re capital gains taxes (to, as it were, apply a generous helping of sunblock to the earth’s atmosphere) have seemingly been all the rage.

Bill Gates, for instance, backed a project by Harvard University scientists to test an idea to spray calcium carbonate into the atmosphere in the skies over northern Scandinavia in 2021 (the project was ultimately canned after outcry from local Indigenous groups and environmentalists). Jeff Bezos put Amazon’s supercomputer capabilities to work modeling the effects of plans to inject huge amounts of sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere later that year. Earlier this month, Dustin Moskovitz, a billionaire Facebook cofounder, plowed $900,000 into funding for scientists in Mali, Brazil, Thailand, and other countries to study the potential effects of solar geoengineering. Even the smaller fry are getting in on the action, with venture capitalists giving a combined $750,000 to a company pledging to implement a planetary solar geoengineering project using SO2. That company, Make Sunsets, conducted its first U.S.-based tests last week, launching balloons containing SO2 in Nevada.