Biology cannot solve everything and chemistry often wins
Dacia Leone · How Supercool Earth's microbes could ease the water crisis · May 20, 2026 · at 15:24
Dacia Leone, CEO of Supercool Earth, discusses why climate and biotech founders must be selective about where biology holds an advantage over chemistry.
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“As much as I love biology, we can't deploy it for every single solution. Chemistry wins a lot.”
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Supercool Earth extracts more water from clouds than silver iodide
“And what we bring, as opposed to silver iodide, is that we can target more clouds and essentially bring, get more rain than silver iodide can currently today. So we can target more geographies, more warmer clouds, more seasonalities, and then at that same temp…”
Supercool Earth induces precipitation within 30 minutes of delivery
“It's an in and out technology that we're developing where we have the effect, we induce precipitation within zero to 30 minutes of delivery, and then that precipitation goes away.”
Multiple VC-backed startups are scaling geoengineering technologies
“There is a lot, there are many up-and-coming companies within the startup space that are VC-backed, that are exploring these technologies and wanting to bring them to scale.”
Silver iodide does not degrade and harms humans, microbes, and fish
“Whereas silver iodide is a metal, and it does not degrade in the environment. So it, ah, it sticks around, and it's bad for humans, for microbes, and for fish. And it's not something that will go away once you release it down into the environment.”
US federal ban on cloud seeding is highly unlikely
“I think that a blanket federal mandate to ban cloud seeding or weather mod is highly unlikely.”
Investors now refuse to fund biotech without early commercial traction
“So investors now are unwilling to give gobs and gobs of money when you don't have commercial traction or a plan for revenue and what you're going to get that revenue. And they're not necessarily willing to wait years and years for that to happen.”