Luke Iseman, founder of a controversial climate tech startup, on Wednesday said his company will pause operations in Mexico after the government there said it would "prohibit and, where appropriate, stop experimentation with solar geoengineering in the country."

Make Sunsets, founded in October by Iseman and Andrew Song with $750,000 in seed funding from two venture capital firms, had already sent two balloons to inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere intended to reflect sunlight away from the Earth and mitigate the effects of global warming.

The company's initial launches were conducted "without prior notice and without the consent of the Government of Mexico and the surrounding communities," the Mexican government said in an announcement.

Iseman told the The Wall Street Journal there is "no law that prevents me from doing this," and that the proper thing to do "is to do it from the U.S. or a U.S. territory."

"Maybe that's what I should have done from the start," he said.

The startup's plan was to sell individuals and corporations $10 "cooling credits" used to "release at least 1 gram of our 'clouds' into the stratosphere on your behalf, offsetting the warming effect of 1 ton of carbon dioxide for one year."

But the company's approach hadn't been studied comprehensively, and experts in the field warned Iseman and Song not to use the word "geoengineering," which refers to the theoretical process of releasing chemicals into the atmosphere to reflect the heat of the sun.

Make Sunsets instead called its method "albedo enhancement," a scientific term for reflecting sunlight.

"I'm very opposed to geoengineering. I want no geoengineering to occur," Iseman told CNBC in early January. "Unfortunately, I was born into a world with a poorly geoengineered atmosphere where I, and everyone before me for the last couple hundred years, were emitting huge quantities of carbon dioxide to build the modern world. So I want to do as little geoengineering as necessary to fix that."

Iseman said there's no time to wait for studies.

"There is not really anything that I've been able to find, other than albedo enhancement, that even has a chance of keeping us below more than two degrees Celsius of climate change. And that's a that's a pretty terrifying world to imagine," Iseman told CNBC. "Basically, long answer short, I'm doing this because it needs to be done. And no one else is."

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