“They’re upset over what they call chemtrails they see in the sky,” Greene said of constituents who have contacted her about the issue. “They’re continually upset about it, and they’re engaged on it. But it hadn’t gotten there on a wide scale. Remember the flooding in Dubai? That was one of the first times I saw, like, ‘Oh, this went mainstream, and people are paying attention.’”
A Democrat who works on environmental policy said the episode has them feeling as bleak as ever about the future of their field.
“I saw someone tweet the other day a picture of the sky, and it was blue,” this person said. “And then 20 minutes later, there were clouds. And they said, ‘How is this possible?’ And I’m like, have people just never looked up?”
This person said the focus on geoengineering has crystallized in their mind as the next stage of the Republican response to the impact of climate change.
“It went from ‘we don’t believe in climate change’ to ‘we actually believe in this other thing,’” this person said. “It absolutely is their response to climate change.”
Greene and Burchett’s legislation still has a long road ahead of it before it could become law, which Greene acknowledged in the interview. But in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed such legislation into law last month.
That bill was a high-level priority for Republican state Attorney General James Uthmeier, DeSantis’ former chief of staff. At Uthmeier’s urging, the state’s Republican-dominated Legislature passed a bill this year that makes weather modification and geoengineering a third-degree felony punishable by a fine of up to $100,000. The bill passed with only Republican votes.
“Florida does appear to have seen evidence of weather modification activities in the state,” a spokesman for the attorney general’s office said. “We don’t yet know what impacts cloud-seeding or aerosol releases have on environmental or human health, which is all the more reason why Florida wants to raise public awareness and stop weather modification experiments in the state.”
In Florida, a decades-old law requires permission from the state for anyone to alter the weather. State officials told the Tampa Bay Times that no one has ever applied under the law.
In a letter this month, Uthmeier warned publicly owned airports across the state that they must be in compliance with the new law, which requires public airports to report planes with weather modification devices to the state, and suggested that weather modification may have triggered the flooding in Texas.
“Because airports are most likely to catch those who seek to weaponize science in order to push their agenda, your compliance with these reporting obligations is essential to keeping our state safe from these harmful chemicals and experiments,” Uthmeier wrote this month.
The Trump administration is also trying to address the concerns. This month, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin directed readers to his agency’s new resources on geoengineering and contrails. (Contrails are naturally forming condensation trails from rockets and other aircraft.)
Those new websites shut down claims of government weather control, saying the government was not engaged in solar geoengineering testing and that the “federal government is not aware of there ever being a contrail intentionally formed over the United States for the purpose of geoengineering or weather modification.”
Bartolotta highlighted the new information now available on the EPA’s website, saying its mention of the issue is more evidence that her concerns are valid and adding that she is worried about potential adverse health impacts.
“I know so many people today, they’re finally noticing, and it gets worse and worse and worse,” she said. “Every single day, you can’t look at the sky and not see huge stripes sprayed by all these planes every single day and every night.”
Allan Smith reported from New York and Washington and Matt Dixon from Florida.
Pilar Melendez and Evan Bush contributed.
