President Trump’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday said his agency will seek to be transparent with Americans who “have questions” about weather geoengineering and contrails.
The move comes as questions have arisen about “cloud seeding” shortly before the deadly floods in Texas, and following a Florida law enacted in June to criminalize climate engineering and chemical weather experiments.
“Americans have questions about geoengineering and contrails,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin wrote on X. “They expect honesty and transparency from their government when seeking answers. For years, people who asked questions in good faith were dismissed, even vilified by the media and their own government. This ends today.”
Conspiracy theorists say contrails, which they often refer to as “chemtrails,” are part of a government plot to poison or sterilize humanity, psychologically control the population, or alter the weather. Some go so far as to say contrails — which are mostly water vapor and carbon dioxide, as well as emissions from combusting fuel — cause respiratory illnesses and other health problems.
As part of Mr. Zeldin’s effort, the EPA on Thursday released new online resources on contrails and geoengineering. On contrails, the EPA says they are “a normal effect of jet aircraft operations and have been since its earliest days of air travel. If you are seeing a lot of contrails in your area it is because there are a lot of jet aircraft flying overhead.”
On geoengineering, the EPA says “Solar geoengineering is not occurring via direct delivery by commercial aircraft and is not associated with aviation contrails.” And on the two subjects combined, the EPA site says, “the federal government is not aware of there ever being a contrail intentionally formed over the United States for the purpose of geoengineering/weather modification.”
Still, Mr. Zeldin wants Americans to know that the EPA “shares the significant reservations many Americans have when it comes to geoengineering activities.”
“I want you to know everything I know about these topics and without any exception, instead of simply dismissing these questions and concerns as baseless conspiracies,” he said, prompting his agency “to compile a list of everything we know about contrails and geoengineering for the purpose of releasing it to you now publicly.”
The EPA administrator’s remarks come days after Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said she will introduce a bill in the House that “prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity.”
Ms. Greene, who earned a business degree from University of Georgia, added in her X post that she has “been researching weather modification and working with the legislative counsel for months writing this bill. We must end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification and geoengineering.”
Florida lawmakers also passed a bill, sponsored by Miami Republican Ileana Garcia, “prohibiting certain acts intended to affect the temperature, the weather, or the intensity of sunlight within the atmosphere of this state.”
“There is a lot of unauthorized activity that is currently not regulated both at a federal and a state level, and this is where we wanted to start,” Ms. Garcia told members of the Senate during debate on the bill. “This is how we are trying to create a method to the madness by creating a reporting mechanism that starts with complaints to the Department of Environmental Protection with complaints and concerns and then also at our local state airports.”
Governor DeSantis, a Republican, signed the bill into law on June 20.
The renewed interest in geoengineering weather comes after a devastating flood that killed more than 100 people in Texas over the July 4 holiday. Conspiracy theorists flooded the internet with claims that the flood was caused by “cloud seeding,” a process in which chemicals such as silver iodide or calcium chloride are injected into cumulus clouds to increase rainfall.
But there’s no evidence to support the claim that cloud seeding led to the deadly flood, and scientists are busy trying to correct the record. Travis Herzog, a Houston broadcast meteorologist posted on Facebook on Sunday, “cloud seeding cannot create a storm of this magnitude or size.”
“In fact, cloud seeding cannot even create a single cloud,” Mr. Herzog wrote. “All it can do is take an existing cloud and enhance the rainfall by up to 20%. Most estimates have the rainfall enhancement in a much lower range.”
In his lengthy post, Mr. Herzog offered his conclusion on what caused the flood.”At the end of the day, this flood was caused by the remnants of two tropical weather systems that cannot be created nor controlled by mankind, despite claims to the contrary,” Mr. Herzog wrote.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
