Conspiracy Theorists and Vaccine Skeptics Have a New Target: Geoengineering

At first glance, what happened in Tennessee’s Legislature this spring seemed a bit odd.

Republican lawmakers introduced a bill to ban solar geoengineering — putting aerosols into the atmosphere to block some of the radiation from the sun. As climate change drives up temperatures on Earth, there is growing interest in geoengineering as a way to cool the planet. But it’s still largely theoretical, with no evidence that anyone in Tennessee is planning to try it.

The main witness to testify in support of the ban was a physician without any apparent qualifications in atmospheric science, who falsely claimed geoengineering was happening nationwide. Democrats derided the bill as ridiculous and tried to amend it with mentions of Yetis, Bigfoot and Sasquatch to prove their point.

Yet the ban sailed through the Legislature. Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, signed it, making Tennessee the first state to outlaw geoengineering.

Behind the scenes, the bill was the result of lobbying by activists known in Republican circles from their efforts fighting vaccine mandates.

“We used the connections and the rapport that we had built over the last couple of years in medical freedom,” Danielle Goodrich of East Tennessee Freedom, which calls itself a “group of Patriots, Momma Bears, Conservative Christians,” explained on a podcast.

For years, the debate over geoengineering has mostly been limited to academics and environmentalists. They agree that climate change is an existential threat but differ about whether humans should look at trying to blunt it by manipulating natural processes.

Some, including prominent geophysicist David Keith, say geoengineering could save lives, and outdoor experiments are necessary to understand the benefits and risks. Others, including the nonprofit Friends of the Earth, say geoengineering distracts from the urgent need to cut the pollution that is heating the planet. And they worry about a lack of international rules to ensure that it’s deployed safely and fairly.

Now those critics have been joined by groups from a very different corner of American society: vaccine skeptics, conspiracy theorists and organizations such as East Tennessee Freedom, which appears motivated by a deep distrust of government rather than by what Goodrich called the “supposed climate crisis.”

These new geoengineering opponents are finding support from hard-right Republicans. Since January, lawmakers in more than a half dozen other states have introduced similar legislation to preemptively ban geoengineering.

“The politics of geoengineering is really weird,” said Benjamin Day, a senior campaigner on the Climate & Energy Justice team at Friends of the Earth. He said it was odd to share a goal with groups who seem to be trying to discredit the government and reflect what he called a “detachment from the truth.”

The fear and misinformation around geoengineering was on display earlier this year in Alameda, California, where scientists sprayed water vapor mixed with sea salts a short distance off the coast. They were testing a device that might someday be used to brighten clouds to reflect sunlight back into space. The Alameda experiment was harmless; the scientists just wanted to observe how the particles moved through the air.

But residents were so worried, they convinced the City Council to shut it down, even though Alameda’s own examination said the experiment posed no danger to public health or the environment.

Researchers argue a ban on geoengineering that includes preliminary experiments would hamstring science. A British science agency said this month that it would provide $75 million to test geoengineering technologies, including outdoor experiments, because without physical tests, “there is no prospect of being able to make proper judgments” about whether geoengineering is feasible and safe.

“As pressure grows to geoengineer the planet, we damn well better have the science to understand as well as we can what the benefits might be and what the downsides might be, before decisions are made,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, which this year committed millions to fund geoengineering research.

The national campaign to ban geoengineering can be traced back to Rhode Island in 2014, when a lawmaker looked to the sky and saw a conspiracy.

Karen MacBeth, a state representative and educator, introduced a bill that would fine or imprison anyone who knowingly engaged in geoengineering within Rhode Island, arguing it could damage soil, water and air quality. She believes she was the first state lawmaker in the country to propose such a ban.

The text of MacBeth’s bill listed what it said were geoengineering’s potential harmful side effects, including changes in precipitation patterns, increased acid rain, harm to the Earth’s ozone layer and less effective solar panels.

In an interview, MacBeth, who left office in 2017, attributed her concern about geoengineering to something not mentioned in her bill: She believed that someone was already using airplanes to deliberately emit chemicals into the air.

“As a child, you would look up and see these big clouds and bright blue skies,” MacBeth said. “And then all of a sudden, I started to see these streaks coming from planes that didn’t disappear.”

She worried the streaks came from a harmful substance. “It’s now happening worldwide,” she added.

MacBeth’s beliefs are better known as the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory, which posits that airplanes are secretly emitting dangerous chemical trails, as opposed to water vapor naturally released as condensation from planes’ engines, which turns to visible trails of ice crystals in the cold air. There is no evidence supporting the chemtrails theory, which has attracted many followers through social media.

“Some people say it’s the local government, or the United States. Other people say there’s a secret world organization behind it,” said Sijia Xiao, a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, who wrote a peer-reviewed paper about the conspiracy theory. “Some people say it’s for poisoning the population. Some people say it’s for modifying the weather.”

A Democrat turned Republican, MacBeth repeatedly filed her legislation, never getting a vote on it. After she left office, other Rhode Island lawmakers picked up her cause and kept reintroducing the bill.

The campaign against geoengineering got a boost after June 2023, when the White House, directed by Congress, released a federal research agenda for solar geoengineering. The Biden administration made clear that federal research into geoengineering remains limited. But the report said outdoor experiments, combined with computer models and lab studies, could be valuable.

That was enough to flood the social platform X with derisive posts and provoke headlines in conservative media like “White House Report Signals Openness to Manipulating Sunlight to Prevent Climate Change.”

Since January, Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation to ban geoengineering in New Hampshire, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Dakota, Minnesota, Ohio, South Carolina and Pennsylvania. Most of those bills resemble the legislation introduced in Rhode Island.

Many of the activists and lawmakers who want to ban geoengineering display a libertarian streak.

Jason Gerhard, a state lawmaker who sponsored a bill to ban geoengineering in New Hampshire, said the federal income tax is applied too broadly and served 12 years in prison after being convicted of supplying weapons to a couple involved in a standoff with federal marshals over unpaid taxes. He ran for sheriff this year in Merrimack County, New Hampshire, promising to investigate geoengineering. “People are tired of the intentional polluting of our skies. No more geoengineering!” Gerhard wrote on X.

Doug Mastriano, a Republican Pennsylvania state senator who lost his bid for governor in 2022 despite an endorsement from Donald Trump, introduced a bill to ban geoengineering in his state in June. Mastriano, a Christian nationalist and subscriber to QAnon conspiracy theories, said in a news release that “the potential for irreparable harm to life and property resulting from solar geoengineering justifies an outright ban.”

His office did not respond to a request for comment.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who ended an independent bid for the White House last month, has also voiced concerns about geoengineering, saying in a statement that it can have “serious unforeseen ecological consequences.”

During an episode of his podcast last year called “Are Chemtrails Real?” Kennedy said the issue of climate change had been “hijacked” by the World Economic Forum and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

“They’re doing the same thing to us that the pharmaceutical industry does, which is they aggravate the problem and then sell us the solution,” Kennedy said. “And of course, the solution that they want for climate are more social controls, and then the big solution of geoengineering projects — which, of course, Bill Gates is funding all over the world.”

A spokesperson for Gates declined to comment.

The campaign’s sole success so far has been Tennessee. The witness who testified most often in support of the ban was Denise Sibley, an internist in Johnson City, Tennessee, and a founder of the group that became East Tennessee Freedom.

Sibley told lawmakers that geoengineering was happening across the country and cited as evidence the White House report, which says no such thing.

Republicans praised her. “I do appreciate your coming to us with this,” said Janice Bowling, a state senator. “I have been hearing about this from constituents for quite a time, and the fact that it is taking place over Tennessee.”

Frank Niceley, another Republican lawmaker, said, “This will be my wife’s favorite bill of the year. She has been worried about this, I bet 10 years. It’s been going on a long, long time.”

The Tennessee ban prohibits the “intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus within the borders of the state into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or intensity of the sunlight.”

That would include cloud seeding, a decades-old practice in which chemicals are injected into clouds to trigger precipitation. Augustus Doricko, CEO of a cloud seeding company, testified that the legislation would prevent farmers from using a common tool.

“If you’re in favor of depriving farmers in Tennessee from having the best technology available in other states, I would ask you to vote for the bill as it is,” Doricko told lawmakers.

Lobbying for the bill’s passage was Goodrich, who described a nationwide anti-geoengineering campaign on a podcast called “Rebunked.”

Goodrich said geoengineering was government overreach, similar to vaccine mandates.

“They’re experimenting on us without our consent,” she said on the podcast. “We went from being dirty germ emitters during COVID, to now we’re dirty carbon emitters. And you know, both of these things are false, and they’re looking to infringe on our rights.”

Goodrich said East Tennessee Freedom got model legislation from a woman named Jolie Diane, who runs a website called Zero Geoengineering. “Jolie is an amazing wealth of information,” Goodrich said.

She credited Diane for getting bans introduced in New Hampshire, Kentucky and South Dakota, among other places.

Diane said in a statement that she was “not at liberty to disclose the specifics” of her interactions with state lawmakers. Goodrich and Sibley did not respond to requests for comment.

On her Zero Geoengineering website, Diane warns against other perceived threats, including vaccine mandates; fifth-generation wireless connectivity, known as 5G; and genetically modified crops.

Diane’s efforts to ban geoengineering around the country appear to date from at least 2018, when she gave a presentation at a Rhode Island library. In a recording of that presentation, Diane said chemicals were being sprayed by the military, the CIA and the “deep state.”

“We’re using this bill as a model and a template when we go to different states,” Diane said at the event. “We adapt it for the different states, to make it specific. And now they have hope too.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .