Republican state lawmakers are going after a new threat they say could cause harm to the environment — and playing into a baseless claim at the same time.
In a Tennessee bill passed by the state Senate last week, lawmakers targeted geoengineering, an experimental — and controversial — practice not yet in use that could help cool the planet amid climate change.
But the text of the bill can also be seen as referring to “chemtrails,” plumes of toxic chemicals that believers of the unfounded claim say are being spewed into the sky by governments and corporations.
Now, the confusion between solar geoengineering and chemtrails threatens to muddy the waters around nascent geoengineering research, chilling potential studies, scientists say.
It’s the latest example of how spreaders of disinformation can latch on to reality to pursue their agenda, confounding public opinion on the issue.
Also last week, Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R) — who has posted on social media about the chemtrails accusation — announced in a memo his intention to propose legislation to mirror the Tennessee bill.
“In my view, the basic idea has morphed,” said Holly Jean Buck, a professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo.
The theory of “chemtrails” has been around for several decades; online essays connecting commercial aircraft to chemical spraying and weather modification appeared in the late 1990s.
According to chemtrails believers, the government or another shadowy force is using commercial aircraft to release chemicals into the atmosphere — for anything from weather modification to mass mind control.
Believers of this baseless claim often point to the white lines in the sky from commercial planes as evidence for chemtrails, arguing that the clouds look different or are behaving strangely.
Those lines are, in fact, airline contrails — or condensation trails created by the warm air from the aircraft engine interacting with the cold air in the atmosphere.
According to a study published in 2017, 10 percent of Americans believed the chemtrails theory to be “completely” true, while an additional 20 to 30 percent found it to be “somewhat” true.
In the last few years, however, experts say the claim has changed. Some now say that chemtrails are being used to carry out solar geoengineering — and that researchers and government employees investigating solar geoengineering are part of the larger scheme.
“In recent years, it’s shifted quite a bit toward the idea that climate geoengineering or solar radiation management is actually happening and involving various chemicals,” Buck said.
