Two Kentucky lawmakers have filed identical bills seeking to follow Tennessee as the second state to ban what they call “geoengineering” — controversial methods to counteract climate change with atmospheric particulates that remain at the theoretical stage of academic debate among scientific researchers.
However, some people — including the sponsor of the Tennessee bill that passed into law in 2024 — believe such geoengineering methods are already happening in the sky and being covered up, essentially rebranding the baseless, decades-old conspiracy theory about so-called “chemtrails.”
One untested geoengineering method the Kentucky legislation seeks to prohibit this year is stratospheric aerosol injection, in which a plane would release particles in the stratosphere that would reflect a certain amount of sunlight before it reaches the earth. Also known as solar radiation management, many scientists theorize methods like this could temporarily slow the planet’s rising temperatures if global emissions of fossil fuels don’t subside, though others are deeply skeptical and wary.
Experts in the geoengineering field say these controversial techniques are at least a decade away from being implemented, if ever.
Republican Sen. Steve Rawlings of Burlington filed an anti-geoengineering bill when he was a member of the Kentucky House in 2024, which did not use the word “chemtrails” — a reference to the misidentified natural formation of condensation trails, or “contrails,” behind airplanes at high altitude when there is enough humidity.
Despite that, Rawlings had a telling exchange with a Facebook commenter on his page in December.
“Please reinstate the chemtrails bill…. So sick of cloudy Stripes where blue once shon(sic),” the commenter wrote.
Rawlings replied: “It’s on the agenda!”
Now elected to the other chamber, Rawlings filed Senate Bill 62 to ban geoengineering in the first week of the 2025 session, with GOP Rep. John Hodgson of Louisville filing the identical House Bill 22 on the first day.
Hodgson says he is very concerned about the possibility of geoengineering methods using toxic materials being deployed in the future and their ecological impact, describing HB 22 as a “preventative measure.” But unlike his colleague in the Senate, Hodgson is quick to dispute the claims of Facebook commenters that the white streaks they commonly see in the sky trailing airplanes are chemtrails.
“99.99% sure you will find those are just ordinary commercial jet flights (like UPS) leaving an ordinary vapor contrail,” replied Hodgson, an aeronautical engineer who has spent his career in commercial jet aviation. “Virtually zero chance a commercial jet flight is doing that.”
Those who buy into chemtrails — or that climate engineering is already clandestinely underway — are no longer just a tiny, fringe minority, according to research by Dr. Holly Buck, a climate change researcher at the University at Buffalo who wrote a book about geoengineering.
Buck said her recent survey of 3,000 respondents across the country found that 20% of people believe the U.S. government is putting chemicals into the atmosphere to counteract global warming, while nearly half are unsure.
Josh Horton is a senior fellow researching geoengineering for the past decade at the Harvard Kennedy School. Like Buck, he believes it is important for the heated academic debate around climate engineering to spread to the public at large. While the bills in Tennessee and Kentucky could be viewed as a positive in that regard, he says it’s counterproductive when that debate is full of misinformation.
“It's good to see it spreading beyond just a bunch of elites and a bunch of academics, but important that when that happens, that it's a well-rounded, well-balanced, informed debate,” Horton said. “And that's not what you see happening.”
Chemtrails, para-environmentalism and RFK Jr.
The chemtrails conspiracy was first launched on talk radio and online communities in the 1990s, with adherents accusing the government of goals ranging from sterilization to mind control. This perceived motivation began to shift as the real geoengineering debate among academics and global policymakers emerged, weighing the viability and consequences of potentially spraying reflective particulates into the atmosphere.
Buck said the latest shift in this movement occurred during the pandemic, as political activists who organized around opposing lockdowns and vaccine mandates turned their attention to geoengineering — many deleting the word “chemtrails” from their vocabulary — continuing their concern about global entities negatively impacting their health. As an example, the anti-geoengineering bill that passed into law in Tennessee was spurred by a group formed to oppose vaccine mandates.
“People see the debate that scientists are having internally about how to pursue research in this field in a responsible way, and — understandably — they filter it through their own worldview and experiences and values,” Buck said. “And so what comes out at the end is something like this bill.”
Some of the most stringent opponents of the geoengineering concept at its onset were left-leaning environmentalists, but Buck has coined this more right-leaning movement “para-environmentalism,” as it exists outside of official institutions and structures. At least for now — as no one embodies this shift like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the longtime environmental activist and purveyor of baseless vaccine criticism that is President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Last August, Kennedy replied to a post on X claiming a widespread government “chemtrail” conspiracy to poison people, writing “We will stop this crime.”
In a “chemtrails” episode of Kennedy’s podcast in 2023, his guest claimed that nearly all contrails in the sky are actually “sprayed particulate trails” and that even commercial passenger airliners are secretly equipped with sprayers. Kennedy, who shared that he was skeptical of chemtrails until actor Woody Harrelson educated him, complimented his guest’s claims as “well-researched,” saying “I’m persuaded by what you’re saying.”
Hodgson cited his experience as an aeronautical engineer to dispute such a claim.
“In my career in aviation, which spans four decades, I've known thousands of pilots and engineers and mechanics and ground crew members,” Hodgson. “No one has ever seen something like that on a commercial airplane. There’s no way to hide that from people.”
Rawlings doesn’t explicitly reject chemtrail claims, but he consciously avoids using that word.
In a 2024 podcast interview shortly before he filed his bill to ban geoengineering that year, he was asked if Kentucky would join the other states where bills had been filed to ban “chemtrails.” Rawlings answered that he would, but added “they’re very careful not to use the term ‘chemtrail,’ because, for some reason, people react in a negative way, where you can't make any progress by using that terminology.”
Responding to a host’s comments about supposed fake clouds in the sky, Rawlings said “And I guess they've been doing it for decades, right? I remember it as a kid… It seems like it's been going on forever. So there's no telling the effects that it's had to our air and our ground and our water.”
Last month, Rawlings told Kentucky Public Radio his bill was driven by constituents’ concern that geoengineering is already happening, though he said it was “unknown” whether that was true.
“It goes to the distrust of government, for one thing,” Rawlings said. “They see the streaks in the skies and they don't understand.”
Solar radiation management
Kentucky is one of 15 states where legislation has been filed this year to ban theoretical geoengineering methods, as well as real “weather modification” techniques that aren’t related to geoengineering, such as cloud seeding — a rain-inducing practice that has existed in the western United States since the 1940s, but not Kentucky.
The Kentucky bills create a Class D felony and $500,000 fine for anyone engaging in the “criminal atmospheric pollution” methods it details.
Most researchers in the geoengineering field believe it would take at least 10 years to implement solar radiation management on a global scale, even if there was universal political consensus on if and how to do so — which is far from the case.
“I think it’s safe to say we’re a long ways off from any sort of global agreement about even research, much less deployment of this,” Buck said.
One factor slowing down this timeline is the fact that even small-scale experiments have been blocked from launching in much of the world, especially the United States.
Harvard’s SCoPEx project wanted to release calcium carbonate or sulfuric acid from a high-altitude balloon to study how the particles dispersed and how much sunlight they reflected, but it folded last year after a decade of opposition from local residents in the different places where they proposed to launch.
Another method of solar radiation management called marine cloud brightening has faced roadblocks with outside-the-lab experiments. Cloud brightening seeks to launch sea salt particles into clouds to make them more reflective, mirroring the “ship tracks” from the emissions of large vessels crossing the ocean.
Researchers at the University of Washington sprayed sea salt into the air from the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier off the San Francisco coast last year to study how the particles dispersed, but local government shut the project down after only a few days.
A small-scale marine cloud brightening project funded by the Australian government over the Great Barrier Reef has been allowed to proceed over the last few years. Additionally, there has been a call for geoengineering proposals by a group funded by the United Kingdom and a U.S.-Israeli startup company called Stardust Solution, both of which are likely to lead to attempts for small-scale physical experiments, according to Horton.
Despite no current solar geoengineering experiments being conducted in the U.S., Hodgson argues that action is needed because of a congressionally-mandated White House report in 2023 on geoengineering, which he said “advocated for” solar radiation modification. The report laid out why researching stratospheric aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening could be beneficial, so long as it weighed the risks of such intervention versus the risk of doing nothing in the face of climate change.
The report has been scrubbed from the White House website since Trump took office last month, which Hodgson views as a good sign the new administration will move to outlaw geoengineering in his second term. Because of this, he said there may be less urgency to pass his bill this session, as opposed to if Democrat Kamala Harris had been elected.
Though weather modification is a completely different process than climate geoengineering, Hodgson has been a vocal online critic of cloud seeding and another theoretical method.
Cloud seeding and lasers
Cloud seeding is the process of dropping silver iodine from planes or launching it from the ground into clouds to spur precipitation in certain areas, whereas no intervention may have led to precipitation in another area. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military conducted a classified cloud seeding operation called Project Popeye, seeking to increase rain and disrupt enemy supply lines — with success dubbed “limited” and “unverifiable.”
Under the Weather Modification Reporting Act passed by Congress in 1971, anyone taking part in cloud seeding must report it to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The federal agency’s records show such activity currently taking place in nine states west of the Mississippi River, though many scientists are skeptical of its effectiveness. These include state agencies managing water reservoirs — ranging from Democrat-run California to Republican-led Idaho — to private companies boosting snowfall at ski resorts.
NOAA records show no reports of cloud seeding in Kentucky, dating back to at least the late 1990s.
Cloud seeding is currently used in dozens of countries, including China, which used it to attempt to avoid rain during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics. Hodgson wrote a post on X last year that severe flooding in the United Arab Emirates was “allegedly due to cloud seeding/Geoengineering activities.” The country does use extensive cloud seeding to deal with its arid climate, but experts debunked the claims that it could have caused the Dubai flooding.
Just a week after Hurricane Helene devastated parts of the south and Appalachia last year, GOP Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X: “Yes they can control the weather. Here is Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan talking about it. Anyone who says they don’t, or makes fun of this, is lying to you. By the way, the people know it and hate all of you who try to cover it up.”
The NOAA says that no technology exists that could create or steer a hurricane — noting their failure to find a way to weaken hurricanes decades ago.
Hodgson replied to Greene’s post and noted the video she shared of Brennan discussing geoengineering, writing “They were not hiding it, they were bragging.” The actual video of Brennan shows him discussing the concept of geoengineering, including its possible benefits and downsides, but not admitting to or bragging about deploying the methods that do not yet exist.
That same week on X, Hodgson shared a video of an alleged chemtrails whistleblower, as well as a 2013 video of scientist Michio Kaku on CBS This Morning talking about the theoretical concept of using lasers to cause precipitation.
“Trillion watt lasers fired into clouds... what could possibly go wrong?” Hodgson wrote. “Sen Rawlings and I aim to ban such dangerous experimentation in KY skies with a 2025 bill.”
Their bill specifically includes “electromagnetic radiation or field” as a prohibited activity.
‘Impossible to avoid discussing it’
A decade ago, Northern Kentucky Law professor Anthony Chavez wrote a paper advocating that the United States take an aggressive role in creating a comprehensive legal and regulatory program to develop research in climate engineering, setting a model for the rest of the world to follow — a necessity for a structured, global response to the climate crisis.
Ten years later, fossil fuel emissions still need to be cut roughly in half over the next decade in order to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the crucial benchmark countries agreed to pursue in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Chavez told Kentucky Public Radio that will be a tall order, making an informed debate over geoengineering as essential now as ever.
"We're crossing those (climate warming thresholds) faster than we anticipated,” Chavez said. “Because the cost of geoengineering is so much lower than other solutions, I think it's going to be impossible to avoid discussing it."
Buck from the University at Buffalo said it would be a mistake to dismiss the power of para-environmentalism adherents as a fringe minority, or to think that Kentucky passing a ban is insignificant, as more states passing such bills will have an influence on their delegation in Congress.
“I think people are overlooking this population at their peril, because it's not a fringe number of people and they really care about the topic,” Buck said. “In politics, the people who care the most tend to determine the issue.”
As for the threat of climate change, Hodgson concedes that the planet is getting warmer, but is unsure mankind is the cause, or if it would be worth “bankrupting ourselves” trying to reach carbon dioxide reduction goals.
“I believe in clean air and clean water,” Hodgson said. “We got to take care of the planet. And I don't like the idea of people experimenting, trying to play God and manipulate the weather.”
Noting that his bill refers to the various real and theoretical methods as “criminal atmospheric pollution,” Horton found some irony that it may advance in a state where the coal industry has as much clout among lawmakers as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has critics.
“If you're actually concerned about public health and the environment, then what ought to come to mind are fossil fuel emissions,” Horton said. “That should be taken a lot more seriously, maybe, rather than these sort of pretend, imaginary pollutants that are documented in this bill.”
