“What this whole debate comes down to is who controls the skies,” Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia told the audience at a House Oversight Committee hearing on Tuesday. “Do we believe in God and that he has dominion over his perfect creation of planet Earth? Do we believe that he has given us everything we need to survive as a civilization since the beginning of time? Or do you believe in man’s claim of authority over the weather, based on scientists that have only been alive for decades and weren’t here to witness the climate changes since the beginning of time?”
As American culture becomes saturated with conspiracy theories, the idea that the government is controlling the weather—an old chestnut—seems to be getting new legs. This theory has led to a raft of proposed legislation in more than two dozen states. Tuesday’s hearing showcased the messiness of what happens when conspiracy theories collide with a federal government that has proven especially willing to entertain them.
The hearing, titled “Playing God with the Weather—a Disastrous Forecast” and convened by Greene, comes alongside legislation she introduced this summer to “prohibit weather modification within the United States.” The definition of “weather modification” in Greene’s legislation is extremely broad, encompassing several unrelated techniques and phenomena; subsequently, the hearing covered many disparate ideas.
“They kinda threw [different ideas] under this umbrella of weather modification” at the hearing, says Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University.
Condensation trails, or contrails, for instance, are natural clouds that can form behind jets as a result of their exhaust. The word “chemtrails” is a term used for contrails by people who think that these are signs of jets spraying chemicals into the air as part of a plot to control the weather. (The two terms are often conflated.) Cloud seeding—the practice of introducing materials like dry ice or silver iodide into clouds to create more rain—is a common technique that has been used for decades by states and counties across the country; nine states currently have active cloud-seeding programs. Finally, solar radiation modification refers to practices that could deflect or dim the rays of the sun in order to halt global warming. Solar radiation modification, also referred to as solar geoengineering, has never been deployed on a large scale.
Greene has a long history of spreading conspiracy theories about the weather, perhaps most famously claiming before she entered Congress that California’s destructive wildfire season in 2018 was caused by lasers in outer space controlled by a powerful Jewish family. Over the summer she introduced the legislation that accompanied this week’s hearing, after conspiracy theories began circulating online that the floods in Texas in July were man-made. Following the floods, the EPA released an online resource on geoengineering and weather modification, in the name, the agency said, of “total transparency.” (The resource features an explainer on different types of weather modification and US government involvement, including an FAQ.)