EPA’s Lee Zeldin publishes facts page debunking claims that ‘chemtrails’ alter weather

WASHINGTON — Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin rolled out a new facts page Thursday debunking wild claims — including from his fellow Republicans — that so-called “chemtrails” are being sprayed from aircraft to change the weather, alter populations or even control people’s minds.

In a video message accompanying the launch, Zeldin said the new webpages were written to inform “anyone who’s ever looked up to the streaks in the sky and asked, ‘What the heck is going on?'”

“We did the legwork, looked at the science, consulted agency experts, and pulled in relevant outside information to put these online resources together,” he added.

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“Everything we know about contrails to solar geoengineering will be in there.”

The EPA website explains how condensation trails, or “contrails,” are common exhaust clouds left behind by high-altitude aircraft and visible to Americans gazing up at the sky “for the same reason that you can see the exhaust from your vehicle or your own breath on a cold day.”

“Contrails are a normal effect of jet aircraft operations and have been since its earliest days of air travel,” the agency stated. “If you are seeing a lot of contrails in your area it is because there are a lot of jet aircraft flying overhead.”

By contrast, according to the EPA, “chemtrails” is “a term some people use to inaccurately claim that contrails resulting from routine air traffic are actually an intentional release of dangerous chemicals or biological agents at high altitudes for a variety of nefarious purposes, including population control, mind control, or attempts to geoengineer Earth or modify the weather.”

Low-altitude, propeller aircraft disperse chemicals at times, but only “for legitimate purposes like firefighting or farming,” the agency said on its website.

“The federal government is not aware of there ever being a contrail intentionally formed over the United States for the purpose of geoengineering or weather modification,” it added.

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“The enthusiasm for experiments that would pump pollutants into the high atmosphere has set off alarm bells here at the Trump EPA,” Zeldin noted in his video, adding that his staff have been “seeing headlines about private actors and even governments looking to not attempting any small- or large-scale solar geoengineering.

Only one private company, South Dakota-based Make Sunsets, has experimented in the US with solar geoengineering through what is known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) and marine cloud brightening (MCB) to potentially lower the Earth’s temperature.

Those kinds of research are distinct from weather modification — the most common of which is cloud seeding — that the US government has been involved with in the past.

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In 1947, a public-private partnership between branches of the US military and General Electric Laboratories dumped dry ice into a hurricane near Florida’s coastline, but there’s been no indication then or since that such tinkering could modify a storm’s intensity.

A classified Pentagon project, dubbed “Operation Popeye,” also tried “to extend monsoon season” during the Vietnam War “to disrupt supply routes in North Vietnam and Laos.”

Most cloud seeding is carried out to learn how to combat heavy droughts and is “primarily funded at the state or local level,” according to a December 2024 Government Accountability Office report.

Some states — including Florida and Tennessee — have passed laws prohibiting activities to change temperatures or modify the intensity of the sunlight or the weather more generally.

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There have also been efforts at the federal level, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) promising earlier this month to introduce “a bill 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.”

“It will be a felony offense,” declared the Georgia Republican, claiming the bill’s text matches legislation already passed in Florida. “I have been researching weather modification and working with the legislative counsel for months writing this bill.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded to a viral video last August claiming to show the dispersal of chemicals into the atmosphere as a “crime” that he would “stop” for good.

At an April 29 town hall event with TV host Dr. Phil McGraw, Kennedy blamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for possibly spraying bromium, aluminum, and strontium into the sky.

“A lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel. You know, those materials are put in jet fuel. I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it,” he told a concerned audience member.

“EPA shares many of the same concerns when it comes to potential threats to human health and the environment, especially from solar geoengineering activities,” Zeldin declared in his video message.

“Prior to now, EPA has never been this proactive to raise awareness about concerns with geoengineering and to stop this activity from being scaled up.”