Why Geoengineering Is an Urgent MAHA Issue

On Monday, as my colleague Emilie Kagan wrote, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. participated in a 90-minute town hall with talk-show host, Dr. Phil, in front of a live audience. Toward the end of the interview, a woman from the audience asked Kennedy about “stratospheric aerosol injections that are continuously peppered on us, everyday.”

Kennedy responded by stating that HHS is not responsible, that the U.S. Department of Defense’s DARPA might be, and that he’ll do everything in his power to stop it.

As health advocate Sayer Ji pointed out, Kennedy’s response on Dr. Phil was one of his most overt criticisms of geoengineering to date. But it’s not his first expression of concern. Last August, responding to a popular post about chemtrails, Kennedy wrote on X, “We are going to stop this crime.” In late March, Kennedy wrote on X, “24 States move to ban geoengineering our climate by dousing our citizens, our waterways and landscapes with toxins. This is a movement every MAHA needs to support. HHS will do its part.”

Believed by some to combat the effects of climate change, geoengineering manipulates Earth’s climate with methods like Solar Radiation Modification (SRM), which is a host of techniques that include spraying sulfur dioxide into the air, also known as Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SRI), in order to reflect sunlight into space.

Cloud-seeding to induce rain by blasting silver iodide or calcium chloride into the air has been going on for decades and is also considered geoengineering, as was a secretive experiment last year off the decommissioned USS Hornet in California that tested marine cloud brightening — spraying seawater to enhance clouds and cool the planet, while potentially altering natural precipitation patterns in unknown ways.

In the case of the USS Hornet, local officials halted the effort, after 20 minutes, due to un-permitted releases and potential health risks, though the scientists behind the effort are reportedly seeking an alternative location to try again.

Whistleblowers, led by Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s former running mate, warn that geoengineering is doing more harm than good, sometimes linking it to chemtrails that some believe carry toxins, unlike contrails from aircraft that dissipate quickly.

Shanahan has emerged as one of MAHA’s torchbearers on the issue. In early April, she warned on X, "Based on what I’m seeing and hearing from whistleblowers, there’s a very real possibility that the biggest contributor to our atmospheric pollution (or PPM which is used to assess climate change) isn’t your fireplace or your car — it’s the lingering effect of geoengineering.”

A day earlier, she posted: “As Tennessee, Florida, and other states lead the way in banning geoengineering, the federal government should follow suit. End all weather modification contracts at the DOD, DOE, EPA — restore informed consent to the people, where it belongs.”

Shanahan has also praised Kennedy for calling geoengineering “a crime” and in a video viewed 1.4 million times she points to strange patterns in the sky and declares: “That is not a contrail.” The text accompanying the video reads: “This has to end. At the very least geoengineering should not happen without a referendum with full and accurate disclosures.”

For MAHA, this is a health emergency requiring urgent action, but the politics of climate tech are contentious. Billionaire progressives champion geoengineering and Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in 2024: “We must explore all avenues to combat climate change, even those that seem science fiction.”

The chemtrails debate is a flashpoint — mainstream scientists dismiss them as myths, but believers see geoengineering’s footprint. Peter Kirby, author of Chemtrails Exposed: A New Manhattan Project, told me: “There’s a global operation spraying particulate matter from aircraft, manipulated by electromagnetic energy, mainly for weather control.”

He alleges commercial jets and a military fleet, possibly pilotless drones, have sprayed since the mid-1990s, citing pilot whistleblowers and William Thomas’s 2004 book, Chemtrails Confirmed.

Thomas argues that what are typically dismissed as contrails have become thicker and longer-lasting and contain barium and aluminum, thus are actually chemtrails that are sprayed purposely for the sake of weather manipulation. He cites elevated levels of chemicals on the Earth’s surface and eyewitness accounts from pilots and military personnel.

Thomas and others who warn of chemtrails note there’s precedence to back up their assertions: chemical-spraying tests in the U.S. and the U.K. during the Cold War, and a 1996 U.S. Air Force paper dubbed, “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025,” which suggests that manipulating fog and inducing drought are useful for gaining strategic advantage over adversaries.

In 2016, the EPA attempted to debunk chemtrail theories with a study that called them a “hoax” and said the Air Force’s “Weather as a Force Multiplier” paper was a thesis that “does not reflect current military policy, practice, or capability.”

Nevertheless, a report one year later from nature.com cited a 36.000-subject Cooperative Congressional Election Study indicating that 10 percent of Americans deem chemtrails “completely” true and as many as 30 percent call them “somewhat” true.

The 2017 nature.com report says that those sky patterns are simply persistent contrails, and it claims that conspiracy theories in general are more widely believed since Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016. It also notes terms like “WikiLeaks” and “Benghazi” are often mentioned alongside “chemtrails” in social-media discourse, driving home the notion that chemtrail activists distrust government entities and are skeptical of mainstream narratives.

“Contrails vanish in seconds, but chemtrails linger for hours. ‘Persistent contrail’ is a politically correct oxymoron,” Kirby told me. He describes planes with trails that stop and start, or skies with crisscross patterns one day and none the next, despite similar weather, urging Americans to observe these anomalies for themselves.

His book, endorsed by Dane Wigington in the 2021 documentary, The Dimming, cites a 1990s Hughes Aircraft patent for atmospheric spraying and government reports to allege a “New Manhattan Project” hidden by compartmentalization, much like the secrecy surrounding Hiroshima.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) denies large-scale geoengineering. In 2023, NOAA stated it “does not modify the weather, nor does it fund, participate in, or oversee cloud seeding.” Yet three years earlier Congress gave $4 million to a top NOAA scientist for the purpose of researching the injection of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and the spreading of sea salt particles to shade and cool the planet.

And California, Utah and other states have been cloud seeding for decades, plus startup companies like Make Sunsets, which has launched more than 120 sulfur dioxide balloons since 2022, keep fueling public distrust.

Conservatives like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are staunch opponents. He posted on X: “I support the bill by Senator @IleanaGarciaUSA to ban geoengineering… The Florida house, though, has gutted the bill and codified the practices. We don’t want this nonsense in Florida.”

Florida’s Senate passed SB-56, the “chemtrails bill,” 28-9, banning climate-related releases, and Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo cheered: “Big thanks to Senator Garcia… These planes release aluminum, sulfates, and other compounds with unknown and harmful effects.”

State rebellions are gaining momentum. Tennessee’s 2024 ban, SB 2691, followed 10,000 public petitions decrying sky patterns. Kentucky’s 2025 bill, debated in local hearings, cites “chemical dispersal risks,” and about two dozen states are pursuing bans.

Make Sunsets, led by progressive Luke Iseman (he told me he’s far left of Sen. Bernie Sanders), has inflamed tensions. The for-profit company sells “cooling credits” with the money used to deliver sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere via balloons in order to reflect sunlight back into space. Its activities prompted an April 14 letter from the EPA.

Addressed to Iseman and Andrew Song, the company’s two co-founders, it demands that, “Within 30 days of receipt of this information request letter, Make Sunsets must provide the information requested in the enclosures to this letter.”

In all, the EPA is seeking answers to 26 questions, some as mundane as its address, hours of operation, number of employees and annual revenue. Also, the altitude its balloons reach, the number that burst on the ground, the chemical formulae used, a list of raw material used and a description of protective respiratory equipment worn by staffers who fill and launch the balloons.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin on April 15, 2025, stated on X: “Make Sunsets is a startup that is geoengineering by injecting sulfur dioxide into the sky and then selling ‘cooling credits.’ This company is polluting the air we breathe. I’ve instructed my team that we need to quickly get to the bottom of this and take immediate action.”

The EPA noted the issue was identified in 2023 but not acted upon until 2025. SO2 is regulated under the Clean Air Act as a criteria pollutant since 1971, part of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, due to its potential to harm humans and the environment.

“People with pulmonary diseases, particularly children, are sensitive to the effects of SO2. Additionally, SO2 can react in the atmosphere leading to acid rain or form particles that harm health and impair visibility,” the EPA told Make Sunsets.

But Iseman told me the EPA is engaging in federal overreach, asking: “Didn't we just have an election where a majority of us decided 'weaponization of government' was a problem?”

“It's understandable people are concerned about the quality of the air they breathe, but our balloons aren't the problem,” he said. “They produce less so2 than a cross-country flight. Drinking an average glass of wine, firing a black-powder round or launching a roman candle all expose you to more so2 than our balloons.”

Iseman wouldn’t comment on the letter from the EPA but he told me that, if chemtrails exist, they can’t be blamed on Make Sunsets because their balloons distribute their chemical payloads at an altitude too high to be seen — then the particles remain in the atmosphere for two years before falling to the ground.

Beyond Make Sunsets, there are many others attempting to manipulate the weather in the name of reversing climate change, including Vesta, SilverLining, Stardust Solutions and Breakthrough Energy, none of which responded to me when I reached out for an interview.

Breakthrough Energy, where renowned climate expert Kenneth Caldeira is senior scientist, was founded by Bill Gates and includes progressive billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros. Among the many methods it has invested in is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), whereby carbon dioxide is captured from the air and then sequestered in long term storage in the ground.

Even those who advocate for geoengineering acknowledge the risks. Caldeira, for example, favors SRM research even though he has called it a “plan Z,” warning that it could worsen droughts in some regions.

Outside the U.S., the Advanced Research and Invention Agency in the U.K. allocated $66 million this month to experiment with using aircraft to spray sea salt and aerosolized particles into the sky, and also methods for thinning natural cirrus clouds so that they don’t trap heat.

The Times of London’s report about the effort includes a drawing of two airplanes, each with four streams of red plumes that look like something a chemtrails activist might have created.

MAHA’s position is firm: activists in the movement demand an immediate halt to atmospheric geoengineering experiments, public release of all related data, and disclosure of funding sources. Shanahan has expressed public frustration, stating, “We’d like more details.” And the fact that two dozen U.S. states have enacted or proposed bans on certain geoengineering practices reflects growing skepticism and a push for oversight.

And Kirby told me that Trump is “chemtrail aware,” though Trump’s specific stance on geoengineering remains unclear.

The controversy surrounding geoengineering extends beyond science to issues of trust and governance. If SRM, SAI and other techniques are safe and effective, critics ask, why is there limited transparency about ongoing experiments?

As whistleblowers, activists, and state governments challenge geoengineering, the political divide deepens. Progressives who champion climate innovation also must grapple with the risks and secrecy of geoengineering, while conservatives use state-level bans to assert sovereignty and demand accountability.

MAHA’s fight for transparency transcends ideology, demanding proof over promises. If geoengineering is the climate fix some claim, it must withstand scrutiny, not hide behind denials. The global conversation has begun. The truth about our skies hangs in the balance.

Paul Bond has been a journalist for three decades. He was the Chief Culture Correspondent for Newsweek and has written for USA Today, The Los Angeles Times and elsewhere. He began his career as a crime reporter before spending two decades at The Hollywood Reporter.

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