Chemtrails, once fodder for conspiracy theorists, is now a campaign issue in SC

COLUMBIA — A supporter wanted to ask Nancy Mace about fluoride in the water. The congresswoman answered. But then she drifted into chemtrails.

Days into her burgeoning gubernatorial campaign, the Republican congresswoman from Charleston had just wrapped up her stump speech in a Myrtle Beach café and opened the floor to questions. An unidentified woman stepped up to the microphone to ask the first query of the morning. 

“Do you intend to take any action to remove fluoride from our water?” she asked, referencing a push by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to remove the teeth-strengthening supplement from public water supplies. 

Mace, television cameras rolling, had a response ready. 

“I would support any action to remove fluoride from our water,” she said. 

Then she added something extra. 

“And also ban chemtrails,” she added, as several members of the audience whooped supportively in the background. “Other states are doing it — Tennessee recently did it, Florida just did it — and we will follow as well.”

Where did this come from?

To the uninitiated, such a plank entering any politician’s platform would have seemed random, foreign even.

The subject of “chemtrails” — a shorthand term referencing a conspiracy theory that airplane condensation trails, or contrails, are actually a government plot to engineer the weather for nefarious purposes — was once fodder for figures like fantastical blogger Jeff Rense and famed radio host Art Bell of popular conspiracy program Coast to Coast AM in the late 1990s. Their actions thrust the topic from the obscure into the mainstream. It forced governments and the scientific community alike to come together in an effort to formally debunk and quash the conspiracy theory.

In the decades since, the notion of chemtrails was seemingly relegated to the dark corners of the internet, maintained by a handful of conspiracy theorists on internet forums dedicated to the discussion of persistent topics like the existence of a single global government, the proliferation of a shape-shifting reptilian race, or whether the Central Intelligence Agency killed President John F. Kennedy. 

Over the summer, sitting Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin addressed the issue in promoting the release of what the government knows about contrails and government efforts to engineer the weather. 

“The American public deserves and expects honesty and transparency from their government when seeking answers,” Zeldin said in a three-minute video. “For years, people who ask questions in good faith were dismissed, even vilified by the media and their own government. That era is over. The Trump EPA is committed to total transparency.”

In publicly sharing what the government knows about contrails and geoengineering, particularly solar geoengineering, the EPA created new websites that state “chemicals are sometimes intentionally sprayed from aircraft for non-nefarious purposes like firefighting or farming” and that the agency “is not aware of there ever being a contrail intentionally formed over the United States for the purpose of geoengineering or weather modification.” 

The EPA says that “the U.S. government is not engaged in any form of outdoor solar geoengineering testing …  or large-scale deployment,” though it does note previous testing of such technology by one private company and university. The government also has been involved in researching cloud seeding, a practice of introducing artificial particles into clouds to increase short-term, local effects of rain or snow. Usually, this has been done to combat droughts.

Some Republican-led states recently have passed legislation that bans geoengineering in their airspace.

Tennessee’s ban, passed in 2024, seeks to undermine the experimentation of unproven and largely theoretical geoengineering technologies that may not exist yet. The one in Florida, which earned the blessing of Gov. Ron DeSantis this year, requires a state registry for the non-existent technologies and threatens violators with third-degree felony charges that could result in up to five years in prison and a fine up to $100,000.

“The Free State of Florida means freedom from governments or private actors unilaterally applying chemicals or geoengineering to people or public spaces,” DeSantis said in a statement at the time.

It has since become a movement. As of June, at least a dozen states have begun discussions to ban the practice, even after years of scientific consensus that weather engineering through so-called chemtrails does not exist.

Mace remains undeterred. 

“No, not at all,” she told The Post and Courier when asked whether the EPA findings had any impact on her thinking. 

An already active conversation

General skepticism has fueled similar conversations in the South Carolina Statehouse, where four pieces of legislation lay dormant at the committee level, awaiting hearings. 

Most of the bills are similar in their approach. One by Pickens Republican Sen. Rex Rice would prohibit intentionally releasing substances into South Carolina airspace with the “express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight.”

A more detailed proposal by House Freedom Caucus member Lee Gilreath includes similar language along with a carveout for cloud-seeding programs — a process of injecting chemical compounds into clouds to induce rainfall in drought-stricken regions. (The state Department of Environmental Services confirmed that no such program exists in South Carolina.)

Rice told The Post and Courier his proposal was inspired not by any particular problem but by constituent demand and the results of his own research on websites like Facebook.

By introducing a bill, he hoped to start what he termed “a conversation” about the trend at the committee level, bringing in experts to testify on the technologies that do or don’t exist.

“If it’s not being done, there’s no big deal,” Rice said. “But if it is being done, it needs to be stopped.” 

Rep. Gil Gatch, a Summerville Republican who serves as first vice chair on the House Committee on Labor, Commerce and Industry, said he initially expected to be made fun of when he honored a constituent’s request to introduce legislation banning the release of weather-altering contaminants in the atmosphere.

Leading up to the 2025 legislative session, he had heard little of the trend beyond videos on platforms like Instagram and TikTok filmed by citizens with phones pointed toward the sky.

Instead, he said, he received mountains of correspondence from around the state praising him, inspiring him to make an earnest push for debate on the bill in the House Agriculture Committee this upcoming session.

“It seems unusual, I guess, because of all the subjects that we have, of all of the issues that we address at the state level, I’ve heard more about this particular subject than anything else,” Gatch said. “More than abortion, more than energy, more than DEI, more than taxes, more than roads.”

Gatch isn’t alone.

Jeff Zell, a Republican senator from Sumter and a 20-year Air Force veteran, said he had long been familiar with the conspiracy theory but always doubted it. While he believes the U.S. military to be an efficient bureaucracy, he said he does not believe the U.S. government to be competent enough to orchestrate a scheme as elaborate as engineering weather patterns. 

But his job, he said, is to serve his constituents. And people keep asking him about chemtrails. 

“People reach out to me, and say things like, ‘Hey, how’s the economy going? Also, have you heard about chemtrails?'” Zell said. “People just keep asking me about it.” 

Can S.C. do anything?

What hasn’t stalled conversations is South Carolina’s apparent inability to do anything about the alleged problem.

A spokesperson for the Department of Environmental Services confirmed the state has “no regulatory authority over or involvement with aircraft emissions or cloud-seeding.”

Any state law would also technically be illegal. Section 233 of the Clean Air Act “expressly prohibits states from adopting or enforcing regulations respecting emissions of any air pollutant from any aircraft or engine,” and that all regulatory powers to do so are vested “exclusively in the federal government.”

Is it worth the legislature’s time to discuss it? Lawmakers think so.

But actually committing the time toward passing a bill is a different story. 

“I think it’s a question worth asking,” Zell said. “But at this point, that’s about it.”