Proposal to ban ‘chemtrails’ from SC skies advances in Statehouse

COLUMBIA — A S.C. Senate subcommittee advanced proposed legislation to ban the airborne release of chemicals into the atmosphere, setting the table for a fuller Senate debate on the alleged existence of a shadowy government plot to engineer weather patterns via “chemtrails.”

Sponsored by Easley Republican Sen. Rex Rice, Senate Bill 110 is one of several proposals on this year’s legislative docket seeking to prohibit the practice of intentionally releasing chemical compounds, substances or contaminants into South Carolina airspace with “the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight.”

The policy push is not unique to the Palmetto State.

Once relegated to the realm of conspiracy theorists, several red states — including Florida and Tennessee — have taken the fears into the mainstream, enacting similar legislation in their own states despite the federal governments’ insistence that toxic, weather engineering chemicals dispersed from planes are not actually a thing that exists.

“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,” the Environmental Protection Agency wrote in a fact sheet on the topic in July.

But among the supportive lawmakers on the committee and the four witnesses who spoke Dec. 11 — all of whom spoke in support of the bill — the word of the federal government was irrelevant. The federal government, they said, could not be trusted, while federal officials themselves have suggested, like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did in May, that the War Department has been adding chemicals to jet fuel to alter the atmosphere.

“You can go to the Google machine and figure out what the federal government has hidden from its citizens over the last 100 years — particularly in the last 50,” said Sumter Republican Sen. Jeff Zell, an Air Force veteran who supported the bill. “This isn’t to say that I’m 100 percent in agreeance that there’s this massive conspiracy. But I wouldn’t doubt it at all if there was.”

The case for chemtrails

Efforts to engineer the weather through processes like cloud seeding do exist in the United States in a limited capacity and continue to be the subject of rigorous study. But the mainstream scientific community disputes they take place on any scale purported by chemtrail enthusiasts, with surveys of atmospheric scientists and scientific studies turning up no evidence to support their claims.

The bill supporters’ case rested upon concerns about the possible health and environmental impacts of real scientific studies into technology to influence weather patterns through the “scattering” of sunlight using naturally occurring minerals like aluminum oxide and calcium carbonite. Others alluded to fears of a separate conspiracy around an effort to coalesce a single world government under the banner of the United Nations’ climate plan.

“If states fail to block these actions with legislation by providing their own governance, then we will continue to be manipulated by the federal government, stakeholders and the U.N.,” said Denise Sibley, a Tennessee physician who aided lobbying efforts for similar legislation in her state.

But testimony also drew largely from narratives laid out in a documentary into the chemtrail conspiracy called “The Dimming,” authored by witness Dane Wigington, founder of a anti-chemtrail group GeoEngineering Watch who has pursued unsuccessful lawsuits against scientists who sought to challenge his theories.

Wigington has gained national renown for pushing claims that major climactic weather events like drought are engineered for profit or political reasons. He claimed during Thursday’s hearing that the federal government was hiding its role due to the sheer liability posed by the damage they were causing through their alleged activities.

At one point, Wigington found himself in a heated back-and-forth with Spartanburg Republican Sen. Josh Kimbrell, an airplane executive who disputed there was any way a paltry number of airplanes could disperse an adequate amount of chemicals in the atmosphere to block the sun or change the weather, even if they tried.

“Let’s say that they’re trying to block the sign, right?” Kimbrell said to a separate witness at another point in the hearing. “You have to have every plane in the country take off at the same time to do it, wouldn’t you? So what are we worried about?”

A one-sided hearing

Rice’s bill sailed through the four-member subcommittee. Kimbrell was the only member to vote against it.

That was not necessarily because all members agreed with the message, said subcommittee chairman Michael Gambrell, R-Abbeville. He said he believed the topic deserved a hearing in front of the full, 17-member committee. There was also skepticism the state could have much impact on the issue, with some expressing reservations the discussion should take place at the federal level.

Testimony was also limited solely to supporters of chemtrail theory, lacking input from skeptical researchers and other members of the scientific community. The only publicized pushback against the bill came from an employee of cloud seeding company MakeRain, which sent an email to bill supporter and anti-chemtrail activist Rep. Lee Gilreath, R-Pickens, asking for cloud seeding to be excluded from the bill, arguing the technology was proven and could be used to help the state.

Gilreath, who has toured the state in recent months boosting his own legislation with criminal penalties attached, said he expects more vocal opposition at future meetings on the bills.

“The opposing side will certainly have plenty of people if this moves forward,” he told The Post and Courier.