A few months ago, I came across a headline that didn’t seem to make sense: Republican lawmakers in Tennessee voted to ban solar geoengineering, a largely theoretical method of artificially cooling the Earth.
But nobody in the state had actually proposed trying geoengineering. So why move to ban it?
The idea of geoengineering has been gaining attention from scientists and policymakers as climate change gets worse. How the method works: By injecting aerosols into the atmosphere, scientists think they may be able to reflect some of the sun’s heat back into space.
My colleagues and I on the Climate desk have spent most of this year writing about the topic for “Buying Time.” It’s a series that aims to help readers understand the premise and dangers of geoengineering, and whether it might someday buy humanity time, as we struggle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Something else struck me as odd about the situation in Tennessee: Lawmakers around the United States were introducing similar bans, calling geoengineering a threat to the environment. But those lawmakers were mostly far-right Republicans, for whom environmental protection isn’t typically a top priority.
The bills shared key passages, suggesting they came from the same source. So I set out to discover who was behind it all. The answer promised to reveal a tantalizing piece of the geoengineering story: Who is mobilizing to stop it, and why?
Answering those questions was harder — and more unsettling — than I expected.
I called lawmakers around the country who had sponsored antigeoengineering legislation, but few agreed to speak with me. So my colleague Emily Cochrane and I filed a public records request with the Tennessee Legislature, seeking copies of emails about the ban sent and received by the lawmakers who introduced it.
Two weeks later, we got a package of emails that included one from Denise Sibley, a doctor in eastern Tennessee who pushed for the ban. But she had no apparent qualifications in atmospheric science; she was a member of East TN Freedom, a group that formed during the coronavirus pandemic to oppose vaccine mandates. Why was she worried about a still-hypothetical climate technology? I tried asking her, but my messages went unanswered.
Then, I got lucky. Another member of East TN Freedom, Danielle Goodrich, appeared on a podcast, seemingly aimed at conspiracy theorists, where she laid out why, and how, her group had gotten the ban passed. She framed it as an extension of her campaign against vaccines: “They’re experimenting on us without our consent,” she said on the podcast, called “Rebunked.”
Ms. Goodrich said her group had gotten the idea for the ban from an activist named Jolie Diane, who had pushed lawmakers in other states to introduce it. Like many people I reached out to, Ms. Diane wouldn’t talk to me. But I found a recording on YouTube from a presentation she gave in 2018 at a library in Rhode Island.
And here, the story took a new twist.
In the recording, Ms. Diane argued that the government was using airplanes to inject dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere, an idea known as the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory.
But as it turned out, the campaign to ban geoengineering wasn’t new. I learned it began in Rhode Island a decade earlier, with the efforts of a woman named Karen MacBeth.
In 2014, Ms. MacBeth, a state representative, introduced what seemed to be the first proposal to ban geoengineering at the state level. I wanted to meet her. So, in August I flew to Providence, R.I.
She met me and a photographer, Christopher Capozziello, one muggy afternoon at the entrance to the Rhode Island State House. She took us on a tour of the chamber where she once sat (she left office in 2017), then fielded different versions of the same question: What made her believe the government was spraying chemicals from airplanes?
She was smart, articulate and polite, and she cited her grounds for suspicion, including that condensation trails behind airplanes seemed thicker than she remembered as a child, and her inability to see meteor showers that she said were once clearly visible.
Ms. MacBeth’s bill never became law, but it did inspire other proposed legislation around the country — including the Tennessee ban.
I finally had my answer. Conspiracy theorists and vaccine skeptics were behind the push to ban geoengineering across the country, as I reported in an article published last week.
Since the article came out, I’ve received a number of emails from chemtrails believers. Some of the writers were polite, but most berated me for calling their view a conspiracy theory, urging me to recognize what they called evidence to the contrary. On social media, one of the leading proponents of the conspiracy theory suggested the public would eventually hold people like me “legally and morally accountable for the part they have played in the criminal cover-up.”
A core demand of journalism is to try to see the world through the eyes of the people you’re writing about. I still may not understand why people believe the government is spraying chemicals into the air. But I can recognize that the world as they perceive it must be a frustrating place, full of people who, they insist, refuse to see the truth.
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